I made this crop from a Facebook image that second cousin Teagan Gray posted. While on her June 9 morning run, Teagan found this little guy crouched in the middle of the trail. Mom was keeping a wary eye on Teagan from the tree line. I used Apple Aperture to give this critter a 60 Minutes crop and to correct the exposure and color a mite. I let Aperture Otto have his head giving the result above from Teagan’s original.
A small church updates its telephone system
Tablo is a new go at an off the air digital video recorder that appears to solve the issues I’ve been having with my EyeTV/HD homeRun combination.
Tablo is an off the air only DVR similar to the Silicon Dust Simple.TV. Simple.TV can receive both ATSC broadcasts and cable TV clear QAM channels. As the reference explains, cable operators are required to carry local market broadcast channels using clear QAM that can be received by a standard HD TV without a set top box. This allows the local channel service to be pirated. The cable companies keep trying to convince Congress to eliminate the clear QAM local TV requirement to prevent theft of local service.
In many areas, especially the 757, the major broadcasters have their towers in a single area and the flat terrain permits local reception out to the tower’s radio horizon. In the 757, there is no real advantage to taking cable “limited service” from Cox as the same material is available off the air at broadcast resolution. Cox often transcodes broadcast content to lower resolution to pack more on the cable. The best signal at no cost (well $300 up front for the antenna plus installation) is available off the air.
Both products are designed to work with a set top box such as Apple TV, Chromecast, or Roku. I don’t know if either will stream to an Xbox or PlayStation. Both products use a smartphone or tablet application for control and display.
After 2 years of living with EyeTV, I’ve come to recognize the following shortcomings.
To fix the transcoding issue, I was looking at buying a new iMac for $2500 or so to get one with the stones for lengthy video transcodes. That’s over 1/2 month of living expense I couldn’t justify spending with other priorities around the house and yard.
EyeTV runs on your computer and controls an external TV tuner. Tablo combines the computer, DVR software, and tuner into a single compact low power device. Tablo has
You bring
Tablo uses a smart phone, tablet, or computer as a remote and viewing device. The Table iPad App is useless until hardware comes. I was hoping I could play with the UI while awaiting hardware but the first thing the App does is to look for a Tablo on the LAN. So it just sits there until you have one to add.
My church had been dissatisfied by the service from its phone carrier. Multiple annoyances led the office staff to seek an alternative but the most telling was that the phone system was difficult to manage. Most troubling was that the staff could not change call forwarding from outside the office.
The incumbent was providing 2 line business service using VoIP off the cable. The cable split between a carrier provided ATA and a Motorola SurfBoard cable modem feeding a Linksys WiFI router. The carrier provides a custom front end web site for managing phone service that was proving difficult to navigate and use. And we were paying about $80/month for service. The box supported two AT&T office desk sets that are somewhat clunky to use.
Given the office’s frustrations I began looking about for alternatives and found Ooma for Business. Ooma for Business is Ooma’s small business VOiP offering and is similar to its home offering in many ways but different in ways important to businesses. And different in some ways important to UCN.
Ooma for Business requires about 256 Kbps or so of bandwidth to service an active call plus the auto-attendant. You can verify an adequate Internet service using the speed test on the Ooma support pages. This test verifies through-put, latency, and latency jitter. Successful completion of this test is recommended prior to ordering.
The Ooma premisses equipment is a trade paperback sized black box with 2 Ethernet ports and a POTS port that connects to the Ethernet. You may connect it between the gateway router and switch using the two Ethernet ports or to an inside port on the switch. If you have a robust service, the internal location is preferred. With DSL service, connection between the DSL modem and switch is preferred.
The little black box runs a tailored instance of Asterix private branch exchange software that supports internal calling, an auto-attendant, and voice mail.
In addition, the base system comes with two DECT 6.0 Linx devices. These provide a wireless connection for a regular 1 line business or home phone with caller ID support. The base configuration supports 3 internal lines, one on the PBX device and 2 using included Linx devices. Two additional Linx devices may be added with current firmware for a total of 5 extensions. Future releases of software are expected to increase this to a total of 10 local RJ-11 drops.
The system can support an additional 10 virtual extensions. A virtual extension pairs a PBX number with a POTS phone number somewhere in the US or Canada. The PBX forwards the call to the paired number. To the caller it appears as a local call. This is very similar to Google Voice forwarding a call to your mobile number to your home phone.
The Ooma PBX also has a teleconference bridge. This service requires an additional extension to be used for joining conferences.
