On Wednesday I chaperoned a group of fifth graders on an overnight campout at Wahsega. I had a rowdy group, but we had a great time, and were one of the first to bed (and one of the first ones packed out in the morning). As I left I could see in the kids’ eyes that I’d had a positive impact on them.

While I was there, I read this article arguing that our cultural shamelessness has led us to become “a society of grift, where a willingness to take advantage of others is a cheat code, or a campaign platform”. The article ends with "I don't know how we combat this"…and I thought, oh, I think maybe I know.

Ten or fifteen years ago I started to see the term "needs to happen" in online discourse. It was a useful rhetorical shortcut - instead of dwelling on the tactical steps ahead, it refocused on the outcome they wanted to see.

But there's hazard: if I tell you something "needs to happen", the best I can hope for is that you agree with me, and that maybe that translates into some future action. But if you don't agree completely - then what? How do we find a middle ground? How do we work together?

Saying "needs to happen" adds a false universality to an argument. It's passive-aggressive, and reinforces other passive-aggressive behaviors that communicate ideology without personal risk. Worst of all, it leaves us all vulnerable to action by opponents who are willing to be non-passively aggressive. Yard signs are ineffective against leaders who ignore the rule of law. Ideology without action is dead.

When you focus on specific actions grounded in your beliefs, you can build coalitions with people who you disagree with ideologically, and this collaboration makes it easier to prioritize actions that are effective and impactful and not just those that are attention-getting. The USA was built off people imperfectly uniting around a handful of core operational activities they could agree on1.

My country is in a very fragile place right now. The president has issued executive orders that are unconstitutional and illegal. Members of his administration are acting outside the law and beyond their authority. Checks and balances aren’t functioning.

In light of this, two kinds of action “need to happen”:

1. Refuse corruption. Don't do things that are illegal or a “violation of the rules” just because someone lets you, and be cautious in accepting favors that are unfairly given. This escalates the breakdown of the rule of law, inhibits cooperation, and gives others leverage over you that can anchor you to a bad situation! (I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I watch Severance Season 2.)

2. Be strong and courageous and do the work. Steadfastly act according to your conscience. Don’t just hide in the shadow of what is legal and uncomplicated – claim what you’re entitled to, especially in situations where it will provoke a response. I'm thinking about the Freedom Riders of the 1960s who risked their lives by exercising their legal right to ride on racially integrated bus transportation, knowing full well that they would likely end up in jail, beaten, and possibly murdered. I'm thinking of the sanctuary churches of the 1980s who risked the future of their congregations by seeking out refugees who were being denied their legal right to asylum. But don't just wait for an opportunity to do this at a national level; it's impactful even just to change your approach from "this needs to stop" to "hey you, stop doing that".

I was once visiting the Monterrey Bay National Marine Sanctuary when I saw someone illegally flying a drone over an area where the sea lions had gathered2. I was angry about it…but didn't do anything. I didn’t really know how. But my father-in-law modeled the behavior I now seek to show: he confronted the operator, and when they refused to stop, he left to find a park ranger. This last action was the step that pushed the operator to stop and leave.

Sometimes a single small action turns into a larger campaign: George Dale put everything on the line (and sacrificed most of it) to drive the KKK from Muncie, Indiana and eventually succeeded. Profiles in Courage is full of good examples of a single person standing steadfastly for what is right. As George Chidi wrote when John Lewis died:

It’s easy enough to say that we need John Lewis more than ever. It’s harder, I think, to say that we must be John Lewis, and that this is achievable for you or I. That John Lewis’s courage is not an excuse for lacking our own.

If someone is cheating at a game you can stop playing, or you can appeal to an authority. But you can also know the rules yourself and insist that they follow them. Leadership can begin with any individual who takes the opportunity to lead, and this is a time when we must expect and provide and defend ethical leadership.

Going back to the article I quoted at the start - how do you fight shamelessness? By creating shame where it’s needed! You don’t need to “make a case”. You don’t need to be angry or loud. You just need be willing to stand up and say “You can’t do that here, it’s not appropriate”. Resist the urge to argue. You don’t need to defend or explain the law - you just need to call on people to follow it. Do the right thing, and confront others around you when they don’t.

