In February 2018, I took advantage of an excellent Green Mountain Power (GMP) program to install a Tesla Powerwall 2.0 on my Vermont home. For just $1,500, GMP installed a 13.5 kWh Powerwall on the outside of my home, providing us with an automatic backup electricity source that has proven capable of running our home through continuous outages of up to two days. (Yes, we get those kinds of outages now and then in rural Vermont.) Fixing a Tesla Powerwall is definitely GMP’s responsibility — but recently I was able to solve a charging problem myself.
Why GMP subsidizes Powerwall installation
Given that an installed Powerwall costs about $10,000, you might be wondering why GMP installed mine for only $1,500. The answer is that they have the right to suck power out of it when there’s a system-wide power consumption peak. With several thousand Powerwalls like mine currently installed around Vermont, these combined units can supplement conventional power sources with tens of megawatts of power, reducing GMP’s need to buy expensive peak power.
I get automatic reliable power when the line power to my house is interrupted. GMP gets lower power purchase costs. Win-Win!
How the Powerwall has worked so far
My Powerwall has worked perfectly for eighteen months. In that time it’s taken us through 43 outages. Most of them are short and last less than an hour, and we don’t even realize the power was off until later. Our longest (54 hours) began on November 27th, 2018 and that’s the only time our Powerwall got completely discharged. In total, the unit has supplied 66 hours of backup electricity since we purchased it.
I know all these stats because Tesla provides an app that monitors your Powerwall, showing your backup history…
…current power flows…
…and historical power flows.
The 42nd power outage
On August 9, 2020, we had a 3 hour outage. It turned out that a tree fell on the power line that snakes up the ten miles of road between our home in Marlboro and the feeder point in Brattleboro. The Powerwall worked perfectly, but when utility power was restored, the Tesla app showed that though Powerwall was still 80% charged, there was no power flowing between the electricity grid, Powerwall, and our home.
This had never happened before.
The green light on Powerwall was steady, so it was “enabled” and communicating with the Gateway.
First I tried turning off the Powerwall, using the switch on the side. The house power remained on, and the big green LED on the side slowly dimmed. I waited for ten minutes until the light was out and then turned the unit on. No improvement. Strike 1.
Second, I gingerly opened the Gateway box, something I’d never looked at before (or been told anything about by the installers.) There was a reset hole, but a flashlight showed me there was no button to reset. The Gateway box has a single breaker which I turned off. The app then came to life and showed that the Powerwall was powering the house, draining the battery. Encouraged, I turned the Gateway breaker back on. The house became powered by the grid again, but, the app display went back to showing no flows. Strike 2.
Fixing a Tesla Powerwall charging problem
Well, when all else fails, read the manual! I’d never received a Powerwall owner’s manual, but found it online and discovered these instructions in the Troubleshooting section:
If the Gateway and Powerwall are both unresponsive:
1. Turn off Powerwall by setting its switch to the OFF position.
2. Turn off the AC breakers for the system (Gateway and Powerwall).
3. Wait for at least one minute.
4. Turn the AC breakers back on.
5. Turn on Powerwall.
I was reluctant to do this since I knew it would turn off the house power completely and I’d have to run around and reset all the clocks. (A classic First World problem.) Anyway, sometimes manuals prove useful, because after I followed these instructions — hallelujah! my app showed flows, including the welcome sight that my Powerwall was being recharged by the utility company. Everything worked again!
I hope my experience fixing a Tesla Powerwall that isn’t charging is helpful to anyone else who experiences this problem.
Any other Powerwall tips and experiences to share? Add a comment below!
I have switched my personal finance software from Quicken 2007 to SEE Finance. For twelve years, I used the venerable Quicken 2007 to manage my personal finances; a lifetime for software these days. Later Quicken versions never matched the functionality of the 2007 version, which has consequently remained extremely popular.
But software platforms constantly change, and Intuit recently announced the functional death of Quicken 2007 in two ways: one that can be worked around, and one that really can’t. First, Intuit pointed out that the 32-bit software will not run on future 64-bit versions of macOS. If you don’t upgrade macOS (or keep a machine to run Mohave or an older version) Quicken 2007 can still be used. But the game changer for me is Intuit’s announcement that “Due to a security and reliability update from the service provider, the ability to download transactions will no longer work in Quicken 2007, regardless of your macOS version”.
