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Winning The DuoLingo Diamond League

[UPDATE 5/4/2022] It’s worth noting that this post was written in May of 2021. The scoring model has changed significantly, but the basic premise applies of doing some analysis of the different ways that you can score points and figuring out the best return for your time.

For the last seven months, I’ve been taking Spanish lessons every single day via the DuoLingo app. I feel like I’d struggle to communicate at a 2-year-old level, but progress is progress and it’s a better way to spend time on my phone than playing games or reading the news. This isn’t an ad, but if you are interested in trying it out, the app is free or you can pay to get rid of ads and support their cause.

The app is, obviously, centered around progressing through lessons, but along the way, you collect points and achievements. There’s one achievement for getting first place in the diamond league which is the highest league in the app. Other than getting the achievement, there’s literally no value in doing this. But I have a completionist itch that needed to be scratched so here’s how I did it…

I hung around in the league for weeks until I finally saw a week where it didn’t look like anyone was running away with the game. Then I pounced and did about 600 points in one day. A normal day for me is 100 which is enough to stay comfortably in the diamond league so it’s more than most people do but far from enough to win the league. Two other people had the same idea so I continued to put in 800-1000 points per day until finally they both gave up and my final day was pretty slow. The league finishes around UTC midnight on Sunday and I won with about 4200 points.

Here’s what I learned along the way:

  • I think I probably could have done it with fewer points if I had gone hard straight from the beginning. Go in with guns blazing looking like you have a few screws loose and people are less likely to want to play with you.
  • I timed myself on various parts of the app to figure out where I could make the most points per minute.
  • In general, the stories are great ways to make points quickly. The highest value story I had unlocked was 28 points, and while the first run through took a while, after that I could do it while watching TV and not really paying attention. I could generate 17 points per minute with this approach.
  • Using the app, you can choose between regular practice and hard practice. Every day I would do the hard practice on all the easy lessons. That’s 20 points plus 5 for a perfect run through the lesson.
  • Missed words go into a separate challenge bucket and are worth two points per word. I would purposely miss all 20 questions on the easy lesson, get the 25 points for doing the lesson correctly and then get an extra 40 points for doing the words in the missed queue. None of that is more productive than doing the 28 point story over and over again but it was close and it was less mind-numbing. I could generate 15 points per minute with this approach.
  • The DuoLingo Fandom wiki explains the leagues in details, but basically each room of the league is filled up with 30 participants based on when they record their first points after the start of the week. You could try to game that a little by waiting a while until less avid users are logging points, but I didn’t. In some games, leagues like this look different for everyone so you’re not actually competing head to head. That doesn’t seem to be the case with DuoLingo. Everyone else in the league sees the same participant list that you do.

The week finally ended and I won. I learned almost nothing about Spanish during the week and the whole thing was ridiculous, except now my achievements list is closer to being all gold. And that’s probably only marginally better than ridiculous.

It was an interesting experience and now I can stop thinking about when I might try it, but I’m glad it’s over so I can get back to actually attempting to learn Spanish. All week long, I kept hearing Drew Carey saying: “Welcome to ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’ the show where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.”

COVID-19: Day 122

I’m changing the title of this series to give a better idea of how long we’ve been in the slog. I’m marking March 13 as the start of our lockdown. I started working from home on March 5 and March 13 was Elijah’s last day of in-person classes.

https://xkcd.com/2330/

It’s been quite a while since I’ve done one of these posts, and frankly that’s because it feels less and less safe to document my thoughts on the topic. I talked previously about how we all started off in the same boat, then we we were just in the same storm, and now I’m not even sure we’re on the same planet. As with most topics on 24-hour news channels, it feels like we’re taught that if you’re not screaming the same thing as me then you must be my mortal enemy. Can we just agree that the truth lies somewhere (undefined) in between the two extremes? Isn’t that almost always the case?