Don’t just do good where it comes easily. Proactively take a stand that incurs a risk and comes at a cost. Lay claim publicly to what you value. Demonstrate "uncivil obedience".

Barcelona was settled in pre-Roman times. The Romans called it “Barca”, and some of the original roads and aqueducts are still standing.

Montserrat gets its name from the way the mountain resembles the serrated edge of a knife. It’s the highest point in Spain, and the peak is roughly at the same altitude (and latitude) as Salt Lake City, Utah. Nobody knows for sure how old the monastic community there is - monks have gathered there for more than a thousand years in many different groups. The current Benedictine structure is only about 150 years old.

There’s an amazing technology museum in Figueres that has hundreds of antique typewriters, calculators, and sewing machines. There was way more variation and variety in the typewriter business than I ever would have imagined. I wonder how much of this variation was driven by the need to develop new mechanisms to evade patents and how much was just individual inventors exploring different approaches in the decades before standards like keyboards, shift keys, and space bars emerged as standards.

There’s a massive cluster of dormant volcanoes north of Barcelona. Sant Joan les Fonts is allegedly one of the best places in Europe to see the different ways lava crystallizes - there are three different floes from three different volcanic eruptions at different times all layered on top of one another.

Dali’s landscapes appear much less abstract when you see the sea and islands around his home in Cadaqués - they’re abstractions, not imaginary.

There’s an inexpensive “Museum of Gardens” near the the 1992 Olympic Velodrome, and they have a real hedge maze! I’ve wanted to do one of these for years!

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Working from other countries

Power Dynamics

When I first started traveling, I needed to bring a voltage converter so I could run my 120V devices on 240V European voltage. As more devices began to include switching power supplies, I switched to universal outlet adapters1 and later a collection of IEC C7 cables that would connect to my Mac’s power brick. But for the past few years, I’ve been focusing on easy ways to get power to USB C devices. Here’s my current approach:

1. Epicka X232 adapter – I bought this because it supports modular connectors so I’d only need to bring plugs for the places I was visiting. It does not charge quickly - but it’s more than fast enough to recharge all my devices overnight. It was also the only device I found that supported…

2. …an adapter for India

3. Three 2 meter USB A to USB C cables, braided together so they wouldn’t tangle

4. I like that the Epicka adapter gives me two US NEMA outlets - so I can connect a 20W ANKER charger to charge my…

5. …Apple Watch a little faster than I could with the USB C connectors built into the adapter

6. Costco had an upgraded 30W Anker charger recently, so I use that to charge my laptop or phone.

   Other Accessories

7. I made this travel wallet out of Tyvek – I like that it’s extremely slim, waterproof but breathable, has no sentimental value, and doesn’t look too much like a wallet

8. Always carry a towel – “Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with” – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

   

9. Belkin iPhone Magsafe Camera Mount – yet another way to hold my phone to use it as a better webcam

10. Levenger Circa Junior Notebook – I have four different Levenger notebooks I use for work, and one of the reasons I like using them is because I can easily remove and reorder my pages – and consolidate them into a single notebook for travel

11. Kleen Kanteen water bottle – these are made in my wife’s hometown. I’ve had this one for over a decade

12. Nalgene Widemouth bottle – it’s harder to drink from, but great to use as a refill container

13. Good Coffee – I reuse old bags to transport smaller volumes of beans - about 18g per cup

14. Aeropress – purchased back when there was only one one model. I weigh my beans with a small travel scale. To avoid the Christmas Rule, I’ve printed instructions on labels on the side of the chamber. When putting the set away, I insert the plunger backwards into the chamber so that it will fit inside my titanium mug - that also leaves a gap inside the plunger large enough to hold the top half of a JavaPresse Grinder

15. Water Kettle (not shown) – I really like this kettle because it’s small, it holds enough water for a full batch of Aeropress coffee, and it supports 100-240V without needing an adapter. It has a nice “temperature hold” feature - but I find it to be more trouble than it’s worth

Working from an airplane

I planned this post with the assumption that my next flight would be an economy class middle seat - but I got upgraded. Even though there’s a little more space at this seat than I’d normally have, the tools work just as well in a tiny space.

