xkcd (sic) is an ultra-geeky, minimalist web comic that all the cool kids love. (Especially the Cory Doctorow fan club.) I’m not a regular reader, but I have seen a handful of popular strips that have caught on as memes. Such as this one or that one.

This book is a collection of the author’s favorite strips. Unfortunately, his favorites don’t really overlap with my tastes, so reading the book was largely joyless for me. But I do appreciate what he has accomplished, and I admire his low-art pluck and success. You be you, Randall Munroe, you be you.

If you’re a bigger fan than I, or perhaps just smarter, you’ll probably enjoy it. However, you could just visit the xkcd website and peruse even more strips. Why pay for something that is published free on the Internet? Karma, I suppose, or maybe you want to enjoy the marginalia, which consists of encoded messages, puzzles, and other doodads.

I borrowed my copy from my favorite neighborhood Little Free Library, but you can get yours from the Amazon.

I was faced with an annoying situation that was inconvenient to solve. The problem was an outdoor Ring Stick-Up Cam, which was permanently mounted to a wall, needed to be recharged.

The solar panel that was supposed to keep it charged was poorly positioned and didn’t receive enough daily sunlight to keep the battery topped off. The camera itself, perhaps because it is a first generation model, doesn’t have a “quick release” mount to take it down from the wall. Furthermore, being mounted 10 feet above the ground over some precarious landscaping, makes it tricky to reach the screws that hold it to the wall.

All of this is not a one-time challenge. The camera will need to be recharged regularly unless that solar panel is moved.

My solution? A cellphone battery booster pack. I opted for an Anker Power Bank, which at 20 watts is more powerful than the Ring requires (2 watts) but I thought it might charge the camera more quickly (I was wrong) and be useful in other situations (we’ll see). The Anker unit has a trickle charge option for low-powered devices (which would seem to include the Ring), but I did not use it.

The connection from the Power Bank to the camera is via an extra long cord from IKEA. A great source for low-cost and high-quality cables, as I’ve noted previously. The photo shows the Power Bank resting on a wall box, with the charging cord running up to the Ring Stick-Up camera. The Power Bank is plugged into the camera where the solar panel is normally connected.

The “device health” display in the Ring app is decidedly not real-time. It displayed 13% battery power when I began charging, and stayed that way for five or six hours, until jumping straight to 100% after letting it charge overnight.

The Ring website wasn’t especially helpful in solving this dilemma. Mostly because they make it very difficult to find support documents for older models. There is no way to filter the results to show only information that is relevant to the product you own.

Fan Fiction, by actor Brent Spiner, is a very unusual novel. It blends day-to-day actor life with L.A. noir, overlayed with an insider’s perspective of early Star Trek: Next Generation. It’s simultaneously true and clearly not true. It’s ambitious, funny, and silly. I loved it.

Would I recommend that you read it? No. Get the audiobook instead. It’s read by Spiner (which increases the surreal fictfactigous nature of the story). It also features a delightful array of guest voice actors — including Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Gates McFadden, and LeVar Burton — all playing themselves in this unusual, rollicking, shaggy dog, bio-fantasy-fanfic tale.

Did I mention that I loved it?

I’m opposed to spoilers, so I’ll let the publisher’s description carry the weight of more details, but if you want a spoiler-filled second review, see this NPR story. (But, keep in mind, I contend that the audiobook is likely superior to the printed edition.)

I listened via Audible, but of course, the Amazon has all the mediums you might want.

Oh, eero, you disappoint me. I’ve been a customer since before you were assimilated into the Amazon. I even upgraded my original system to your “6 Pro” models. And, I’m an eero Secure subscriber, despite the hassles it causes with overly aggressive site blocking and nonsensical “new client” alerts.

When you recently enticed me to upgrade to an eero Pro 6e system, I took the bait and spent $600 (with discount and trade-in) for your latest models. Boy, do I regret it.

The new Pro 6e stations refuse to recognize each other, and they complain about being placed in the same locations as the stations that I’m replacing, I dutifully tried moving them closer to each other. Then, when that failed, even closer. I tried starting fresh instead of using your “replace an eero” option. Nope. Nope. Nope. These pretty white half-cubes are steaming piles of shit.

Fortunately, I was able to reinstall my “old” 6 Pro stations, which immediately worked perfectly in the same locations where the new ones failed. I wasted nearly three hours of my life trying to accomplish something that should take ten minutes. Something that did take ten minutes the last time I upgraded.

I’ve returned the new system, cancelled my eero Secure renewal, and I will eventually find some 6e stations by one of your competitors. Thanks for the memories, but don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.

My 1600th dice tale. For more, follow me on Instagram.

#milestone #storycubes #dicetales #flashfiction #30words

I was sitting in my dentist’s waiting room, waiting for a follow-up visit after a pricey root canal, when the Hallmark Channel played a commercial for Physician’s Mutual Dental Insurance. That’s how they got me.

Admittedly, I was an easy mark, both situationally and financially. My dental coverage from Aetna had barely paid anything for my procedure, and given my age, I anticipate more work in the future.

I visited the Physicians Mutual Insurance website and requested an information packet. When it arrived, it seemed like much better coverage than Aetna, although I wouldn’t be eligible for any big-ticket reimbursements during the first year. I decided to bite anyway (see what I did there?) and enrolled online.