It’s unclear exactly what “update” Intuit is referring to. Regardless, there was no way I was going back to the days when I had to manually enter security prices, and bank and credit card transactions.
So I needed new personal finance software.
My search for personal finance software
I spent a few days reading reviews and comparing features of current personal finance software. My must-have features included:
Runs on an Apple Macintosh and looks like a Mac app
Can import my historic Quicken 2007 data (~50,000 transactions!)
Downloads bank and credit card transactions from the financial institutions I use
Updates security prices
Allows customization of the information shown in account registers
Includes memorized repeated transactions
Provides adequate financial reports
Allows me to choose where I store my data, so I can access it anywhere from my desktop or laptop Macs
Rock solid reliability
As responsive as Quicken 2007
One feature I didn’t need is built-in online bill paying. I use my bank’s service, or the online payment scheduling that most businesses offer today.
Hello SEE Finance!
After checking out options that included Moneydance and subscription-based Quicken for Mac, I installed a thirty-day free trial of SEE Finance 2, and never looked back.
SEE Finance 2 imported all my Quicken 2007 transactions flawlessly, even highlighting a few discrepancies I’d overlooked over the years. The OFX (think Microsoft Money) one-step update of prices and account transactions works better for me, and for more accounts than Quicken 2007 ever did. Online account updating is outstanding: one-click updates all security prices and brings in new transactions from all linked brokerage, bank, and credit card accounts.
I have bank accounts, credit cards, investment accounts, mutual funds, individual investments, and some assets — all handled without problems. It took me a little while to understand how SEE Finance reconciles accounts, but I now find the process intuitive. The program is very fast and has been rock solid. And I am rapidly adjusting to the new interface after all these years of muscle memory Quicken 2007 data entry.
The program handles multiple currencies and budgeting, which might be great features for some, but I don’t need them. The developer also offers an IOS version for $4.99 (!), but it only works if your data is stored in iCloud. My free iCloud storage is fairly full, so I prefer to use my paid Dropbox account to store my 200MB data file plus the backups SEE Finance makes.
I think the only thing I will probably miss is Quicken 2007’s extensive reporting capabilities. I haven’t fully explored the reporting in SEE Finance yet, but it looks adequate for my needs, though there may be some minor gaps.
Currently, you can buy SEE Finance 2 for $39.99 US “for a limited time”. Unlike the current Quicken for Mac, no subscription is needed.
I have no connection with the developer, Scimonoce Software; I’m just, so far, a happy customer!
After years of trying many tools, here are my two favorite free easy ways to create graphics for blog posts and presentations if you’re not a graphics wonk. (Note: I am not a graphics wonk.)
I’ve written over eight hundred posts on this blog over the last fourteen years. As they tell you in SEO School, every post has at least one image. I often find an appropriate image on the web, but sometimes I feel inspired to create a graphic that fits better.
In addition, I frequently present at meeting industry events and to clients. Good presentation graphics can help communicate what I’m trying to say and strengthen my message.
Are you also “not a graphics wonk”?
I think there are a lot of people like me who have difficulty easily creating even simple graphics. My problem is that I simply don’t use “professional” graphics creation tools enough to be able to reliably memorize the variety of techniques, tools, and processes needed to speedily turn what I visualize into reality.
My graphic designer, whom I happily hire for complicated stuff, can quickly create perspective drawings, remove unwanted photo elements, and tone down someone’s bright clothing. For me, attempting any of these things takes a few hours on the web figuring out how, and making lots of mistakes along the way. The next time (if ever) I want to repeat the process I’ll have likely forgotten how to do it.
The graphics creation software I use most frequently comes free with Apple devices: Keynote.
Apple pitches Keynote as presentation software, and it’s an excellent tool for that. But it also has all the desirable features I listed above, so it’s perfect for quickly putting together a blog post graphic from a few external images plus some internally generated vector graphics and text. The alignment capabilities are especially nice: Keynote often seems to read my mind and pop up just the alignment guide(s) I might need.
I store a library of all my graphics in a single Keynote document, one slide per graphic. It’s easy to scroll through the slides and find an old graphic that can quickly be copied onto a new slide and modified as needed. Exporting a slide to a high-resolution jpeg (well, high enough for web or presentation purposes) is straightforward.