I timed my last post right at the bottom of the trough for Washington. Since then we’ve been climbing very steadily. If you look at the raw diagnosis numbers, it looks like we’re getting infected at a much higher rate than we were in March and April. But the other side screams, “It’s just because we’re testing more!” Look one step further and realize the truth is in the middle. Yes, the numbers are going up, but no the virus isn’t spreading as fast as it was in March and April. So much is unknown about the actual spread back then, but the best estimates show we were at an R (reproductive rate) of 2 back then in King County, and we’re probably around 1.4 now. So should we be concerned about this regression? Absolutely! But do we need to lock everything down as drastically as we did back then? No, not yet anyway. Very early in this series, I wrote that we’re going to go through a series of ups and downs as we figure out the right level of safety precautions to balance a functioning society with not killing off 2% of the population. We’re in for a roller coaster ride of these infection waves because there is no magic cure out yet. We’re just as vulnerable as we were on March 6, but the good news is that we’re in a better position to analyze the spread and jump on it sooner.

It’s encouraging work at a company that is so heavily involved in analyzing the data. There’s obviously a tight partnership with the Bill Gates Foundation and their jobs all revolve around fighting disease on a global scale. Combine the two groups and you have a real powerhouse. Some of the information is still being vetted and worked on but I’ll give you four solid links to peruse if you want to focus on the data and not the media’s interpretation of it:

That first link is probably my favorite as it gives you an apples to apples comparison of the infection rates by US county (or by country). Even that can be a little misleading when you look at very sparsely populated counties where a single case can change the color of the county, but still, when you hear a friend across the country say things are good or bad, you can compare the infection rate in their county per 100k people with your own and compare their statement with your own personal feelings.

The other link that caught my attention this week is the COVID-19 Survival Calculator. As we collect more and more data about the virus and about the people catching it, these kinds of statistical models get more and more accurate. My odds of dying this year (without COVID-19) are around 1 in 700 according to the CDC. My odds of catching COVID-19 and then dying from it are 1 in 400. So while that’s not going to cause me to hide under my bed for the next year, it’s a significant increase. If you’re elderly, lower income, etc those odds can get horrifically bad to the point where if you get COVID-19, it’s like sticking a revolver to your head and being forced to play Russian Roulette.

Getting a good handle on the raw data is an important step in arming yourself to not be taken in by bad information. The internet is aflame with people using “data” to argue their point. For example, this chart was floating around the internet recently.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

That one comes from the CDC so it must be legit, right? Sure, the data is right but read the fine print and you’ll see that it can take weeks for the data to roll in and even if the data was instant, people don’t die from the disease as soon as they get diagnosed with it. So this chart is very much a lagging indicator of what’s going on. Go back and check that chart when you we get into late August and see if it still looks as rosy. You have to be so careful whenever you read the news or peruse social media.

The first step in the battle is just knowing when you’re being manipulated either directly or via a share of a share of a share of a share. I wish I could give more details but we get some incredibly interesting security talks inside the company and they go into great detail breaking down misinformation campaigns post by post and tracing it back to the bad actors running those campaigns. I’ll summarize with this: assume that everything you read is fake. It’s almost impossible that in your internet browsing today, you haven’t read a story, post or comment that is written by someone explicitly trying to game your emotions to push you to one side of the war or the other. Be on the lookout especially for “us vs them” talk. Once they get you screaming at the other side, nothing productive will happen. They want us to hate each other. Destin from Smarter Every Day had some a nice Instagram story about this exact topic the other day. I’m paraphrasing but he said “Don’t let this affect your heart. If you met someone on the street, would you run up to them screaming? Wouldn’t you be able to have a polite conversation even if you disagreed with them? Remember Proverbs 15:1: A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” (Now’s a good time to rewatch his great series about disinformation on the internet.)

We’re in this for the long haul. We could be 6-12 months or more away from a vaccine but there is still question about if we can produce a vaccine or if it will be effective for more than a few months. And even if we can make the vaccine, how long will it take to distribute to everyone in the world? And how many people are going to refuse it? Sure, 2020 is bad, but it’s not like 2021 is going to be all sunshine and roses. This is going to take time.