Ooma’s marketing is a bit confusing on how Ooma for Business works. The best way to learn is to read the support pages. You purchase 2 resource types from OOMA, phone numbers and internal destinations (extensions or virtual extensions).
A phone number is a 10 digit dialed telephone service address associated with the system. UCN needed one of these.
An extension is an internal port that is able to make and receive calls. These come in 3 varieties.
It seems obvious that you would pay for numbers but shouldn’t extensions be free? Why is Ooma charging for them? The Ooma PBX creates one “line” for each extension. They are 100 percent provisioned for external service access. All may be active on external calls simultaneously. Most large scale branch exchanges assume that most calls will be internal and that some fraction will be external. This is an invalid assumption in a small office context.
Virtual extensions are internal extensions that are paired with a POTS phone number, typically a home office or mobile number.
UCN needed 3 extensions and 0 virtual extensions.
Ooma prices the business service based on numbers and extensions.
UCN’s bill is about $55 per month
The auto attendant uses a synthesized voice to deliver a greeting and directory information. It has different greetings and behavior for business hours and non-business hours.
This behavior is customizable and each day of the week can be a business day or a closed day. Each day of the week can have different business hours but only one period per day of business hours.
The system is bring your own device. Any RJ-11 POTS phone (desk set or cordless) may be used provided that it has an electronic ringer. The RJ-11 ports do not have the heft to power mechanical ringers or some older caller ID desk sets.
The system does not support direct pairing of DECT 6 wireless phones with the Ooma base station. Ooma uses a high definition voice codec to communicate between the base station and Linx end points. Ooma’s HD hand sets will not pair with the Ooma Business base station in current form.
The system provides voice mail delivery in several ways.
During power outages and Internet fades, Ooma HQ picks up service and will take messages in much the same way that your mobile carrier sends calls to voice mail when a mobile handset is indisposed. Ooma will read or play your recorded announcement and direct callers to voice mail.
Voice mails will be queued for delivery on site and delivered by E-mail as described above.
UCN has experienced one service interruption associated with our router loosing its DHCP leases from our ISP. Basically, everything inside the router lost DNS access. Restarting the router and Ooma PBX corrected the problem.
My beloved Oswald (named after Nick’s grand sire) was getting as slow as his deceased name sake. The internal disk was failing, boot and shutdown times were long, and the machine was getting unstable. Time for a new iMac? Being a retired moocher, the thought of parting with $2500 while totally out of pocket was a bit unsettling. What could I do with an overhaul?
The machine’s symptoms were
At this point the machine was somewhat improved. At least log in and log out were moving nicely. But the machine died in its sleep a week later.
Now that the system was cleaned up, was the hardware old, ailing, or failing? Time for a visit to the Genius Bar.
I took the machine and power supply to the local Genius Bar at the MacArthur Mall Apple Store. After a few minutes to review the symptoms and my corrective actions, the Genius rounded up a monitor and keyboard and began a quick inspection. Once complete, he recommended running diagnostics. The disk phase quickly found a failing Hitachi Death Star disk. Apple could only put a disk like the original back in. Apple business rules did not allow Apple to make an alteration equivalent to repair. So I elected to reinstall Mavericks at the Genius Bar and restore the disk from Time Machine upon my return home.
On the way out, I launched a few things on the Mac Pro. Blinding fast. What’s in that sucker? About this Mac found a 256 GB SSD. Ah Ha! What can I do?
While Time Machine was chugging, about 8 hours for 1/4 TB to restore, I did some research.
After some reading, I concluded that Samsung and Crucial were the go-to SSD suppliers. Both made their own flash and Samsung made its own controllers. Crucial was using recent Marvel controllers that were well regarded.
Could I get the memory and SSD from the same source? Maybe. Who?
So, I ordered 8 GB of expansion memory, and a 512 GB M550 laptop form factor eSATA 3 SSD. The SSD included a 9 MM spacer that would be needed in the Mac Mini. I also ordered Crucial’s Apple tools which included a spudger and small screw drivers.
Crucial was a bit back ordered so it was 10 days waiting for parts to come. Oswald took another header so I put an OS image on my media Drobo Gen2 to limp along while waiting for parts.
Parts arrived in Tuesday’s evening UPS run so I elected wisely to do the installation Wednesday morning.
OWC advises that the replacement is easy but not so easy. As to be expected, I found out why.