One feature it doesn’t have is rotating objects a precise amount (flipping horizontally or vertically is included). I occasionally need rotation capabilities for creating more complex (for me) graphics like a circle of chairs. If you need this capability, check out my bonus suggestion below.
For creating the kinds of graphics I’ve described, this software just works. The user interface is intuitive; I’ve never needed to research how to do anything I wanted to do. For the rare occasions I’ve attempted something (by my standards) really complicated and been stymied, I use the suggestion below.
Anyone with a web browser can use the best tool I’ve found for quickly creating simple graphics online: Canva. The software has a free plan that has been perfectly adequate for my modest needs. The trick to using it is to ignore the features that you don’t need — the free and paid templates and the galleries of free and paid images. Instead, start with a blank custom-size graphic workspace and use the drag-and-drop editor with your own graphic elements and perhaps a few basic objects.
Here’s an example of a graphic I made with Canva:
A couple of logos and some lines, and bingo! another graphic for another blog post.
Canva is especially helpful for creating a custom-sized graphic that’s filled perfectly with your desired content. You can do this in Keynote, but it’s a bit more fiddly.
So there you have it. Two free easy ways to create graphics for blog posts and presentations. But wait, there’s more!
Bonus resources
To reward you for reading this far I want to mention two other invaluable graphics resources. They both cost money, but not very much.
For more complicated graphics I use OmniGraffle. Here’s an example of the kind of graphic that is easy to create in this program:
OmniGraffle shines working with vector graphics. Diagrams like the above are easy to create because the program supports “connected objects”. I also find the program useful for drawing event room sets when you have to start from a venue’s floor plans downloaded as graphics.
OmniGraffle Standard (the version I use) costs $149.99, though education and volume discounts are available. Pricey but when you need it it’s worth it!
Finally, there’s Noun Project. This gem describes itself as “Icons for Everything: Over 2 million curated icons, created by a global community”. For $39.99/year you get unlimited royalty-free large SVG & PNG icons arranged in a searchable catalog. Noun Project is perfect for icons that represent abstract concepts, like communication [3,029 icons]:
or passion [1,567 icons]:
If you read my posts regularly, you’re likely to recognize some of the graphics I’ve made using icons from this extensive and ever-growing collection. You’re likely to find what you need here. Recommended!
Got recommendations that make creating graphics a snap for the graphically challenged? Share them in the comments below!
So often I check into a hotel room and discover that every power outlet in the room is already in use. (That’s why I always bring a small power strip on my travels.) Even when there’s a spare outlet or two, they’re often in an inconvenient place. Or there’s no outlet next to the bed or a tabel or desk. Also, sometimes an outlet won’t power a two-prong plug reliably, due to a loose fit.
Hotel industry, please wake up! Make power in hotel rooms available and accessible. Today’s travelers need power to recharge their devices. So provide spare outlets in your rooms! And make these outlets easily accessible — no more crawling on the floor, or moving furniture to get to a hidden outlet! Finally, remember that many folks love to use their laptops in bed, catching up on work, or watching a movie at the end of a long tiring day. As shown above, make us very happy by providing outlets right next to the bed!
We’ll appreciate it — and we’ll return!
Do you have other observations about power outlets in hotels? Share in the comments below!
Want to learn how to enable Verizon free call filtering? Read on!
Verizon now offers free call filtering, but enabling it can be incredibly frustrating! Many reviews complain that after downloading the Verizon Call Filter app, no option for the free version appears. Instead, you are only offered a free 10-day trial or the option to purchase a monthly subscription.
Here’s how to activate the free version of Verizon Call Filter
I found these instructions buried in a comment on the wonderful TidBITS website, posted by Paul7. I have cleaned up Paul’s explanation and added a couple of screenshots, but Paul deserves full credit for this solution.
The crucial step omitted from Verizon’s incredibly brief explanation of free call filtering activation is that if enrolling via the Call Filter App doesn’t work, you need to log in to My Verizon. Here’s what to do.
Go to My Plans & Services and select Manage Products & Apps. Or your menu might look like the image below, in which case go to Plan and select Add-ons and apps.
Click on the Get Products tab and the Premium Products option.
Scroll down until you find the Call Filter app and select the Call Filter Free option.
You’ll see a Checkout box where you can add Call Filter Free to the lines in your plan. Select the checkboxes next to the lines you want, and click Confirm Purchase.
On your phone, close the Verizon Call Filter app if it’s currently open. When you reopen it you’ll see that free call filtering has been turned on!