So woooosahhhhhhh. Be kind. Seek the truth in the middle ground. Be wary of information presented in arguments. Show grace to those who are struggling with this on both sides. But most importantly:

Above all else, guard your heart,
    for everything you do flows from it.
Keep your mouth free of perversity;
    keep corrupt talk far from your lips.
Let your eyes look straight ahead;
    fix your gaze directly before you.
Give careful thought to the paths for your feet
    and be steadfast in all your ways.
Do not turn to the right or the left;
    keep your foot from evil.

Proverbs 4:23-27

COVID-19: Part 10

When this whole thing started, it felt wonderful to be fighting something together as a global group. It’s like the story from the cold war when Reagan and Gorbachev were in tense negotiations. During a private conversation in a break, Reagan said, “If aliens attacked the United States, would you help us?” Gorbachev said yes, and after they went back into the room, negotiations went much better. Sometimes there’s a common enemy we can all fight and it brings us together.

That was nice while it lasted wasn’t it? On a recent episode of his podcast, Mike Rowe said, “A couple months ago I said, ‘For the first time in a long time, we’re all in the same boat.’ I take it back. I don’t believe we are. I think we’re all in the same storm. Our boats are different for sure.” When I open up the news, it’s full of tension and anger as each political side beats the drum and rallies the troops for another screaming match. How can people be so different when the data is so clear?

Data like this is far from clear. While this virus was expanding rapidly, the population had to learn how to understand the pace indicated by an upward line on a logarithmic scale. Now that we’re coming back down, a better metric seems to be the “R-value” or the transmission rate. An R of 1 means that for every one person who gets sick, they share it with 1 more person. If the outbreak is at that level, it means that we’re going to hold our ground. Go above 1 and we end up with a mess. Keep it below 1 and we will solve the problem. The trick is figuring out what R value we’re currently at and how that varies by region.

Uncertainty in models showing the impact of various social distancing rules combined with the fires being flamed in politics lead to a situation where everyone can find a “statistical report” that reinforces their bias. I don’t know which point of view this report backs up, but I’ve been keeping tabs on the ones that my company is involved with and one of the best is the Centre for Mathematical Modeling of Infections Diseases. Their estimates show that R is probably at or above 1 in most states. The Institute for Disease Modeling also has a very detailed dive into transmission characteristics in Washington State.

CMMID transmission estimates for the United States
IDM transmission estimates for Washington State

The media thrives in the uncertainty of these models. They can twist the statistics and wording, but if you skip over the media and look at the raw data, you can get a better idea of the situation and the level of confidence you can reasonably gain from it. Are we out of the woods? No way. Have the changes in restrictions over the last couple weeks taken us immediately back to huge increases? Nope. Yay for now, but this virus is pernicious. The time between being infected and having measurable symptoms is long, so the task of finding a good balance between lockdown and a return to normal is going to take a very long time.

It’s hard to know how much of this anger being flamed up around the country is legitimate and how much is an effect of being influenced by bad actors in the system. Other countries love targeting the US and feeding the frenzy. The media makes their money on eyeballs. People love to have their biases reconfirmed. It’s a lot of dry tinder.

It’s easy to get depressed with all the fighting and the numbers that arent’ trending down as fast as we’d like. But there’s hope too. There are other polls that show that we’re not really as divided and angry as it seems. I enjoyed this comic (with sources cited) from Randal Munroe:

Coronavirus Polling

Even if the country really is divided and angry, it doesn’t mean that I have to participate. Tyla and I were talking about good things to come out of this This list will continue to grow for decades as gain more perspective, but here are a few of the things we came up with:

  • We have an amazing digital library that keeps our eyeballs full of good books. A couple weeks before this all started, we had decided to get Elijah a tablet to help with his reading. So not only can we use our awesome library, but now there are floods of educational apps that have free periods. Elijah’s reading skills have skyrocketed!
  • We haven’t been sick for two and a half months! That’s unheard of during school season. It’s usually a non-stop merry-go-round of viruses and bacteria flowing around.
  • I do most of the cooking at dinner time and it’s challenging to keep dinner interesting on weeknights. The removal of my commute means that I can plan just about any meal on any day.
  • What a perfect time for me to build a new computer! It has been a joy to work on this thing every day, and the enormous horsepower has come in very handy with all the video editing that I’ve been doing for church.
  • I’ve been wanting to learn Davinci Resolve for video editing and all of this editing for church services finally pushed me over the edge. While I don’t really have any extra time to learn things since work is busy, I was forced into the situation and after a couple weeks of struggling, I’ve burst through to the other side where now I’m more productive than before and I have an endless list of new features to explore. (It’s like learning to swim the Stennis way!)

I could go on and on, but the point is that while there’s still a lot of uncertainty and we’re being encouraged to fight with “the others”, keep calm and carry on. Good things are happening too. And even if you can’t see those good things when you read the news, you can find them in your own life. Celebrate them and thank God for them.

James 1:17-21

17 Every good act of giving and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the lights, who does not change or shift like a shadow. 18 Just as he planned, he gave us birth by the word of truth so that we would be a kind of firstfruits of his creations.

19 Remember this, my dear brothers: Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. 20 Certainly, a man’s anger does not bring about what is right before God. 21 So after getting rid of all moral filthiness and overflowing wickedness, receive with humility the word planted in you. It is able to save your souls.

COVID-19: Part 6

https://xkcd.com/2287/

It’s been almost 2 weeks since the last update, and it has been nice to tone down the obsessive reading about the virus. I limit myself to a couple minutes per day. My basic routine is:

  1. Hit the home page of a local TV station. If there isn’t anything new on that initial screen, close it and move on.
  2. Visit the excellent page of graphs and scroll through to see how/if things are changing, especially for Washington.

It’s wonderful to see that some countries are actually peaking. I don’t believe any of the data coming out of China, but even ignoring them, but even ignoring them, countries like Australia, Taiwan and maybe even Italy are starting to actually have fewer new cases each day than the day before.

Washington has beautiful mountains, but being the flattest state is nice too.

In most other places, we’re just happy to be seeing the rate of acceleration slow. That means we’re still getting more cases per day than the day before so the worst is yet to come, but those logarithmic curves are bending down closer and closer to horizontal and having the same number of new cases tomorrow as we did today is the first big milestone. From there we can watch the number of new cases each day decrease until finally, the total number of people with COVID-19 is less than it was the day before.

I think that is still quite a ways off. Anytime someone tells me a date of when a particular restriction is going to be lifted, I wonder why anybody even puts out those dates. It feels unlikely that any of them are correct. Weeks ago my company said, “There’s no end date. We’ll tell you when there is one.” That feels more reasonable at this point than saying the lockdown is over in X weeks.

I continue to wonder what will happen to schools. There are so many ideas floating around and none of them are good. Some states have already said there will be no more school after the scheduled end of the year. I can see how that might work for older students who are getting a reasonable online education, but what about my first grader? Despite having a trained teacher staying home tutoring an only child, there’s no way he’s learning as much as he would be at school, especially when a lot of that learning centers around social skills. We’re working hard and doing our best, but will they really just bump him up to second grade? Tyla and I are thankful that we didn’t hold him back a year when he started because that will leave the possibility open for that down the road if needed. I think one outcome of this whole experience will be an almost complete removal of the stigma surrounding repeating a grade. That’s going to be so much more common than it was when I was growing up.