1. Packable Backpack – I dislike the hassle of having to get in and out of my seat just to retrieve things from my carry-on bag - but I also don't want to deal with the bulk of a second carry on bag. I found this Osprey packable backpack a few years ago that solves this problem elegantly: the bag compresses to smaller than the size of my fist, but is large enough to hold everything on this list plus a neck pillow and sleep mask.

2. MacBook Pro (14 inch) – I love this computer, but it’s too big to open comfortably in an economy seat, even in my lap. It’s in the Osprey bag, stowed under the seat.

3. Yam Display – This app lets me use my iPhone as an external display for my Mac - and even better, I can use it as a touchscreen mouse too. (This functionality is built in for iPads, but I don’t have an iPad)

4. Amphetamine (Mac App Store) – Unfortunately, my Mac tries to go to sleep every time I close it, even with Yam Display connected. The Amphetamine app lets me disable sleep mode on the Mac for a configurable amount of time.

5. 2 meter USB C cable – Yam Display supports wireless connections but a wired connection is more reliable.

6. iPhone with Yam Display app – Although the Mac app is free, there's a small cost for the Yam Display app for the iPhone. I paid $10 for the bundle that included both the wired and wireless Yam apps.

7. MagSafe Phone Clip – This is the exact same model of MagSafe Phone Clip I mentioned in my last article. (You can save a little if you buy the two-pack.)

8. Collapsable Bluetooth Keyboard – This bluetooth keyboard can remember up to three devices and folds up to about the size of my phone. I wish it was a little wider - I have to make a conscious effort to scrunch my fingers together to touch type effectively on it.

9. Case – This is a freebie case I got on a previous flight - it's a large zippered pouch that I won’t feel bad replacing when it gets worn out. Before this I used a Clinique bag my wife gave me.

10. Airpods Pro 2 – These have completely transformed my flying experience. The noise cancelation is so good that flying with these is less loud than my day-to-day life without headphones. There's just one problem: they sometimes fall out of my ears when I'm sleeping.

11. Silicone Airpod Strap – A few months back I heard about this great new set of noise canceling Bluetooth headphones that was designed to stay in your ear while you slept. I was all set to buy them - but they cost even more than my AirPods, and I’ve always been uncomfortable buying a more expensive thing to avoid losing a cheaper thing. So I got this $2 silicone strap to keep them from falling under the seat if they do fall out of my ear.

12. AirFly – This is my third wired-to-bluetooth adapter and it's the smallest, cheapest, and most reliable of the three.

13. Saline Nasal Spray – I get dried out on airplanes. This stuff is cheap and helps.

14. REON POCKET 4 – I found this in Japan last year - it's a personal heater/air conditioner, and it really takes the edge off of the regular "too hot/too cold" experience of flying.

15. Amazon Basics Trash Bags – These are sold for picking up after your dog - but I always keep a roll on me when I travel so I have a place to put sticky trash, wrappers, gum - the sorts of things that are hard to manage in a small seat. (It's not like they pre-poop them. They're just bags, really. It's just a mental barrier.)

16. Water Bottle – Like I said, I get dried out on airplanes - and flight attendants will often refill a reusable bottle for you.

17. Shirt with a breast pocket – It's great having a packable backpack and a separate case for all this gear - but sometimes you just need to get a cable out of the way for a minute, and a breast pocket is a great help for that. Also good for passports and boarding passes.

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This isn’t going to be a “here’s how to vote” post. I voted early several weeks ago, and if you know me, it’s not at all hard to guess how I voted. (And if you don’t know me, I can’t imagine why my lone voice would be the thing that tips your decision.)