Paul notes that if you have more than two lines, you may have to go through this process multiple times since it only shows two lines at a time. Alternately, your My Verizon may offer this process for each device/line separately. If that’s the case, select each device in turn and repeat the above process.
Finally, follow the steps in Josh Center‘s helpful TidBITS article to enable Verizon Call Filter’s spam filtering.
That’s it! Did this work for you? Do you have comments/additions/corrections? Please share them in the comments below.
Not long ago I wrote about the end of decent-paid jobs and the need for basic income. A startling recent advance in machine learning has only heightened my concerns about the future of work. Last month, Google’s subsidiary, DeepMind, published a paper on AlphaZero, an artificial intelligence (AI) the company designed to play games. The AI started with only game rules. Here’s what happened next:
“At first it made random moves. Then it started learning through self-play. Over the course of nine hours, the chess version of the program played forty-four million games against itself on a massive cluster of specialized Google hardware. After two hours, it began performing better than human players; after four, it was beating the best chess engine in the world.” —James Somers, New Yorker, How the Artificial-Intelligence Program AlphaZero Mastered Its Games
From “knowing” nothing about the game, in four hours the program became the strongest chess player in the world. AlphaZero also taught itself to become the world’s best Go and shogi player in a few hours.
As a schoolboy, I played competitive chess for a few years. Although I haven’t played chess seriously since then, I still have a feeling for the game.
I was shocked watching AlphaZero’s tenth game with Stockfish, the strongest open-source chess engine in the world.
I’d describe AlphaZero’s play as completely solid, interspersed with incredible flashes of brilliance. Great human chess players have an uncanny ability to view a position and quickly select a few plausible moves for deeper study out of the many possible legal moves. The best grandmasters occasionally discover a brilliant and unexpected move in a game. AlphaZero found several during this game.
Having seen this game, I’d describe AlphaZero as the most creative, brilliant, and strongest chess player the world has ever seen.
From a novice to best in the world in four hours, is a level of performance that no human can match.
Now think about what would happen if this kind of performance could be achieved in human work environments such as:
medical scan diagnosis;
legal document creation;
engineering design; and
stock market trading.
These are only harder problems than playing a game because:
the problem space is larger; and
the data needed for learning can’t be self-generated by the AI itself and must be supplied by humans.
But these are not insuperable obstacles. If overcome, many high-paid jobs for medical practitioners, lawyers, accountants, and financial analysts would disappear.
So what is the future of work? Are we moving towards a world where the only available work is in low-paid “human service” areas where people are still cheaper than machines? Perhaps.
Until the arrival of robots capable of doing just about everything humans do. What work for humans remains then?
There’s a better way to improve meetings than augmenting them with technology. As Finnish management consultant and polymath Esko Kilpi says:
“Human beings augmented by other human beings is more important than human beings augmented by technology” —Esko Kilpi, quoted by Harold Jarche
At face-to-face meetings, we can facilitate relevant connections and learning around participants’ shared just-in-time wants and needs. This is more effective than augmenting an individual’s learning via technology. We maximize learning when:
Participants first become aware, collectively and individually, of the room’s wants, needs, and available expertise and experience (i.e. “the smartest person in the room is the room” — David Weinberger, Too Big To Know);
We use meeting process that successfully matches participants’ needs and wants with the expertise and experience available; and
Time and space are available for the desired learning to take place.
And of course, this approach significantly improves the quantity and quality of relevant connections made by participants during an event.
So the smart choice is to invest in maximizing peer connection and learning. Do this via simple human process rather than elaborate event technology.
I’ve wasted time at many events trying to use apps to connect attendees in some useful way. Even when high-tech approaches use a simple web browser interface, getting 100% participation is difficult due to technical barriers: all attendees must have a digital device readily available with no low batteries or spotty/slow internet access.
Well-facilitated human process has none of these problems. The value of having a facilitator who knows how to do this work far exceeds the cost (which may be zero once you have invested in training staff to fulfill this function).
When push comes to shove, modern events thrive in supportive, participatory environments. Attendees appreciate the ease of making the connections they want and getting the learning they need from the expertise and experience of their peers. Once they’ve experienced what’s possible they rarely enjoy going back to the passive meetings that are still so common.