Personally, I’m getting in to the groove of working from home, but this is probably the busiest I’ve ever been since taking this job. Cloud computing is booming and with supply chains disrupted, work is… challenging. As if that wasn’t enough, I’m also putting in a lot of hours helping our church to get services online. Pastor and Dave, our main organist, are doing a great job getting me recordings, but my evenings are spent at the same computer where my days are spent so I can edit everything together. It’s all important work and I know people are thankful, but it’s all so draining physically, emotionally and mentally. On Wednesday of last week, I realized I hadn’t been outside (except to put up the flag or take out the trash) since Sunday. Since then I’ve abandoned my post over lunch, left the phone in the house, and gone for a walk. And oh yeah, my family needs extra attention and time through this too!

When I do get a few minutes of free time, I feel like I should be spending it on work, church or family. But if I do talk to friends, watch my favorite YouTube creators or listen to podcasts, it feels like a never-ending stream of “I have so much time.” I know that everyone has their own challenges and the grass is always greener on the other side, but the idea of having an entire day (much less multiple weeks) with no responsibilities feels like the Shangri-La to me. If you are in that position, don’t squander your time! Don’t blow it watching Netflix all day. This is an amazing opportunity and if I can’t have it, I can at least enjoy seeing you be productive. It would feel so amazing to spend a couple days out in the garage working on that dresser project which is taking me so long.

As a family we’ve totally cut ourselves off from outside contact except for groceries and occasional food deliveries. We took a family “adventure” on Saturday which amounted to driving around. We drove through the new tunnel under Seattle. I’ve always wondered what it would look like to drive through four billion dollars. Now I know. We continued our tour around the Space Needle where we parked right in front and hopped out for a quick photo. We wrapped it up by driving down the main drag at Pike Place Market. That’s an impossible feat on a normal Saturday. It’s a measure of Elijah’s boredom that he thought this long car ride to nowhere was exciting.

Speaking of Elijah, he’s handling this all pretty well. He, like of all of us, has his moments where it all feels like too much, but overall I give him a thankful thumbs up. It’s especially hard for him when he sees other families who are interpreting the lockdown differently than we are. I try to let him feel that frustration but treat those as teachable moments. (If you’re a parent, this is a great 5 minute watch.) But in the back of my mind, I do wonder if we’re drawing our own boundaries correctly. However, deep down I still believe that if we all suck it up and cut off contact, we’ll be back to normal sooner than if we do this halfway. It would be different if you had symptoms as soon as you were contagious, but any one of us could have it right now and not know it so having contact with other people feels irresponsible.

In the end, my bar is “If everyone did this, would it be ok?” You can twist that in lots of ways to make anything seem permissible or not, but when viewed honestly and for lack of anything better, it feels like a reasonable starting point.

As I struggle to live up to my responsibilities as a Christian, husband, father, employee and church AV geek, I constantly have to remind myself that I’m not doing this alone. Yes, I have my family to support me, but more importantly, God is here with me. He’s guiding me through all of this and I’ll come out better for it having experienced it.

Psalm 50:15 Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will honor me.

Davinci Resolve

One of the big reasons I built a new PC recently was to make it easier to edit 4k video footage as more and more of my devices are able to record it. I’ve been using various versions of Adobe Premiere Elements for 10 years, but I’m starting to feel like I’ve outgrown it. The problem is that the next level of video editors is the same stuff the pros use which means it’s complicated and expensive. The main contenders are Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro from Apple. Thankfully there’s a third option: Davinci Resolve.

Resolve initially started as a color correction tool but evolved to include a full editor and special effects tool. The best part is that it is FREE. That’s right. Free! Or at least it’s free until you start editing the next Marvel movie and then you’ll want to shell out a few hundred bucks for the Studio version of Resolve. But there’s no way a mere mortal at home is ever going to get that far.

One downside to Resolve is that it has a very steep learning curve. Thankfully I’m not totally new to editing and our library also includes a free subscription to Lynda.com. I took a ~5 hour course, learned the basics, and then plunged into my first video: a full church service.

Because we’re staying home, we decided to publish as much of a normal church service online as we could. Pastor spent many hours at church recording the various segments and DaveK recorded some organ pieces from home. I was able to get it all pieced together and posted. You can find it on our Facebook page and our YouTube channel.