The challenges we face in the US right now are not solely about a candidate or a party (but they’re not not about that) – they’re areas where our systems aren’t delivering for us what we need them to deliver. But our systems have never worked all that well! The electoral college never worked the way we hoped. We never really engaged with the implications of slavery until we backed ourselves into a corner. There are some Very Important Questions around presidential immunity from prosecution that are irresponsibly vague. But - I want to take a minute to speak up for the American System. Not the constitution; not the tangled web of laws and court decisions - but the underlying behavior that brought my country together and that has continued to bind it together through centuries of drama.

The US has never had the structural advantages of a monoculture. Even two centuries ago when “American” meant “White” and “Northern European” and “Protestant”, there was tremendous division over “which Northern European” and “what kind of Protestant and how much of it”. There were fights over national banks. There were fights over abolition. There were fights over suffrage and workers rights and individual freedoms. And there was never a point when working through any of this got easier. But…

“We the people” isn’t an exclusive statement. It’s not a land boundary, a race, a political ideology. It’s not Blood and Soil, nor is it Coke and Blue Jeans. “We the people” never represented a “true America”. It was a diverse group being willing to unite around a few shared priorities - some notions about liberty, and government by the people as a tool to preserve that - and to continuously realign when those priorities needed to change. It’s not about the “better America” that was, nor the fragmented America that is, but the America we can always hope to make. “We the people” didn’t speak for all the people when it was written, but it can speak for as many as wish to be spoken for.

I’m an optimist, and that has led me into trouble in the past. I’ve made trouble for myself by underestimating the impact of things like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill or the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. As I’ve aged, I’ve learned to not be so quickly dismissive of things that carry the potential for great harm. So my greatest fear on November 5 is not that the wrong candidate will win (though I do feel deep fear there), nor of what consequences will come from this election, but that this election will reveal that I simply don’t understand my country and my neighbors the way I thought I did.

Tomorrow may be a severe test. But tonight, before this Election Day begins, I want to go on the record for America. I believe in America. I believe that my neighbors and friends who vote differently than me love my country too, and I hope they know that my love for my country is as great as theirs. And I hope that whatever comes tomorrow, our love and our hope can outweigh our fear and our despair.

Last year I came back. “This time it will be be different”. And it was - I got a new job, and my time became even more compressed.

Now it’s been another year. I just got back from an amazing weekend with friends, and it’s sitting with me just how much I want to write. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep it up, but here’s a start.

Working from my car

There are times when I need to be fully present on a video call while I’m still on my way to work. Other times, I may leave the office early to miss traffic but still have a couple hours before my kids finish after-care. This is how I get work done.

Here are the items I’ve highlighted in that photo:

1. 2021 Toyota Prius Prime - I love this car. The 25 mile / 40 km electric range is more than enough to get me to work in the morning, and there are chargers there where I can recharge for the ride home. When I last refueled, I’d traveled 2830 miles / 4530 km on 7.8 gallons / 40 liters of gas.

2. Macbook Pro. It sits perfectly on the dashboard above my steering wheel at an ergonomically correct height.

3. Steering Wheel Desk - I bought this almost five years ago, and although I’ve tried several other options, I still prefer this over the others for its size and lack of fussiness. I adjust the steering wheel all the way in and down and scoot my seat all the way back and it’s just about perfect for typing.

4. Logitech Pebble 2 Keyboard – Great little keyboard that can switch between three Bluetooth devices. Great for switching between laptops and phones quickly.

5. Logitech Pebble 2 Mouse – Same idea as the keyboard but in mouse form. I wish the scroll wheel supported side-to-side movement.

6. Kirkland Signature Bottled Water – when placed here, it allows the Keyboard and Mouse Case (#7) to stay wedged between the console and the armrest storage compartment.

7. Keyboard and Mouse Case – This keeps my keyboard and mouse from getting banged up in the trunk and serves as a nice mousepad for while I work.