Yes, we can use technology to augment learning. But the majority of the high-tech event solutions marketed today are inferior and invariably more costly to implement than increasing learning and connection through radically improving what happens between people at our meetings.
While exploring the New York City High Line for the first time in November 2017, I stopped for lunch in the Chelsea Market, passed the Apple West 14th Street Store, and on impulse went in to take a look at the Apple Watch Series 3 which had just been released. Though impressed while watching the original Apple Watch launch two years earlier, I was still wearing an inexpensive watch I’d purchased years ago in Zurich. This time I liked what I saw. Within 30 minutes I was the owner of a space gray 42mm aluminum Series 3. I added a space black Milanese Loop but passed on the cellular option.
As I write this, two months later, my Apple Watch has hardly left my wrist (you’ll see why later). Frankly, I’m surprised at its positive impact on my life. Let’s list the ways…
Fitness
From interviews conducted since the Apple Watch was released it’s clear that, originally, Apple had no firm idea about how it might be received or used. Today, the Series 3 upgrade and recent improvements to watchOS make it plain that Apple believes that fitness tracking is the key reason people buy their watches.
I am no fitness fanatic, just a guy in his sixties trying to slow down the effects of old age. But the Series 3 has significantly improved my ability to consistently carry out the modest fitness-maintaining activities I’d previously struggled to do on a regular basis. These days I walk, do yoga, and stack and carry a few cords every year for our wood-burning stove.
How it works
The Apple Watch’s basic indication of the amount of these activities is a set of colored rings that concisely display your desired daily levels of exercise, movement, and standing (i.e. not spending hours sitting in a chair without a movement break). Adding these to your customized watch face allows you to notice your progress every time you glance at your watch. The continual reminder, with the subtle motivation to close all the rings by the end of the day, really helps me to stay faithful to my modest daily exercise goals. Although I rarely have a problem taking breaks since my adoption of Pomodoro, I love how the watch buzzes my wrist with a little reminder on the rare occasions I’ve been too couch potato-ey (which means at 10 minutes before the top of every hour when it senses you’ve been inactive for 50 minutes).
For more precise tracking (not a high priority for me), the Apple Watch contains a good variety of fitness “workouts”. These monitor your efforts once the watch knows what kind of activity you’re doing, like walking, running, cycling, elliptical, and swimming (yes it’s waterproof). I do a lot of walking while typing at my treadmill desk, which means that the standard watch walking workout would be inaccurate since my arms aren’t swinging and my position doesn’t change. For fitness activities not included in watchOS, Apple has “Other” workouts that I can custom label (e.g. “treadmill”) and treat as if I was taking a “brisk walk”. (Apple recently introduced GymKit, which obtains accurate exercise information from certain next-generation gym equipment — i.e. not my ancient treadmill.)
Heart monitoring
A friend of mine was feeling under the weather recently. He finally went to the doctor where they discovered that his heart was beating abnormally fast — 130 beats per minute (BPM) at rest. He needed urgent treatment. The Apple Watch has an accurate continuous heart monitor that can be set to notify you if your heart rate remains above a given BPM while you’ve been inactive for 10 minutes. Graphs of your daily heart rate are available. They’re interesting to occasionally peruse and it’s unlikely that I’ll find myself in my friend’s situation without knowing about it right away.
In addition, I joined the (free) Apple Heart Study conducted by Stanford Medicine, which monitors my heart rate and rhythm. If an irregular heart rhythm (arrhythmia) is identified, the app will notify me. I’ll receive a free video consultation on my iPhone with the study’s board-certified, licensed primary care providers for further analysis. “In some cases, the doctor may recommend a BioTelemetry electrocardiogram (ECG) patch for additional monitoring. The patch will be mailed to you at no cost and should be worn for seven days. The ECG data gathered over this period will be used to determine whether atrial fibrillation (AFib) or another type of irregular heart rhythm is present.”
I appreciate the heart health monitoring that my watch provides.
Informing me unobtrusively via haptics
The watch generates different kinds of haptics. These are sensations created by tiny motors at the back of the watch that deliver real-time tactile feedback on the skin below. Haptics can feel like a gentle tap on the wrist or something more complicated. A consistent haptic indicates distinct notifications and situations. For example, if you’re walking to a destination in an unfamiliar city, Apple Maps can guide you there. Your watch can tell you when you need to turn left by playing two taps three times in a row, turn right by playing twelve steady taps on your wrist, and that you‘ve arrived at your destination by using a long vibration.
