Category: Technology | Edward Jensen

Five Things for PaperCut Hive

A return of the Friday Five and some of my observations on PaperCut Hive, a software stack I’m currently deploying

Where I work, we’re almost complete with a migration from PaperCut MF on-premises to the fully cloud PaperCut Hive product. For the most part, I’m pretty pleased with how it’s gone and how it supports some of our organization’s transition goals to less on-premises. But there are some things that have been some definite head-scratchers in the process.

1. There’s no migration. That’s right: there’s no migration. Any data or user provisioning settings in MF don’t transfer over. You’re starting from scratch. Do you have RFID badges for your employees that they use to authenticate to the copier or MFP? Gone. Custom scan locations? Gone. While I’m thankful that I have a small number of colleagues and they have been more patient with me than I deserve, imagine if you have to have hundreds or thousands of employees re-authenticate on the new system. At least it’s a one-time only process.

2. There’s an app, but you don’t need it. PaperCut makes a big push to have users download their app for print management. I have issues with making people download company software to their own personal smartphones. Thankfully, even though PaperCut makes this push, you can ignore them.

3. Communicate early, often, and concisely. One of the questions I received a lot was about why we were doing this and how this would affect them. Fortunately, by planning the deployment, I was able to say that except for two initial tasks, everything would remain the same. And I told them why this change was being made, which was to support our organization’s future technology stack.

4. If you have multiple copiers/printers/MFPs, don’t move everyone over all at once. Keep both printing systems running in parallel so that you don’t have to sweat it having some users unable to use the printers and you have to rush the migration. By having some machines on the new system and some on the old system, you don’t have to be so aggressive in moving everyone over.

5. What automation? What year is it again? There is no way to use automated tooling to deploy PaperCut Hive software to our colleagues’ computers. To install the software, I had to go to each machine, download the unique software that PaperCut generates for each user, install it using my administrative credentials, and go on. That worries me, because that means the software is not directory aware and also means that I can’t include it in a base deployment configuration. While I’ve heard that this may change in the future, had I known this limitation, I would have postponed our deployment until later.

Those are some of my observations about this. It’s been received well by my colleagues, but some of the initial challenges made for a fun week.

A blogging renaissance?

Are we standing at the front door to a blogging renaissance?

Back in October, I put some thoughts out on LinkedIn about the future of social media and if we’re headed toward a renaissance of the blog. Given the public agita about the current social media landscape and the associated issues regarding content moderation, ownership of those platforms, and bullying and minimization of minority communities.

Personally, while it had been festering for some time, I finally pulled the plug on my use of Twitter. While I had been using it for 15 years, it felt to me like it had run its course and was far more noise than signal. And, to be absolutely fair, the whiplash changes to that platform under its new ownership helped push me to making this decision. It doesn’t feel like a huge loss for me.

The heir apparent to Twitter seems to be Mastodon, but I’m not sure if I’ll go on that. Not because I have issues with that tech stack – it sounds fantastic and totally dismantles the so-called web3 notion that anything decentralized has to have blockchain technology and some sort of transactional monetization to work – but because I’m not sure if I need to be on that. You might recall my essay on Five for the New Year 2023, in which I said one of the things I’m going to work on in 2023 is limiting digital distractions. It’s also why I want to spend my time in this world, and not some digital “metaverse” world that is definitely totally happening* at some point in the future.

I’m therefore led to make the following bold proposition: One of the major moments in the changing of the internet from independent communities to being controlled by a handful of social media companies was when Google killed Google Reader ten years ago. Instead of a choose-your-own Internet that was based on what you wanted to read from the sites and sources you chose, social media companies sucked us in to their sites and subjected us to their algorithms and rage. If you wanted the latest news from major news organizations, you are left to the whims of the social media networks whether they’d even allow it, or if the platforms were even telling publishers the truth. And that all led to the advertising dollars going to the websites that got the most views, which were not the traditional journalism outlets and newspapers, but rather internet content farms.

I digress. This isn’t about my views on the internet, but on blogging specifically and my proposition that blogging will see a renaissance in 2023. I realize my blog is a special case, because this is not a revenue-generating operation for me. With platforms like WordPress still out there, and even with some free or relatively inexpensive, there’s no barrier to entry.