Other than having to do some searches to find a few very basic things, the experience was good and it didn’t add a huge amount of time to the way I did things before. As I get better I’m confident that I’ll be able to make them look even nicer and do it faster than before. Specific things I’m already enjoying:

  • It has a feature that syncs separate audio and video tracks with a single click! This was a constant source of pain for me before because even if I got them synced up, at some point they might start to drift by a couple frames.
  • The titles are done through their full-blown effects system so the sky is the limit. I stuck with the built-in titles for this first video but I thought even those looked very nice.
  • Rendering is FAST. This software uses both my CPU and video card to get the rendering done as quickly as possible.

The three of us put in a huge amount of time getting this one service done, but it looks like we’ll have a lot more chances to optimize our workflow. The biggest hiccup was transfering ~12GB of files around but it turns out that just dumping them on the PC at church and letting Backblaze put back them up was the easiest and most reliable solution. The upload speed there is very slow (2Mbps) but reliability proved more helpful than raw speed.

It was also really tempting to try to use the special effects to light the candles, but I resisted. We’ll get those lit in real life and made some other small tweaks for next time, but if you’re using these videos and there’s anything we can do to improve your experience, please share them with us!

Video Surveillance System

I’ve written quite a few posts over the years about the camera system I use around my house, but I thought I’d write up a new summary of everything that I recommend right now.

This stuff has kind of turned into a hobby for me, so the setup you’ll see later in this post is probably more than Joe Public is interested in. If you’re not looking to tinker a little bit, I recommend a package deal that includes the DVR along with a bunch of cameras. I bought one of the 8 camera Amcrest packages for church and we’ve been very happy with it. There are quite a few options ranging from 1080p up to 4k with varying numbers of cameras. You can see the full list on their site but there are a bunch of companies in this price range with similar packages. If even that is too much for you, companies like Simplisafe and your cable provider have camera packages but of course you’ll end up paying more for the convenience.

Ok, on to the more DIY solution that I have… all of the cameras I’ve ever owned have been from Amcrest. Are they best? Nope. But they work very well for me and they’re super cheap so I’m happy to replace them when they finally give up. I have one camera that is over 6 years old. I keep waiting for it to die because it’s only 640×480 resolution and I want to upgrade!

It’s possible to buy individual cameras and use the built-in web servers to access them remotely. I don’t recommend doing that. The security on those cameras is terrible and it’s very easy to accidentally (or obliviously) leave your camera open for easy access from the web. I kid you not, when I first was looking through the settings, I couldn’t believe the defaults. I did a quick internet search, typed in the default user name and password and bingo, I was watching a camera inside someone else’s house. Gross. The default settings have gotten better over the years but I still don’t trust them to keep up to date with every new exploit that happens.

To add a better layer of security I have a piece of software called Blue Iris running 24/7 on one of my machines at home. That software is then my entry point from the web or from my phone and that software has active development and updates. So none of my cameras are directly accessible from the web. Instead I fire up the Blue Iris website or app on my phone and then connect to my cameras.

The software also gives me a plethora of options (more than I’ll ever use) for doing things like triggering a recording and/or alert whenever motion is detected, recording the last N days of video, etc. I even played around with having it live stream one of my cameras to YouTube. The interface isn’t great but the feature you want is there somewhere. It might take a little while to set it up, but once you’re done, you won’t need to touch it much.

The other nice thing about having Blue Iris is that it supports a LOT of different cameras. So even though I have kind of standardized on Amcrest, I could easily buy one different brand tomorrow and throw it into the mix and I’d get the same standardized controls over the new camera too.

The final question is how do you want to connect your cameras to the Blue Iris software. The easiest is WiFi and generally that works pretty well. The catch is that you need to plug it into an outlet and if you’re doing outdoor installations, there might not be outlets handy. I’ve started moving to “Power over Ethernet”. To do this, you need a PoE switch that injects power down some of the unused wires in an Ethernet cable. As long as you get a PoE web cam, you can just run a single Ethernet cable to the camera and have a solid network connection and power all in one cable. That’s pretty convenient for those outdoor cameras.