Unlike the beeps, rings, and loud buzzes from other mobile devices, haptics are unnoticeable by anyone except the watch wearer. Once I’ve set up my destination in Maps, I can walk there without ever touching or viewing my phone. If I’m eating dinner with friends I can choose whether or not to ignore a tap on my wrist. And if I want to see a notification, a discrete turn of my wrist towards me turns on the display. This is usually unnoticed by my companions and certainly less obtrusive than dragging my phone out of my pocket or staring at it on the table.
Haptics is a subtle new way to communicate. It has its limitations, but I find it a great improvement over the obvious intrusions of pre-Apple Watch digital devices.
Meditation
Last week I watched Walk With Me, a documentary about the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. I learned that his Plum Village monastic community rings “bells of mindfulness”. When residents hear one, they stop all conversations and whatever they are doing and bring their awareness to their breathing. I like to meditate, and the Apple Watch includes a simple app named Breathe that reminds users every five hours (default) to take a moment to relax and take deep measured breaths. You can ignore the reminder or take a few minutes to bring attention to your breath, guided by a lovely haptic that provides a sequence of graduated speed taps to synchronize with your in-breath.
Breathe
The default Breathe session is one minute of seven breaths. However, the iPhone Watch App can easily adjust this to remind a user to breathe mindfully as often as every hour and fine-tune the number of breaths per minute and the number of breaths per session. During a Breathe session, a pattern on the watch face expands and contracts to indicate in and out breathing, but I find the haptic feedback sufficient to meditate on my breath with my eyes closed.
One can, of course, simply meditate in the traditional way with no gizmo telling you when to mindfully meditate. I like the Breathe app’s periodic gentle reminder to check what I’m currently experiencing and the opportunity to center myself and help bring me back to living in the present. Rather like the bells at Plum Village.
Little things that Siri makes easy and routine
Siri is so easy to use on my watch that I now routinely do useful things that were too cumbersome when I had to find and talk to my phone. For example, I’ll lift my watch and say: “Hey Siri, start a treadmill workout for 26 minutes”. Or: “Hey Siri, how cold will it get tonight?”
Messaging “hands-free” has become possible while my phone’s still buried in my pocket. I say: “Hey Siri, send a message to Celia”, and dictate it after the “What do you want to say?” response. Siri’s voice recognition is very good so there’s rarely a transcription problem with simple messages. The first time I did this while driving, Celia was alarmed until she discovered I’d never touched my phone!
Setting timers and alarms
I frequently need triggers (aka timers and alarms) to remind me of future things I need to do. For example, take a break (as per the Pomodoro practice mentioned earlier), go to the post office before it closes, check the wood stove that I left on updraft, make a phone call, etc. I used to use small digital timers to do this. But with Siri on my wrist it’s simple to say “Hey Siri, set a timer for ten minutes”, or “Hey Siri, set an alarm for 12:30 pm”. Siri faithfully reminds me with a haptic tap when my timer or alarm is due. I can stop it with a single tap or pause/snooze it with a slide and tap or a Siri command.
Setting triggers via Siri is so easy that I set many more reminders than I did before. This enhances my imperfect memory and improves the likelihood that I’ll actually be doing what I’ve agreed to do when I need to do it.
Sleeping
I wear my watch pretty much all the time, including while I sleep. No, the watch has not become a fetish object or a substitute teddy bear, but I’m taking advantage of a sleep app Pillow to monitor my sleep. It’s a fully functional free app, though you can pay $4.99 (which I did) to unlock a few extra features. As I age, my sleep quality has declined (at least it feels that way). Pillow provides an interesting window into my sleep, allowing me to explore the effects of bedtime routines, medication, etc.
I’ve learned, for example, that I don’t sleep as much as I thought I did. Also, I hardly snore (the app includes optional recording of sound via the watch microphone). The pretty graphs of my sleep state aren’t totally accurate — I sometimes know I was dreaming when I woke but the app doesn’t think I was in REM state. But day-to-day comparison is enlightening and helps me improve my sleep hygiene.
Ergonomics, comfort & ease of use
I’ve owned quite a few watches over the years. Whenever I’ve looked for a new one I’ve had a hard time finding a watch face I like. My criteria seem simple. An analog face that shows all the numerals, a second hand, and a readable day of the week and date. Sounds straightforward, but less than 1% of conventional watches supply this combination.