I’ve been at this for well over a decade now, and I think I quite like it. In 2023, it takes a renewed interest with more frequent essays and columns, and frequent photography. The best part? It’s mine. Not Meta’s or Twitter’s.

Mine.

blog image derived from a photo by 4motions Werbeagentur on Unsplash

Behind the Weather Dashboard

Editor’s note: Due to ongoing systems and networking upgrades, the weather dashboard is temporarily offline.

The second COVID-19 vaccine knocked me out for a couple of days, so while I was recuperating from that, I created a Grafana dashboard with data from my weather station. The station is perched atop a building in midtown Phoenix. The dashboard is still quite a work in progress, but I’m pleased thus far with how it’s coming along.

For those who aren’t in the IT world, Grafana is a software platform that creates visual dashboards from various sources, including time series databases (TSDBs). TSDBs work by collating discrete metrics over time, and they’re usually found in the world of information technology. Instead of network I/O or CPU usage, the principle works for weather statistics: At this time, it was this temperature or the wind speed was that.

The Home Server

The past year has brought upheaval, but it’s given me a good space to rethink my computing portfolio. Join me on Fridays as I share discoveries and new things

Over this past year of COVID-19 lockdowns, I’ve taken the opportunity to re-conceptualize my personal (and business) IT portfolio. Prior to the pandemic, I was rather haphazard about things. Even though I espoused the benefits of having a master plan and having things fit into that plan, in practice for my personal IT estate at least, it was a different story. I focused on getting things stood up quickly rather than robustly. It worked, but it sometimes incurred a price.

The Friday Five: Improving Your Video Calls

As video calls have taken a bigger spot in our lives in the past few weeks, here are some cheap and easy ways to up your video call game.

What a weird few weeks it’s been. I hope everyone has been safe and healthy during these interesting times. For those who have been working from home, I’m sure video calls have been a part of your life. They certainly have for me!

Since I’ve been doing this for a bit, and since I also have some things to bring from dabbling in the photographic arts, I thought I’d share some easy things you can do to help improve your video conference setup. Each one of these ideas can be done independently of each other, so as to be flexible for limited budgets, but the total cost of all five of these different interventions shouldn’t exceed $100. With a couple exceptions, you probably have the kit around your home already! Continue reading “The Friday Five: Improving Your Video Calls”

Pixel 3 exFAT camera importing update

Good news! An update on the exFAT-on-Pixel 3 adventures I chronicled from earlier this week. It only requires the purchase of an app.

Back at the start of this week, I wrote about my issues with not being able to import photos from my standalone Canon DSLR camera to my new Google Pixel 3 XL because the Pixel doesn’t support the exFAT file system natively. I’m happy to say that I have good news and I’ve found a workaround that only requires the purchase of an app.

Before I get into this, I’m just going to write here that your results may vary and that I’m not responsible for any loss of data you may have as a result of this. Be sure to practice good data hygiene and backup responsibly.

My solution hinges on the “Microsoft exFAT/NTFS for USB by Paragon Software” app available on Google Play. Whilst the app is free to download, exFAT support requires a $5.99 in-app purchase. This app is unique in that it’s not a standalone file explorer, it’s an interface mechanism between the USB SD card reader and some other apps, including the default Files app on the Pixel. Here’s how it works:

Step 1: The exFAT/NTFS app. Mount the device here.

Step 2: The device is now viewable in the Files app as “Paragon File System”

If the captions aren’t viewable, the steps are as follows:

Step 1: After connecting your SD card reader to the USB-C port, launch the Microsoft exFAT/NTFS (etc.) app. Tap on MOUNT. (The UNMOUNT button is shown after the device has been mounted.)
Step 2: In the Files app, you’ll see that a new option is there: the Paragon File System. That’s your SD card.
Step 3: You can now browse your SD card and copy/move/whatever files from the card to local storage or cloud storage.
Step 4: When finished, go back into the Paragon app to UNMOUNT the device. Unplug the SD card reader and you’ll be good to go!

My explorations are still continuing because although I can easily copy-and-paste the SD card files, there is no mechanism that I have discovered so far that won’t copy duplicate files. By default, if you ask the Pixel to copy a file, if it’s a duplicate file name, it will just append a (1) next to the file name before the file extension.