How much does all this cost? Figure about $70-80/camera and then $70 for Blue Iris. There aren’t any ongoing monthly fees. That makes it pretty easy to dip your toe into the water with just one or two cameras to see how you like it. But they’re kind of like Pringles… once you pop you can’t stop! It’s easy to find reasons to add more and more cameras.

If you decide to go the Blue Iris route, I’m happy to help answer questions and guide you through the setup!

ISS Transiting The Eclipse

Destin Sandlin has one of the best YouTube channels in existence: Smarter Every Day. I don’t know how he keeps upping his game, but he has managed to do it again. He found his way onto the perfect tiny little patch of earth where he could watch the eclipse AND see the International Space Station transit across the sun during the eclipse. The math is bonkers. He got a bit lucky because they periodically adjust the height of the space station (it slowly falls to earth) and the last adjustment put the viewing location on some reservation land that is very difficult to get to. It all worked out and he has a great video about it. He wins the eclipse.

Ford Android Auto

One big reason why I waited for a 2016 F150 instead of getting a 2015 was because the 2016s were going to come with the new Sync 3 system. Sync 3 includes options for Android Auto and Apple Car Play. I’ll be focusing on Android Auto because that’s what I use.

My truck came from the factory with Sync 3, and while that was an upgrade to the original Sync, what I really wanted was Android Auto and I didn’t have that version of the firmware. Late last year, a firmware update for Sync 3 which adds Android Auto and Apple Car Play leaked online. I saw hundreds of people reporting success installing it themselves, but I was a little nervous to brick an expensive piece of my truck. So I waited. And waited. And waited.

This week I finally saw the update appear on the Ford Sync website. I quickly downloaded it onto a USB key and headed out to my truck. The install took 20-30 minutes, but when it was done, I had Android Auto! It’s pretty slick. You can easily switch back and forth between Ford Sync or Android Auto. Maybe I should pause to explain what Android Auto is…

The common problem with fancy head units in vehicles is that by the time you buy one, it already feels obsolete. And in 10 years? It’s almost a joke how far technology has progressed leaving your fancy head unit in the dust. But we carry around phones in our pockets that get upgraded every few years, have internet connections, and have way more capabilities than head units. So why don’t we just use the head unit as a dumb display and use the phone as the brains of the head unit? That’s exactly what Android Auto does. When you connect, an app starts up on your phone and is displayed on the head unit. It’s a simplified interface with bigger buttons and a reduced set of capabilities for safety. But even with those restrictions, it’s AWESOME!

For example, I can touch the voice button on my steering wheel and talk to Google to send text messages, ask the internet a question, etc. I can pull up the maps and say “Find the nearest Dairy Queen”. A list shows up on the screen, I pick one, and it finds the route with the least traffic. My podcast app integrates with the system as does Spotify. It’s super slick and very snappy. If you want to see it in action, I’ve included a couple photos below but you can also head to YouTube and find lots of demo videos.

My only complaint at this point is that you have to plug in your phone to use Android Auto. They technically do support Bluetooth connections, but I don’t know if that’s just coming later or if it requires slightly different hardware. It’s not the end of the world because I often plug my phone in while I’m in the car anyway.

The best part is knowing that this interface will keep getting updated and improved, my maps will always be up to date, and I don’t have to pay any silly subscription fees to get live traffic on the maps in my vehicle!

New Media

I probably get 3/4 of my video entertainment from YouTube. There is so much incredible content being produced. Not only is it a great way to learn stuff and be entertained, but it’s fun to be able to interact with the content producers too. When is the last time your favorite TV star replied to your tweet, liked your Instagram photo, thanked you by name in their book or sent you a t-shirt in the mail? All of those things have happened to me in the last couple months from content producers on YouTube.