Once all was back together (well, almost all, one screw went missing), I fired the machine up. No happy chord. I let the machine boot. No internal disk. Three checks to find all the stuff mentioned above. Then the lost chord was back.
Mac OS X installation goes like this.
Other than being agonizingly slow, the whole process was without drama. Only a bit of futzing around to get connectors seated.
For $500 and a day of BS&T, I have a new machine that is quick to boot, quick to log in, and pleasant to use. Even Aperture launch and Aperture import, both painful, are reasonably quick. This without making a working Aperture library on the SSD. Aperture is quick enough that there is no need to make a working library in addition to the archival library on the Drobo. Even image correction, which was slow before, is reasonably quick. Here’s why.
Just what were those LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons? Would you believe
Any or all of these were ill behaved. They’re worm food now. And the machine is happy. And Google’s helper is not missed.
After responding to questions from a fellow Unitarian Universalist Association Congregation, I’ve updated this article to make it a better reference for other UUA congregations and small non-profits. The changes include addition of references and a how we should have done it section.
So, what have I been up to these past four months? A lot of goofing off to find a new normal and a bit of non-profit hacking for my church’s communications committee. Unitarian Church of Norfolk, like most 200 member churches, needs significant technical infrastructure but is not large enough to provide it organically. Our solution has been to subscribe to Google Apps which provides E-mail, Google Groups, Google Drive, Google Analytics, and other services to non-profits.
Retirement gives me some free time to play around with my hobbies so I gave davehamby.wordpress.com a new look using the WordPress 2014 theme. This themes is designed for magazines rather than for “blogging”. I expect this site will become a scrap book over the coming years so the new theme fits the site’s mission well. I can use the blog for announcements and the pages to share photos, music, and video.
With the new look comes a copyright statement and Creative Commons License down in the footer. All of the material hosted here is created by me. When sharing material created by others, I’ll do that by link.
Comments are welcome but moderated and there are rules.
Bread by the numbers gives my favorite bread recipe. This recipe is a mash up of the basic white bread from Joy of Cooking and the learning recipe from the book Bread Alone and cooking ratios. By knowing the ratios, remembering the recipe becomes easy.
I’ve been doing some WordPress hacking the past couple of days.
I have no idea why I named it thus other than to warn you that this is not Mom’s Lentil Soup. It has a good bit of other stuff in it as inspired by several recipes for lentil soup that I found on the Internet. I know, Internet recipes are risky. Often they assume experience but this one does not. If you can measure, dice stuff keeping all your parts, and sauté without burning the house down, you can make this main dish soup. It is pretty thick so it can be served as a soup or over rice as a curry but it is a vegetable stock not relying on cream or coconut milk.
This recipe is assembled in three passes. The first pass does all the slicing and dicing. The second pass sautés the veggies. The third pass creates the soup.
I use Better than Bouillon “chicken” stock for this soup. This product contains a small amount of rendered chicken fat. The largest ingredient is salt. Most of the flavor is from glutamates and other wonders of food science that have non-chicken origins. A table spoon gives a whole lot of flavor that beats most home made vegetable stock. This product is an America’s Test Kitchen favorite. And is the start of most canned stocks. Do yourself a favor and use it. And rest assured that not even Grissom or Sherlock Holmes can find chicken in this product.
This recipe makes four to five servings. I ate a bowl and filled 4 pint containers with the leftovers.
This recipe requires the following tools.
As you can see, it is all basic stuff. If you elect to double the recipe, you will need larger prep bowls and a 7 quart Dutch oven.
I like to list the ingredients in the order they are prepared and added, so here goes.
For this recipe, I went lazy and used a prepared curry seasoning, Frontier Natural Products Co-Op Balti Curry found at Whole Foods. This curry seasoning is a blend of coriander, garlic, ginger, cumin, roasted red chili powder, cinnamon, brown mustard, and a whole bunch of other stuff that will give a complex taste. This goes into the oil while it is being heated to begin the sauté step.
2 to 3 tsp curry seasoning of your choice
I’ve not tried this but if I wanted to add a bit of meat flavor without adding a whole lot of beast, I’d add one Chorizo sausage prepared as follows. Skin the sausage and mush it flat on your cutting board. Toss it in the Dutch oven, set the heat on medium high (7.5) and brown. Then pick up with sauteing the vegetables using the rendered sausage fat as a starting point. Add additional olive oil as needed and run with it.
Prepare these vegetables for sauté by dicing small. Small dice is about pea sized for purposes of this recipe. The idea is that all these ingredients be about the same size as the cooked lentils.