Explorations are continuing! Isn’t that the great part about learning about new technology?

Twitter nonsense

Can someone explain today’s Twitter nonsense?

[Updated 16 June 2018 at bottom] Can someone explain Twitter? Not in the “you can share ~~140~~ 280-character snippets of daily life” sense, but in the “what is going on with that platform?” sense? As I see it, it’s a bunch of Twitter nonsense.

Earlier this morning, I get around to changing my password on Twitter because they were leaked out. Now, I should back up to say that I signed off from Twitter at the end of 2017 because I had thought Twitter had become more noise than signal and, frankly, had outlived its usefulness for me. Not to mention that Twitter had some pretty murky reasons for defending hate speech, something that made me uncomfortable. (To be fair, their guidelines changed earlier this year.) As I thought about signing back in and breaking my Twitter silence in April, I read that they were changing their API so that my usual Twitter client, Tweetbot, would be significantly limited to access the service.

So fast-forward to this morning. As I sign in to change my password, I’m presented with this graphic:

My account, @edwardjensen, has been suspended with no reason or rationale given for its suspension. The help pages are pathetically useless, only giving roundabout reasons for suspending an account. I had not received any advance warning in my email about this suspension. It’s not that the account has been sitting dormant for too long: the Twitter account for The Downtown Phoenix Podcast (@dtphxpodcast) last updated on 31 December 2016. It couldn’t have been for content as the last post on my personal Twitter account was on 31 December 2017. Did someone report my account? Again, why wasn’t I notified?

The moral of the story is this: When you use an external service, you’re at their mercy for what they will allow or disallow and often times, it’s a random mess based on their algorithms and what those services think they want you to see. When social media started moving away from chronological post feeds to an algorithm-driven “news feed,” that’s the moment when we lost it. When social media started removing human editors from the equation to curate what happened in favor of computer processes, that’s also the moment when we lost it. When social media started pay-to-play to get more eyeballs on posts, we lost an egalitarian community message board and went to a plutocratic space.

The point of this mini essay is this: When you create content, unless you’re hosting it on a platform that’s wholly under your control, there’s no guarantee that it will be out there in the future.

That should give everyone pause. Because today’s Twitter nonsense might have greater ramifications for society tomorrow.

[Edited to add: On 16 June 2018, my Twitter account was unlocked. In the email from Twitter support, “[It] looks like your account got caught up in one of these spam groups by mistake. This sometimes happens when an account exhibits automated behavior in violation of the Twitter Rules (https://twitter.com/rules).” In reviewing the Twitter Rules, I can’t find out what I specifically did to have Twitter’s algorithms think my account is a spammy account. That should give people even more pause.]

Friday Five: Chromebooks

A couple of weeks with one of the Google Chromebooks. Is it right for you?

[Editor’s note: This blog will take a slight turn this year. To be sure, comment will still be offered on the urban condition in Phoenix as needed. But we will be starting to talk about the role of technology in daily life. This post is the first of that new focus.]

A few weeks ago, my trusty Dell Latitude XT2, whose adventures have been chronicled on this blog several times, decided that it had had enough. This was a sad day because it was probably my favorite computer – a relic from the first time Tablet PCs went around about 10 years ago but one that worked brilliantly.

My main mobile machine is my trusty iPad Air but there are times when it’s nice to have a full laptop. I had been wanting to restart regular writing and I found that my iPad just had too many distractions on it to be useful. But finding a machine that doesn’t break the bank can be a challenge. I had always been interested in the Google Chromebook series of devices, even though I’m an Apple user through and through.

I picked up a refurbished Asus Chromebook C201 for about $140 online a few weeks ago and here are some of my initial thoughts on the device:

The Chromebook is not a home computer replacement. Chromebooks are powered by Chrome OS and the OS has only one purpose: to get to you launch the Google Chrome web browser. That’s it. There are no OS-level offline things except for the system settings and a rudimentary file browser (that has deep integration into Google Drive). It is all handled in the Chrome browser. In this sense, Chrome OS is essentially a thin client – the processing of anything you do is done on Google’s servers elsewhere. If you’re fine with that, then that’s great.

