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Argon One with NVME base

I've been having some fun lately with my Raspberry Pi 4s. They're back in stock more frequently at adafruit.com. Give my filter at rpilocator.com a look to catch one in stock. I just picked up 2 8GB rpi4b's. They can be found.

Anyway, I was looking for an RPI4 to add to my desktop setup and wanted a nicer, more functional case for it. I also have a few nvme drives floating about, and wanted to put one to work in this desktop pi.

Don't get me wrong, I've got a gaming rig, slightly aged, but sporting a RTX4070ti, next to my Macbook Pro... the one I bought right before the Apple Silicon MBPs were released. That's just the way of the road with these things.

Lots of digressing... so... the rpi case I settled on was the Argon One with the add-on Argon M.2 NVME Expansion Board. Note: There is also a sata version.

The Argon One is an aluminum case with a fan, a daughter board that converts the mini-hdmi ports to regular HDMI ports, and an IR receiver, that I'll never use. What I did do, obviously was add the nvme base. I put a drive on it, got it all installed with 64 bit RaspberrypiOS (formerly Raspbian?) and fired it up.

Well there was no sign of the nvme drive. I was heartbroken. I through the drive in an external ssd case I had and realized I just needed to format the drive. I put it all back together, and now have a desktop pi to play with.

Fun stuff.

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No More Facebook

My Facebook account was recently compromised & frankly, Facebook is a dumpster fire, so I won't be reinstating it.

If you receive anything via Facebook from me, ignore it as it is not from me.

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Dusting Myself Off

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Let’s Talk About Growth

Corporate America frowns on social media. Let's face it, most of social media in relation to Corporate America, is bad news. So I took a hiatus from blogging during my time at Verizon. Now I'm opening up about my experience.

It was 30 long months.

That's frankly what I took away from the Verizon experience. Okay, so I met some killer people (Cliff, Jason, etc. looking at you folks.) But for the most part it was everything people think of Corporate America.

"So what about the other 3+ years since you left Corporate America?"

I flexed my 2nd amendment rights, creating a rifle company and brand called Militia, Inc. It was vigorously buried by Facebook and Google, and will be the topic of its own post in the future. The whole thing was a lesson a "shoot-from-the-hip" software hacker like me never wanted to learn about, compliance, government, good ole boy networks, supply chain, liability, and many more things. Definitely not the brightest spot on my resume, but a great learning experience.

My personal life has also taken a few knocks in recent years. I'm not sure how much of that could constructively be shared at this point. Perhaps as I work on projects going forward a few things will be shared as I'm able to move past painful subjects.

Let's talk about growth.

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Time Machine Backup Disk Read Only

My Time Machine backup disk decided it was read only this morning. There was an Apple Support Forum post that helped me out.

Essentially I had to turn off Time Machine backups. Open Disk Utility. Select the backup drive. Click repair.

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Out for delivery (Taken with Instagram)

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Service, Favors and Self-Betrayal

Brandon Hays, aka @tehviking, suggested I read Leadership and Self-Deception by the Arbinger Institute. He warned me it was life changing, and he, as always, was spot on. Here's the problem though, if there is one. I thought I'd come a long way the past few months in improving my personal relationships. I didn't think I had any problems with my business relationships. This book has convinced me there's a whole new level of interpersonal skills to learn. Obviously I'm not that naïve. I really enjoy having my eyes opened to BETTER perspectives. Let me give you an example. I was sitting in one of my church meetings where we were discussing service that we show others. Now I'm not necessarily talking about the kind where you build someone who's down on their luck a new house, or save someone from the raging rapids of a river during a storm. I'm referring to the little things. As we continued our discussion I thought of the little things I choose not to do. There are examples that happen all too frequently I realized. One in particular happens whenever I switch the kids' car seats to my car. Inevitably I'm in all too much of a hurry Monday morning and 1) forget to pull the car seats out, or 2) if I'm smart enough to realize I have the seats, I quickly yank them out and toss them into some nether region of the garage. So where's the service come into play? Despite how much of a hurry I'm imagining I'm in, my first instinct is to remove the car seats from my can, AND install them in my wife's vehicle. Some mornings I would be cognizant of this fact, recognize the opportunity to perform a service for her, and I'd go ahead and install the seats. I'd then feel pretty good about myself and head off to work with a smile on my face. In my reading of Leadership and Self-Deception, I've learned an additional perspective to apply to this situation. When I have the impression that I should perform an act of service, even a simple favor for another, and I start to rationalize why not to help out, this is self-betrayal. I'm a big believer in instincts (I'm an entrepreneur aren't I?) and those initial instincts to help out are seldom the wrong choice to make or the wrong action to perform, etc. Self-betrayal happens to all of us all the time. It happens to me several times a day. Sometimes I justify my actions as doing the better thing. Is that choice really better? When I find myself justifying one set of actions over another, I try and raise a mental flag, assess the situation, and contemplate the correct choice. In terms of my interpersonal relationship efforts, I also evaluate my longest term goals. This helps me to manage the harmony of my actions in my life. Brandon has a lot of good advice for you. You can read more about his views on self-deception, and lots of pertinent topics at http://brandonhays.com/blog/.