I sliced the potato into thin quartered slices for no good reason that that is what I’d seen done in a dehydrated Minestrone soup kit I use from time to time.
I use the following procedure for my soups. First, I gather up all the ingredients and measure out the spices, salt, liquids, etc into prep bowls. I dice up all of the vegetables into prep bowls. Multiple ingredients may go into a prep bowl provided that they are added at the same stage in assembly. For example, all of the vegetables being sautéed can be staged into a mixing bowl or sauce pot. Similarly, the water and Better Than Bouillon may be measured and combined in a 2 quart sauce pan for later addition.
This post grew out of research I did to prepare a discussion about income in the United States for my church’s discussion group. As I prepared the presentation materials for the opening of discussion, I learned quite a bit about how fortunate I was and how things fit together. This post is based on the following references.
An understanding of this information is important to making both personal and public policy decisions.
How much income does it take to support an individual or household in the United States? I was surprised to learn these figures. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten the source so take these as 2013 thumb rules
The $30,000 figure represents the income needed to live independently and provides basic housing, transportation for work, food security, and basic health care in the absence of chronic diseases or injury.
The $40,000 figure represents savings for retirement and for maintenance of reserves to meet minor health emergencies, out of work contingencies, save to replace a vehicle, etc.
The $10,000 figure represents the incremental cost of adding an additional non-working resident to the household. Thus, a single head of household with 2 children requires $50,000 for a basic standard of living and $60,000 for a secure standard of living. For a two parent household, raise these figures to $60,000 and $70,000.
This figure shows the Census Bureau’s 2012 estimate of individual income density in the US. The bar height is proportional to the number of individuals in a $2500 band, for example from $40,000 to $42,999. Normalizing by the total number of people surveyed gives an estimate of the probability density function of income levels in the US.
There are some inconvenient truths here.
The important thing to take away is how income is distributed. A large swath of young (< 15) are counted as zero income. The median individual income of about $40,000 is well below the middle of the range considered in the survey ($50,000). Household income has a similar distribution with the median income being $51,000.
Because the data is gnarly, it is helpful to think of it by percentiles as shown by the figure below.
The figure shows some of the more important income bands. A percentile boundary represents the fraction of the population making less than that income level. For example, the tenth percentile tells us that 10 percent of the population earns less than $10,500. One quarter of us earn less than $22,500. One third of us earn between $30,000 and $62,500. Similarly, one quarter of us earn more than $77,000 and one fifth of us earn more than $92,000. Our doctors and dentists earn more than do 98 percent of us. The top 1.5% of income earners make more than $167,000 and to leave the 99% requires an income greater than $350,000.
Let’s interpret the income figures in terms of standard of living. Most importantly, the bottom 1/3 of us do not have the income to live independently. The middle 1/3 of us range from struggling to get by to independent with some savings. A 90th percentile income, although statistically wealthy, is not practically wealthy and requires careful choices of housing, automobiles, children’s education, etc.
The table above shows median income for commonly encountered occupations. Median income is that income level dividing the occupation into two equal sized groups. Half make less than median and half make more. In choosing occupations from the reference, I was careful to choose occupations we commonly interact with. So barbers, auto mechanics, plumbers, waiters, cooks, janitors, dentists, surgeons, etc are all present as are some glamorous occupations like airline pilot.
The table above shows median household income by racial group. Just the facts, no opinions and no rewarming of racial stereotypes. But half of black and Hispanic households are struggling as are maybe half of all households.
This figure shows median income by age group taking the 10 year slices commonly used.
Other than the racial disparities, skill, experience, and the emergent nature of economic system behavior go a long way toward explaining these data. Broadly consumed goods and services must be either inexpensive or subsidized. For example, we all need our hair cut. To be affordable places an upper bound on the fees for this service and the earnings in the profession. The providers of this service don’t have a lot of pricing power because half of their market earns less than $40,000.
The data show that the keys to upward mobility are educational attainment and experience in our profession, trade or occupation. But demand for services sets limits on upward mobility. First, we can’t all be rock stars or brain surgeons. The demand is not there. As the data shows, the most important thing we can do is to finish high school. After that, we can attend a trade school, apprentice in a trade, or attend college to acquire professional knowledge and gain experience in our profession being attentive to changes in demand for our services.
The data suggest a few implications for public policy
And a few implications for personal choices.
Dismal Manor Dispatches 
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