Chrome OS really works best if you’ve gone fully Google. Chrome OS’s web-based applications are tied hand-in-hand with the Google Apps suite (Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, etc.). Other online suites do work but bear in mind you’re accessing these through whatever web interfaces they offer. You sign in with a Google Account (be it personal or issued through your workplace or school) instead of a local user account or some sort of on-premises Active Directory credentials. This gets messy if you’re using a password manager with a randomly generated password to manage your Google Account credentials!

Enterprise-level management requires an expensive additional subscription. Whenever I evaluate a piece of tech, I wonder about its integration into enterprise or managed environments. As it turns out, even if you have a paid Google Apps for Work subscription for your business users, you still need to purchase yearly per-device management licenses that range from $30 per device per year up to $250, depending on what the device does. And, unfortunately, navigating these licenses is as perplexing as navigating Microsoft license programs.

Battery life is exceptional. Considering I purchased a refurbished device, I wasn’t expecting too much in the way of battery life. I’m finding I’m getting about 7-8 hours on a full charge. Not too bad, considering the device is always connected to the Internet and therefore has to have the wi-fi radio on all the time.

If you keep in mind what this device is, it’s actually a compelling piece of technology. As a test for if a Chromebook would work for you, ask yourself this: Can you do your task within Google Chrome? If the answer is yes, then this will work. If you need a separate app, then it won’t work. I bought this device to do, really, one thing: provide a distraction-free environment for writing. Google Docs runs magnificently on this.

There are a couple limitations of this due to the nature of this system. First, if you use a separate application on your other machines for password management (e.g., 1Password), you will find that it won’t work on the Chromebook. In the case of 1Password, you’ll have to sign up for 1Password for Families or 1Password for Teams to access your password vaults. The other issue is that as offline support is an always evolving thing, offline access to your data is spotty at best. You have to pin files for offline access in Google Drive, for example, if you want to work on them where you don’t have an Internet connection. But since this device never leaves my home, this is a non-issue.

When Google announced the launch of the Chromebook on its blog back in May 2011, they said, “These are not typical notebooks. … Your apps, games, photos, music, movies and documents will be accessible wherever you are and you won’t need to worry about losing your computer or forgetting to back up files.” That’s true. Seeing how wi-fi has become more and more ubiquitous over the past five years, the potential for these thin clients for the masses is greatly increasing. The hardware is only as good as its software, it seems, and thin client computing is becoming more and more used in enterprise environments.

I’m happy with this device. I don’t expect it to do everything my Mac can do because it can’t.

iOS 8: Hic sunt dracones

Updating to iOS 8 in the morning when it’s released? Be wary but be prepared: for there are dragons.

Are you going to be updating to iOS 8 when it’s released tomorrow morning? I think I’ll wait.

The eighth incarnation of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 8, is set to be released tomorrow, probably around 10:00am Phoenix time (following previous release schedules). The biggest feature set of iOS 8 is its closer integration with OS X; however, almost all of the integration requires the next release of OS X, OS X 10.10 “Yosemite,” set to be released later this year. So because a lot of the integration of iOS 8 requires the next OS X release, this might be a prudent opportunity to let Apple get the bugs out of this “point zero” release and not update.

Certainly, the other features of the operating system are very intriguing. I am looking forward to Safari Extensions, mainly so I can enter in passwords I’ve saved in LastPass much easier than a bookmarklet that often doesn’t work or copying-and-pasting passwords from the LastPass app. Alternate keyboards are certainly welcome.

But those nice additions are overshadowed by the perils and possible dragons of the changes to iCloud: iOS 8 significantly reworks iCloud. (Hic sunt dracones = Here be dragons.)

Right now (iOS 7 / OS X “Mavericks”), iCloud data storage is in, essentially, per-app containers. The new version of iCloud, called iCloud Drive, becomes more like Dropbox than per-app containers. Right now, the data I save in, say, Pages, is synchronized to my iPad in the Pages container of iCloud. iCloud Drive data is accessible in all different apps (desktop and mobile), which is a different paradigm than the current incarnation.

If you’re going to update to iOS 8 in the morning, then be sure to select “no” to the upgrade to iCloud Drive option after the update finishes. Your data should still be accessible by apps just as it always has been. If your only entrée to the world of Mac and iCloud is on your iOS device, then go ahead and upgrade.