8. MagSafe Phone Clip – I’m super proud of this hack. I use this clip to mount my iPhone to the sunglasses holder in my car, which positions my iPhone camera ideally when I need to take a video call from a parking lot. The clip came with a metal ring that can be attached to non-iPhones, but I attached this to the back of the inside of the sunglasses holder so that the clip wouldn’t bang around in there while I drive.

9. iPhone – Used especially for video calls and tethering. I use Continuity Camera to use this as my laptop webcam instead of the built in camera.

10. Anker USB C Car Charger – It’s not visible on the image, but it’s located directly under #7 just to the right of #6. This adapter is more than powerful enough to recharge my laptop and phone if I run low, and I never worry about draining my car battery.

11. AirPods Pro 2 - I use these for hours every day. With noise canceling on and a little music, it’s enough to make me feel like I’m sitting in a phone booth by myself.

Next time: working from an airplane

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Atlanta is “the city in a forest”, and a fun side effect is there are birds everywhere: little brown birds, big predator birds, the occasional vulture or bald eagle. I’ve grown quite fond of the birds that nest in my yard. This unexpected nest seemed like a great way to learn more about my bird neighbors.

I’ve been trying to take on fewer projects at a time (and to finish them more quickly), and this was also a good opportunity to put that into practice. I don’t offer a lot of deep insight in this post, but there are plenty of cute baby bird videos.

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Day 0: Getting Started

The nest had three eggs when I found it. I had no idea how long they’d been there, or how long it would take for them to hatch, so I ordered some parts on Amazon right away.

While I waited, I captured a couple videos with my phone:

Day 10: Building and Mounting the Camera

Here’s what I planned to build:

• A Raspberry Pi Zero-W

• with an infrared camera

• and a really long, flat power cable

• inside a waterproof enclosure that I could somehow mount to my porch

• streaming video to Youtube

That’s more-or-less what I ended up with, but it took me way longer to get it working than it could have. I thought I already had an infrared camera - and only realized I didn’t after the enclosure had already arrived, so I had to wait a few extra days for another order of parts - and I’m not even sure it helped that much, since I didn’t have an IR light to illuminate the nest in the dark, and it meant all my daytime videos were washed-out and pink. In hindsight, I also missed a big opportunity to experiment with the software while I was waiting for the parts to arrive.

Even so, things came together well enough:

I then stealthily mounted the box to my front porch ceiling with gaffing tape.

The tape started peeling almost immediately, so I added some strategically placed nails. When those started pulling out, I used a staple gun. That held…but this is probably a good time for me to publicly thank my wife for not giving me a hard time about doing any of this to our porch…

Anyway, my timing couldn’t have been any better; the first egg had just hatched a few hours before I got the camera mounted:

The bird parents were not at all sure about the camera when they first saw it. I don’t know if it was just the unexpected change in their environment or if they were seeing their reflection off the plastic…

…but soon both had resumed their normal routine:

Day 14: Three Babies

Two more eggs hatched within a couple days of the first (the fourth never hatched)…

…and I finally started getting some cute videos of baby birds eating.

A Few More Technical Details

I initially streamed my video directly to YouTube using raspivid and ffmpeg using this command:

/usr/bin/raspivid -o - -t 0 -w 1280 -h 720 -fps 25 -b 2500000 -g 50 | /usr/bin/ffmpeg -re -ar 44100 -ac 2 -acodec pcm_s16le -f s16le -ac 2 -i /dev/zero -f h264 -i - -vcodec copy -acodec aac -ab 128k -g 50 -strict experimental -f flv rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/<STREAMKEY>

Unfortunately, this stream was super unreliable: it would periodically timeout and I’d have to log back into the YouTube creator dashboard to restart it. I tried better power supplies for the Pi, set up a watchdog timer to reboot if something went wrong, and eventually determined that something was happening between the Pi and YouTube. I spent a lot longer on this part than I planned to and never figured out what was going wrong. I started down the path of automating the process of restarting the stream from YouTube…but then I found a giant shortcut.