This isn’t a problem with Apple watches, which come with plenty of customizable faces. I quickly created exactly what I wanted (see the screenshot). You can have multiple faces for different circumstances available with a swipe. The one I use handles what I need at a glance.
The Milanese Loop
After years of wearing leather bands that eventually distort and fall apart, I love my Milanese Loop. It’s the first comfortable metal band I’ve ever worn. The infinitely adjustable magnetic metal closure is brilliant and works perfectly. I bought the Apple version. Some of the imitation bands that cost a fraction of Apple’s price have good reviews.
Charging
The watch is charged magnetically and charging is quick. I pop the watch on the inductive charger a couple of times a day for 20-30 minutes. Even though I’m wearing the watch almost constantly (see above) I’ve never come close to a low battery situation. While we’re on the topic, the $7.95 Spigen S350 Apple Watch Stand creates the perfect travel alarm clock as long as there’s power near the bed. I say “perfect” because the stand holds the watch vertically in Nightstand mode, where the time display turns off until it’s tapped or detects even the slightest motion/sound, and you can easily set an alarm with Siri.
Ways to interact
There are multiple ways you can interact with the Apple Watch (tap, slide, force touch on the watch face; press, rotate the Digital Crown; press the side button; “Hey Siri”) that initially felt complicated. However, getting the watch to do what I want has become fairly intuitive, though I occasionally fumble for a moment.
Notifications are convenient and completely customizable. I appreciate the automatic “do not disturb” feature at night. It’s easily turned on with a slide and tap while meditating or doing yoga. Even the watch’s “flashlight”, though dim, has been useful far more than I expected.
Limitations
The watch requires you to own an iPhone. Most functionality is only available when the phone is within Bluetooth range. This is rarely a problem for me, since I tend to keep my phone in my pocket, but might be inconvenient for some. (The LTE cellular model adds phone-free calls and messaging, but battery consumption is understandably high if used extensively and, of course, there’s an additional monthly carrier fee.)
There are many other apps available for the Apple Watch besides the ones I’ve mentioned, but I barely use them. Yes, it’s impressive that I can squint at a weather radar map on my watch, but the small display area really limits its usability to viewing limited information, like a short message or tweet. It’s also quite hard to pick a rarely used app from the cloud of icons; it’s easier to have Siri do it (provided I can remember the app name).
Conclusion
The Apple Watch Series 3 is a fantastic device that has had many unexpected positive impacts on my life. I hope sharing them will help you decide whether a device like this is valuable for you.
Today, communities of practice — groups of people who share a common interest, profession, or passion and actively engage around what they have in common — have become essential sources for productive learning, because they provide crucial bridges for social learning between our work community and our external social networks.
Here are four tools for creating, supporting, and enriching communities of practice.
Listservs are an old but still surprisingly useful technology. They manage a list of subscribers and allow any member to send email to the list. The listserv then sends the message to the other list subscribers. Listserv software is available on multiple platforms and is free for up to ten lists of up to five hundred subscribers which should be sufficient for most communities of practice. Yes, it’s true that numerous commercial alternatives exist. But self-hosted listservs don’t rely on commercial providers who may close down or change services with little notice or recourse.
Slack
Slack can be used free for basic support of communities of practice (up to 10,000 messages), though many useful functions are only available in paid versions ($87+ per person annually). All Slack content is searchable. The product, initially targeted at organizations, has been evolving into a community platform. Because of its cost, Slack is probably most useful for communities whose members already have corporate access.
Zoom
The ability to converse with community members via audio/video/chat on a scheduled or ad hoc basis is an important tool for maintaining and growing community connections online. For many years the free Google Hangouts was my go-to tool for this purpose, but the service has become almost impossible to use on an ad hoc basis and Zoom is the most popular replacement. For short meetings (up to a maximum of 100 participants for 40 minutes) the free Zoom Basic will suffice, but most communities will be well served by Zoom Pro (unlimited duration and participants; $149.90/year). Any community member who has a paid Zoom plan can host a video/web conference. So this tool can be a cost-effective way for communities of practice to keep in touch.
Do you use other tools to create, support, and enrich your communities of practice? If so, share them in the comments below!
Here’s how to fix the dreaded HTTP error uploading WordPress images or videos or other accepted file types to the WordPress Media Library.