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My wife's amazing feet. (Taken with Instagram)

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Geo Filtering Architecture: The upLynk Approach

flags CC-BY-ND-NC Kexino

Keeping with the upLynk mantra of making everything simpler to integrate, we made the decision to use a token exchange system to enforce Digital Rights Management (DRM) business rules our customers design to protect access to their content. Here's an example user experience flow.

User visits content access site.

User passes business rules.

User presented accessible content complete with access tokenized URLs.

User selects content to play back.

Token checked by upLynk CMS to ensure it hasn't expired or been tampered with.

If the token is validated, the m3u8 is returned.

Pretty simple right?

We provide customers sample code for generating the tokens. It's nothing your OAuth gals haven't seen before.

And that's it.

Does this mean it's up to you to develop the actual geo filtering system? Yes! But you want to be in control. Here's why.

Every user experience is different. There are several different ip database providers. There are options on those databases such as including filtering of anonymous proxies, etc. Everyone wants a different set of rules applied to their content.

However, the most important reason is to ensure your users are not frustrated by your experience.

Let's walk through an example.

Perhaps today, you rely on your video platform to do the geo filtering for your content. Here's a typical frustrating experience.

User visits content provider's site.

User browses enormous catalog.

User attempts playback of content.

Error pops that content is not currently available in their area, or worse, user watches an ad followed by the error.

That is of course, if there's any error at all!

There are business and marketing reasons to "tease" users with available content. If legal rights will prevent the user from content playback, don't risk frustrating the user by presenting that content. Here's an alternative experience.

Ensure you have enough content. Only you will know how much is enough.

Geo filter the user early in the process. The ip db query is not that expensive. Most web stacks support custom middleware which could perform the query and set a cookie with the location code, or other custom identifier. This will help scalability as the user includes the cookies with all their requests.

In your application, check for the cookies (or whatever session based mechanism you choose for minding the location code) and present the user content they can successfully playback.

Keep in mind, this does not exclude content that may require user registration or even a subscription. The point is to present the user content that, given their location, they can potentially playback.

Slightly more evil is presenting the content you have rights to, but may not be available in the user's location, but is clearly marked that it's currently not available. Say it's "coming soon", if you want. It's ultimately your decision if you'd like to risk the trust of your user.

You can't afford to lose that trust.

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Hail to the Chief (Taken with instagram)

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The Crazy Ones

Tim Cook, at the Celebrating Steve event, shared this audio clip of Steve reading the dialog he wrote for the crazy ones add.

Dreyfus' voice was perfect and the messaging was correct for the time, but Apple, Tim, don't pass up the opportunity to reprise the ad with this version.

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A Keynote Address

The first time I shared a room, and arguably the closest I ever came to meeting Steve Jobs, was in the keynote address at WWDC in 2007.  Although I'd owned a few Macs by then, starting with the "flower pot" iMac, I had  only started exploring development on the platform.

My favorite anecdote about Steve was the story a client of ours told us about him using an app we'd written, on his couch at home, on an iPad, the night before the iPad launch.  He was impressed with what we'd done.  I was on cloud 9.