I’ll repeat: if you’re reliant on iCloud document syncing working between mobile and desktop, then you should probably not upgrade to iOS 8. If you do, then be prepared.

And backup, backup, backup.

Another Day, Another Strikeout

News broke of a local company moving their HQ to farther-north Phoenix. This does not bode well for downtown Phoenix at all.

The news broke earlier this week that Phoenix-based Sprouts Farmers Market had signed a deal to move their corporate headquarters from near Paradise Valley Mall to the farther-removed and failed CityNorth development near Loop 101 and 56 Street. The new offices will include a Sprouts market. What’s ironic in the article is this quote from Sprouts CEO Doug Sanders: “It also will better reflect the Sprouts brand and our commitment to sustainability.” Yes, because having all of your HQ employees continue to drive to their jobs really is sustainable.

Commenters on my Facebook were quick to point out the usual failed Phoenix logic: “At least it’s still Phoenix instead of another town” was a chorus repeated on several occasions. It was suggested by a commenter that this was OK since Phoenix made a massive investment in the downtown-killing CityNorth project despite, as another commenter pointed out, it being a failed project. Other commenters suggested that we should work with Sprouts to have a grocery store downtown, possibly as part of the new development at Central & McDowell.

This idea that we must have economic activity all across the 550 square miles in Phoenix is killing our city and any hope we have to compete in the 21st century global marketplace that will be based on urban areas, urban activity, and urban economics. It may be very downtown-centric of me but there are two Phoenixes, if you will: there’s Phoenix proper, the urban part that is a much smaller size, say between I-17 on the west and south, SR-51 on the east, and Dunlap Avenue to the north. Then there’s the other part that I do not like to call Phoenix: the suburb of Phoenix that is subdivisions and sprawl, even if it is within the city limits of Phoenix. That other “Phoenix” is sucking all of the life from the Phoenix I know and love. When you’re both a suburb and central city, as Phoenix and “Phoenix” are, this is what happens.

All of the research and all of the trends suggest one thing: Downtowns of core cities will carry cities and regions forward, full stop. Even worse is this idea that Phoenix will succeed if our other suburban cities succeed. In a recent Twitter exchange I had with Jon Talton (@jontalton), author and Phoenix observer (and guest on an early episode of The Downtown Phoenix Podcast), he noted that “‘Regional’” is killing Phoenix. It’s the civic destruction without the entertainment value of Rob Ford.”

Other cities in our metropolitan area are certainly succeeding while downtown Phoenix falls behind. I have frequently praised Tempe for landing the new home for the U.S. national basketball team and State Farm Insurance developing in their downtown. I have publicly lauded Mesa and their former Mayor, Scott Smith, for the work done to bring quality economic development to downtown Mesa. If you would have told me 15 years ago that downtown Mesa would have a world-class performing arts center, light rail, and a nice downtown, I would have laughed at you. Outside of Arizona, we hear of developments moving specifically to downtown environments. California’s Active Network is moving their headquarters with 1,000 jobs to downtown Dallas.

What is the economic development strategy for downtown and midtown Phoenix? I fear to ask the next question, but I will: Is there one? I think it’s admirable that we are trying to have lots of incubator spaces and attract individual entrepreneurs but we need to ask: What is their economic impact compared to, say, the Sprouts Farmers Market headquarters? Or any headquarters for a major or emerging company? The lack of central-city economic stewards makes the downtown development case challenging, especially when the City of Phoenix has adopted the policy (in my estimation) that we need to spread the thin wealth of economic activity and development over the entire 550 square mile footprint.

Another troubling question that needs to be asked: Where have our central-city councilpeople been? Or what about the economic development groups that are tasked with downtown’s growth? My fears are that they were, again, asleep at the wheel. At last year’s overly contentious Phoenix City Council elections, one of the candidates said that they thought midtown Phoenix needed an economic development strategy; perhaps presciently, that same candidate called midtown an “inner city.” Absent an economic development strategy, we will become one in no time.

While we focus on walkability and creative temporary uses for undeveloped land in urban Phoenix, the good quality development—the stuff we want and so desperately need—moves away from here. We can have the most walkable streets and good urban design, if there’s nothing to walk to, then what’s the point?

This needs to be a wake-up call for all of us. We need to do better.