Oddly, while setting up my account, I was unable to elect spousal coverage. I assumed I could add that later. (If you’re keeping track, this is my third mistake of the story.)

Immediately upon signing up, my credit card app pinged. They had already charged my card, but they gave me an empty promise (spoiler alert) to send me the policy and membership information via snail mail.

Nearly every day after I signed up, I received spam email from them, asking me to sign up. At my post office box, I received at least 10 mailings also asking me to sign up, but no policy or membership card. The policy and membership card, in fact, never arrived.

I emailed their customer service to add spousal coverage. I received an email response with an encrypted message. To read the message, they wanted me to install some shady-looking app on my computer. Unless, the message said, I was using a “mobile device,” in which case I needed to forward the message to a third party who would decrypt it and send it back to me. (I am not making this up!)

I replied to the message, telling them I could not read the encrypted message. They replied with another encrypted message. This exchange was repeated twice more until I finally had enough. I called them to cancel my policy.

The customer service person asked for my membership number. (Which I didn’t have because it’s only provided in the membership packet, which I hadn’t received, despite it being nearly 30 days after I enrolled.)

I explained all the problems. I could hear the representative shrug their shoulders on the other end of the line. I asked that my policy be cancelled. The only way to do that, I was coldly told, is via mail. Snail mail. He gave me the info to do so. I asked for a refund for the first monthly payment that they had taken within minutes of my enrollment. He said, “put that request in writing, too.”

One month after I mailed the cancellation and refund request, I received a paper check (hello, 1995 called) refunding my payment and confirming my “disappointing decision to end coverage.” (I would use a different adjective.)

Two weeks after receiving the refund, my policy and membership card finally arrived, which I happily dropped in the shredder.

This 2015 book by Robert Moss is subtitled “Playing With Signs, Symbols, and Synchronicity in Everyday Life.” It’s an easy, first-person read built upon the premise that “the world speaks to us through coincidence and chance encounters.” But only if we are listening.

I’m not typically hooked by a book’s title, but this one grabbed my attention. Largely because I once bought the charming “Professor Pam’s Urban Divination Deck” from an Etsy shop, and one of its archetypes is “the mysterious puddle” — a phenomenon that happens on our front sidewalk. Furthermore, a life-changing book I’ve read is Coincidance: A Head Test, written by personal saint Robert Anton Wilson. Given these two signs from the universe, how could I resist this book? After all, there’s the old saying that “coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” Clearly, this book had something to teach me.

The book includes many of the author’s personal stories of synchronicity, which I wasn’t so fond of, as it’s often like reading someone else’s overnight dreams. But he made them as interesting as possible and justified their inclusion by quoting Mark Twain — “I do not wish to hear about the moon from someone who has not been there.”

Thankfully, the bulk of the book is not about the author’s experiences with synchronicity. It’s about recognizing and discovering your own meaningful coincidences. And the book is filled with interesting exercises you can use to tune in to "messages from the universe.” One of these is bibliomancy, or “book-dipping,” which is a basic way to put this whole bit of nonsense to a test. But, fair warning, sometimes you learn what you need, not what you want.

Just a few of the many snippets that caught my attention:

• The term synchronicity is a modern invention of Jung’s. He coined it because people have a hard time talking about coincidence.
• The term kledon refers to something you hear, such as a snippet of conversation. Or, I suppose, from a spirit radio. See wikipedia for more.
• The term kairomancy is the author’s coined word that refers to divination by recognition of meaningful moments.
• Every so often a synchronistic event is simply a rhyme, rather than an obvious coincidence.
• The term weird has a fascinating etymology.
• If you’re of a scientific mind, consider that synchronistic events (and déjà vu) may be related to happenings in parallel dimensions. (See time-reversed interference, which is an actual subject of study.)

If you’re going to read a book like this, I highly recommend that you give yourself permission to imagine — a sadly repressed trait among contemporary adults. (See another review I wrote for more on this.)

I bought my copy from the Amazon. Your local woo-woo shop will likely have it, if not another half-dozen books by this prolific author.

I’m adding a new camera system to my automated home. I chose the EufyCam 2C Pro system, partially because it’s made by Anker, but mostly because it supports HomeKit Secure Video.

However, it was a major headache getting the system configured to use HomeKit. The issue is that the process of adding the HomeBase2 as a HomeKit accessory would fail. I tried doing it in HomeKit directly, and I tried doing it through the Eufy Security app. Adding the HomeBase2 would always fail.

Making it even more frustrating, each attempt took several minutes, and seemed to work until the final step. HomeKit found the HomeBase, it asked for its location and camera names, and so on. It wasn’t until the final step when it would eventually timeout with a frustrating “Accessory not found” error. Well, FU HomeKit, you found it just fine five minutes ago when I started this process!

How did I finally resolve it? By (inconveniently) connecting the HomeBase directly to the router. (I previously had it, like everything else in my home, connected to a switch. A professional-grade switch, I might add, not some cheap Amazon Basics crap.) Once I moved the connection, adding the accessory was fast and smooth. Apparently, the HomeBase (or maybe HomeKit) doesn’t like being behind a switch. Word to the wise.