My father once told me, "A computer costs $50,000.00 or more.  $2000.00 for the machine, and the rest to pay the person that runs it."  Despite the comment he did purchase a used Apple ][e for my brother and I to use.  I wrote a lot of code in my single digit and teen years on that machine, or as my father put it, "Played games all day and all night."  I even worked around the fact that in an attempt to fix a broken 'G' key, he super glued the post and I never used the actual key again.

Years later I would be employed at a company that would sell for millions of dollars.  Some of my proceeds of that money I spent on the new iMac I mentioned before.  I also took the time to fax a copy of the check I received from the Bank of New York to my father, with the words, "I'm not playing video games!!" brutally scrawled on the sheet below the image.

Steve, I never met you, but you inspired me to stick with my instincts, against the odds I faced, and it has made all the difference in my life.  I aspire to inspire as you did.

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You Should Attend LaunchUp

No rants, no raving, just the facts. LaunchUp brought the entrepreneur out in me. I attended LaunchUp #1 in March of 2009. I learned that guys like me could pull off startups. I learned that because I'm a coder, I've got an advantage over a lot of the guys in the LaunchUp audience. I could take my ideas, prototype them, launch them and become the entrepreneur I wanted to be. I also learned that a lot of the folks in attendance had the sales, marketing and biz dev experience I needed to get my ideas in front of others. I needed to meet all these people. At that first meeting I met Blaine Nielsen, CEO of Doba. Here I was, an engineer by day, rubbing shoulders with guys I looked up to in the valley. LaunchUp is billed as a barn raising for the presenting companies, and this is spot on. However, LaunchUp is also therapy for entrepreneurs that are stuck in mundane corporate jobs too. That was me. The next 6 months of work were abysmal. Sure I had previous plans to do my own thing. LaunchUp gave me a new found clarity though. Dave and I were full-time with Protoven the first week of September 2009. Now my job was to be that guy, the "Goto Guy" for our company. I had to find clients. I had to build the foundation that would support our growth plans, and put us on a trajectory to meet our lofty goals. Oh no! The engineer had to network! I started attending LaunchUp more regularly. My network was growing. Then the opportunity to present our new company, upLynk, was offered while I was at lunch with Jeremy Hanks, the LaunchUp Guy! Of course I wanted to present. I wanted others to kick the tires on this idea. Then I realized I'm an engineer. 2 seconds later I told myself I was a COO and that this was part of the job description. I started out fairly nervous presenting at LaunchUp #15, but then settled down as I started talking about the portion I was really passionate about. How was the response? Absolutely exceeded every expectation I had. I talked to folks from technology to finance. While our seed capital did not end up coming from LaunchUp, I felt very confident during our negotiations knowing we had great options if terms couldn't be reached. If you're starting a business anywhere along the Wasatch Front, you should present at LaunchUp. A few months later I was invited to present the "In the Weeds" talk at LaunchUp #20. I presented along side Dr. Phil Windley, one of my local tech entrepreneur idols. I think he made me the most nervous of anyone in the room. I talked about a quick experience I had while working with a large customer, and how I'm heading off these tangential efforts this time around with upLynk. It was another great opportunity to get up in front of a lot of folks and speak. I was quicker to jump into the "passionate portion" which I've learned helps me to calm the nerves and connect with the audience better. For me, it's about getting in front of a crowd one more time. The more I do that, the more comfortable I feel doing it. I hate doing it, but it is a necessary exercise in order reach my own personal goals. I still have a lot of hard work and perseverance in front of me, but upLynk is really catching on with everyone we share the story with. We're focused on lighting up some huge customers this fall. I look forward to the day when I can call upLynk, and myself, a LaunchUp success story. As of this writing, LaunchUp #21 is scheduled for Thursday, August 4th at Neumont University. I encourage everyone to attend. You never know what it may do for you and your career.

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Anticipation (Taken with Instagram at Eagle Summit Park)

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The Prize is Mine! (Taken with Instagram at Eagle Summit Park)

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Fi will hunt! (Taken with instagram)

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For those of you weighing the benefits of an MBA program: join a startup instead. James Yu Formerly of Scribd

http://www.jamesyu.org/2011/03/10/on-being-an-early-employee-at-a-startup-and-a-farewell/