One of the most frustrating aspects of using the popular WordPress platform is running into this error when attempting to upload media. If you’ve never experienced this, you’re lucky! I run into this problem on ~1% of my image uploads and have wasted a lot of time and energy trying to resolve it.
I’m not alone. The two million plus hits returned by a quick Google search for the cause of this problem confirm that this problem is common. There is neither a simple explanation of why it occurs nor a single solution that prevents it from happening.
Here is a summary of some of the “solutions” that have been proposed:
Reduce image size
Increase PHP memory
Disable mod_security
Disable plugins
Change php.ini and /or .htaccess settings
Install a newer version of PHP
Disable image optimization
Change upload folder permissions
I’m not denying that these approaches work under some circumstances. If you are consistently unable to successfully upload images to the WordPress media library you should probably investigate them. But be prepared for a lot of messing about with no guarantee of success. (At least, that was my experience.)
So, here’s a solution that works. (Note: except for websites hosted at wordpress.com, because plugins cannot be added to such sites.)
How to avoid the HTTP error when uploading images or videos to WordPress
Install the Add From Server plugin and activate it. If you don’t know how to install a WordPress plugin, consult this clear beginner’s guide.
From your WordPress Dashboard, check Settings > Add From Server. The default settings [User Access ControlAll users with the ability to upload files] & [Root DirectoryDo not lock browsing to a specific directory] should be fine for general use.
Upload media to your WordPress library
Once you’ve completed the above steps, you can upload media to your WordPress library as follows:
Run your FTP program and navigate to the appropriate folder to upload your media. There are a couple of possibilities here. For a default WordPress installation, the appropriate folder will be your Uploads folder, i.e. (..[NameOfYourSite]/wp-content/Uploads/).
If, however, you have the WordPress Dashboard Settings > Media option Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders checked, you will probably want to upload your media into a subfolder of Uploads that has the form [CurrentFourDigitYear/CurrentTwoDigitMonth/], for example ..[NameOfYourSite]/wp-content/Uploads/2017/07/. Note that if this is your first upload for the current month, the folder won’t exist and you’ll need to create it using the FTP program.
Once you’ve found the appropriate server folder, upload your media file to it.
From your WordPress Dashboard, go to Media >Add From Server.
Use the navigation links at the top of the Add From Server screen to navigate to the same folder you chose in step 1 or 2.
Click the checkmark box (or boxes) next to the media you wish to add. Then scroll to the bottom of the page. There’s an option to set the imported date to the current date and time [default] or the file’s creation date and time. I think the default is most appropriate, but feel free to choose the alternative. Click the Import button and voila! Your selection(s) will be added to your WordPress Media Library!
That’s it! Although this description of the process is long, once you’ve set up your FTP program the six subsequent steps above take very little time to complete. I hope this has been helpful, and welcome your comments below!
In February 2018, I took advantage of an excellent Green Mountain Power (GMP) program to install a Tesla Powerwall 2.0 on my Vermont home. For just $1,500, GMP installed a 13.5 kWh Powerwall on the outside of my home, providing us with an automatic backup electricity source that has proven capable of running our home through continuous outages of up to two days. (Yes, we get those kinds of outages now and then in rural Vermont.) Fixing a Tesla Powerwall is definitely GMP’s responsibility — but recently I was able to solve a charging problem myself.
…current power flows…
After years of trying many tools, here are my two favorite free easy ways to create graphics for blog posts and presentations if you’re not a graphics wonk. (Note: I am not a graphics wonk.)
While exploring the New York City High Line for the first time in November 2017, I 
stopped for lunch in the Chelsea Market, passed the Apple West 14th Street Store, and on impulse went in to take a look at the Apple Watch Series 3 which had just been released. Though impressed while watching the original Apple Watch launch two years earlier, I was still wearing an inexpensive watch I’d purchased years ago in Zurich. This time I liked what I saw. Within 30 minutes I was the owner of a space gray 42mm aluminum Series 3. I added a space black Milanese Loop but passed on the cellular option.
I’ve owned quite a few watches over the years. Whenever I’ve looked for a new one I’ve had a hard time finding a watch face I like. My criteria seem simple. An analog face that shows all the numerals, a second hand, and a readable day of the week and date. Sounds straightforward, but less than 1% of conventional watches supply this combination.
Charging
