The April Fool,

A.K.A. The Northern Spy took a break from April foolishness this year, except to wake up the sleeping-over grandchildren with a clarion call to go outside and play in the snow. Believe it or not, ye who be denizens of Terra Incognito to our South, but this part of Canada does have snow-free months--unlike Calgary, place of the Spy's birth, which has the occasional year where it snows at least once every month, and the saying is "We have two seasons--winter and Stampede week". Moreover, he's never seen temperatures on the wet coast below about -19C, whereas on the prairies -40 (same in both F and C) was not unknown, and could be accompanied by very high winds. Tornados are not common in summer there too, but on the vast prairies usually touch down in a wheat or beat field rather than a city. Interestingly, he'd never heard of a school closure (snow day) in deference to the white stuff until moving to the coast, where it seems no one knows the least thing about driving in snow, and all too many suffer from the same lack regardless of the weather.

But somehow, spyfoolery seems inconsistent with the week leading up to Good Friday and Easter Sunday--incomparably more important than the 3/14 through 3/17 sequence that he whimsically recognized in last month's column. Part of this Palm Sunday will be spent at Church taking orders from the kitchen boss for a breakfast, as he did so often when his late wife was on a Church social committee--which automatically meant the respective husbands were drafted for fetch and carry. As suggested by his eponymous character in the novel Paladin (shortly after reviving from being interred in a chest freezer with packages of other meat for a decade or more) 3-D printed food is unlikely to push aside that created by a true artiste chef any decade soon. Glad to help make it happen.

Revisiting more from last month,

he notes that nothing has been heard from the repair shop yet about his poor damaged snow blower, likely meaning the parts have yet to arrive that would allow a proper assessment of the sadly broken machine. He suspects it will need a new engine, as did his much older rototiller a year ago.

Meanwhile, epsilon and delta progress was made on home security. Turns out that his WI-FI networks have a relatively low threshold for the number of devices that can be connected, and he'd exceeded that limit, so that any time he added something new, the router kicked off some previously connected device. The interim solution: open up a new network using the telecom modem's own router and move some of the non-security devices to it. Longer term: look for one that can take, say 40-50 devices on the main router and the same on additional ones configured as access points. WI-FI 6 mesh coming up? Recommendations are welcome.

Then there's the new M2 MacBook Pro laptop. Installation of software is now complete, with only a few glitches. Yes, he got Windows 11 working, and had IT install the asset management and anti-virus software (contradictory as those two tasks may sound). How'um'so'ere, printing turned out to be an issue. With the machine properly recognized on the net, he can see all the printers, and for any that uses a single charging GL as does the one in the Math office area, all works like a charm, But for the big honkin' copier upstairs in the Science office , where he can charge on many GLs, Paper Cut is a requirement to intercept the job, then ask to which department the pennies are to be billed and, as with Windows 10, the university's customized Paper Cut does not run on an M2 sporting Ventura. Whether there is a newer version or not it can configure IT will have to determine.

In the interim, he has rescued an old HP 2100 printer he had decommissioned and will directly connect it in his school office, though it appears its network card is non-functional, so he needed a parallel (32-pin) to USB cable, which works OK, except that the box said the cable was two metres long and it opened to one barely 30 cm. Visions of the old days when one had to use a breakout box to determine on which pins the computer and printer were trying to talk to each other, then craft a custom cable and carefully label it for that specific purpose only. The "standard" connectors had twenty-five pins but a given connectivity solution never used more than five, and not always the same ones for the same purposes.

As for the laptop itself, it seems it does everything the Spy needed. It drives three external monitors with ease, booting and backups are lightning fast, it never gets even warm under the load, he has no idea what the fan sounds like, if there even is one, and the charger can top up the battery in record time. Is it too much to hope for, or has Apple finally gotten power management right after years of wrestling intractably with the problems?

'Course, just as there's always one more bug, there's always one more glitch. The three monitors in his school office are two with HDMI and one Apple with Thunderbolt. He runs one of the former off the laptop's own HDMI port, and the other two through an OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock. However, at home, one of his monitors has even older mini display port connectivity, and it appears that (a) Thunderbolt 4 will not talk to that through a four-to-old-thunderbolt dongle and (b) trying to run two HDMI connections through the same dock does not work either. The latter problem can easily be solved by routing one from the laptop's HDMI port through yet another HDMI switch as at school (he wants to preserve access to the tower setup). He will attempt to solve the other by using a C-to-mini display port dongle once he can assemble all the necessary parts. Aside: how many kinds of cable does he own? He has no idea.)

Sadly, he has to report that Thunderbird on MacOS still cannot connect properly to MS Exchange, even though TB versions with patches purporting to fix this problem have been released. Please don't tell him that the only way out of this mess is to use Outlook or Apple Mail. The former has always been its own virus, and the latter is not a program to which ports are either easy or flawless.

But, duty calls,

so this month's column, in the light of this season not only being theologically important, but also academically mind-bendingly busy, is not only free of bad jokes, but also of any more matters technological of which to speak.

--The Northern Spy

Opinions expressed here are entirely the author's own, and no endorsement is implied by any community or organization to which he may be attached. Rick Sutcliffe, (a.k.a. The Northern Spy) is professor of Computing Science and Mathematics and Assistant Dean of Science at Canada's Trinity Western University. He completed his fifty-second year as a high school and university teacher in 2022. He has been involved as a member of or consultant with the boards of several organizations, and participated in developing industry standards at the national and international level. He was co-author of the Modula-2 programming language R10 dialect. He is a long time technology author and has written two textbooks and ten alternate history SF novels, one named best ePublished SF novel for 2003. His various columns have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers (dead tree and online formats) since the early 1980s, and he's been a regular speaker at churches, schools, academic meetings, and other conferences. He and his wife Joyce celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in 2019 and lived in the Langley/Aldergrove/Bradner area of B.C. from 1969 to 2021, where he latterly continues alone, depending heavily on family to manage.

URL s for Rick Sutcliffe's Arjay Enterprises:

The Northern Spy Home Page: http://www.TheNorthernSpy.com

opundo : http://opundo.com

Sheaves Christian Resources : http://sheaves.org

WebNameHost : http://www.WebNameHost.net

WebNameSource : http://www.WebNameSource.net

nameman : http://nameman.net

General URLs for Rick Sutcliffe's Books:

Author Site: http://www.arjay.ca

Publisher's Site: http://www.writers-exchange.com/Richard-Sutcliffe.html