The latest one is a t-shirt that Bob Claggett from I Like To Make Stuff sent to thank me for my support. Well thank YOU Bob! It’s so much fun to interact with the same people who are providing my evening entertainment, and it feels much more rewarding to support these people than to give money to random Hollywood people.

I’m not saying that everybody should stop watching standard TV/movies and watch YouTube creators, but if you are at all interested in doing some of that, there is a LOT of good stuff to watch. Here are some of my favorites:

If you like a YouTube creator, one of the best things you can do to help them out is clicking that Subscribe button! And most of these people have Patreon accounts too if you want to contribute a buck or two directly to them every month.

Election Debrief

election2016I picked a great year to avoid the election as much as possible. I unfollowed people on Facebook, avoided news stories and stayed away from political conversations Even with that, I obviously still got a deluge.

The Gore/Bush voting argument was a pretty big deal, but this election felt even more dramatic and it was dragged out for a longer time. I’m not going to rehash the whole thing over even pick a side, but here are some of my thoughts in my favorite formatting style: bullets!

  • Why were people so wildly upset by this? I know people who called in sick, people were crying on TV, and the moms in Tyla’s various social groups were totally distraught. One possible thought is that it has been 12 years since liberals/Democrats lost a presidential election. There’s a whole new group of people in their 20s and 30s who are experiencing this for the first time (assuming they didn’t follow it very closely in high school.) I imagine the first time is the hardest and after that it gets slightly easier… unless you’re on TV paid to overreact to everything.
  • I saw one picture that said something to the effect of: “One candidate is what’s wrong with society and the other is what’s wrong with government.” It’s probably not too far off. Can we please break up the shadowy cabal that owns the debate system and get some other candidates in the mix? Even if they don’t win, it would be nice to inject their opinions into the conversation.
  • Bing has really great data and maps about how every county voted. It’s eye opening to look at those maps and realize how many people around you disagree with you. Even in a very one-sided county, it’s still probably that only 1 in every 4 people didn’t vote with the majority.
  • Name three ways this campaign season different from American Idol… feel free to try for a while, but you can continue reading even if you give up.
  • The whole campaign season focuses on the differences between the candidates (and for good reason), but really the candidates are alike in many ways. They both want what they think is best for the country. Obviously they differ in many ways on what they think is the best, but these aren’t evil people out to blow up the moon while stroking a cat.
  • Along those same lines, I think it would be healthy for everyone to figure out three viewpoints they agree with from the opposing candidates. Whenever I take the “which candidate do you agree with” quizzes, I never get 0%. There’s always some stuff that overlaps. I think that can be a healthy first step to realizing that the other side is full of logical humans too. They arrive at different logical conclusions than you because they have different life experiences and different priorities.
  • We’re realizing that the media’s Hillary blinders obscured their view of what was really happening in the voting community. Can we also realize that their characterization of Trump supporters is incorrect? I’m sure there are xenophobic hate mongers somewhere in his supporter base, but they’re the vast minority. Extremists will always exist on both sides and it doesn’t do any good to stereotype the entire voting community based on those two extremes.
  • Whether your side won or lost the presidential election, don’t worry and don’t gloat. If there’s one common thread through almost every presidency, it is that fewer people approve of presidents when they finish than when they start. (Clinton is the notable exception which is really intriguing given all the impeachment talk.) Eventually people realize that the president really doesn’t have the power to do most of the things they promised in their campaign. This president will get to nominate a supreme court justice but otherwise, he’s pretty limited. The president is the head of the executive branch which means they get to direct the FDA, the EPA and a bunch of other federal agencies. They aren’t some all-powerful dictator that can enact laws on a whim. We attribute way more power, responsibility and importance to them than they deserve.
  • Take a minute to be thankful that we live in a country that has a voting system and a process for the orderly transition of power. We are blessed.

Hopefully we can all rub our ear lobes and let out a collective “woosahhhhhhhhh.” And next election, how about funneling even a fraction of that energy into local politics?