My Synology NAS includes a Surveillance Station feature for monitoring home security cameras, and I realized I might be able to just stream to that instead of YouTube. This turned out to be incredibly easy: I used this package to publishing V4L2 video as an RTSP stream and then just told my Synology to connect to the Pi as an IP camera. One unexpected benefit was the automatic motion detection: I could easily skim through the day and see any time something interesting happened with the birds.

Growing Up

It took about two more weeks for the babies to grow up:

Leaving the Nest

It was really important to me to to be able to see the birds leave the nest for the first time. “Leaving the nest” is often depicted a certain way in media and culture, and I’m convinced that this still impacts the way some parents think of “sending their children into the world”. I wanted to see what leaving the nest looked like for these birds. When I saw how big the birds were in that last video on Day 29, I thought I’d better prioritize building a second wide-angle camera. But I was too late - when I came back from a drive that day, the nest was already empty:

This is the moment when all the bird cam setup work really paid off. I went back and watched my video feed for the morning and got to see each of the babies leave one-by-one.

Huey was the first to go, at about 8:00 AM. You can see Dewey is just itching to go too, but doesn’t quite make the leap.

About 30 minutes later Mama showed up with another snack, and this time Dewey is ready to go for good.

Louie keeps waiting for mama to come back, but after three hungry hours finally decides to root hog or die:

When mama finally does come back a few hours later, there’s nobody there.

I left the camera monitoring for another week to confirm, but this was the last time any of them came back to the nest.

Coda

I liked being able to watch the birds all though the day, so I decided to transplant the bird camera to my back yard to watch our hummingbirds. It turns out my waterproof enclosure wasn’t so waterproof after all - the gap created by running the USB cable out of the box left more than enough room for water to get in - so I filled up the box with rice and added a layer of electrical tape around the seam. So far, it’s kept working for two months without any issues…

…and now I can watch our hummingbirds, even in the middle of a rainstorm:

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What happened

Things started getting really complicated for me starting in 2020, and they kept getting harder and harder from there. I thought was just a product of COVID and virtual school and work-from-home and finishing a Masters Degree - but then my kids got back to school, and I finished my degree, and I got a new job…and not only did things not get easier, they got a million times harder.

I just couldn’t figure out what was going on. How did things get harder when I had fewer hard things to do?

I thought maybe it was a problem of inspiration and that I just needed more compelling things to work on - so I picked up a few more projects, started this newsletter, and continued to reclaim some personal time in the early morning to work on them. But I continued to drag.

I thought maybe it was a problem of organization, and I doubled-down on my Getting Things Done workflow. But that didn’t get me anywhere either: somehow, the work seemed to just continue to compound - I was spending more and more of my time just managing my todo list while feeling less and less effective at working from it.

What I figured out

A few months ago, I realized that my problems hadn’t actually started in March 2020 when COVID hit - they started about eight months earlier when my son started kindergarten. Before that, he’d been in daycare, and I could drop him off and pick him up any time between 6:30 AM and 6:30 PM. They’d even feed him breakfast and lunch. But once he started at public school, I had to drop him off later, at a much more precise time, and pick him up from aftercare much earlier. This consumed a lot of my discretionary time, but I didn’t even think about it because I’d also started my masters program at about the same time and had expected to be super busy. This childcare work didn’t feel “busy” in the same way - it was much lower intensity, but it came with a constant need to be on standby.

I had lost two important things at the same time.

First, I’d lost an arbitrary stupid goal that I could focus my attention on day to day and month to month. “Finish the assignment, finish the class, finish the degree” had turned into “get everyone fed and in bed before it gets too late”. Trying to find inspiration in new projects only helped if I could keep making progress on them, and I found I couldn’t.

That’s the second thing I’d lost: my “focus time”. My family was super supportive of me in my masters degree - they’d all go to the playground for a Saturday afternoon so I could focus on an assignment, but once my degree was done I found it a lot harder to say “I’m going to go sit alone for a while to work on a project that only matters to me,” even though I know they would have supported me on it.

This lack of goals and focus was pathological, and it completely contaminated my getting-things-done workflow too. The GTD idea of “capture things so they don’t float around your head” has been really good for me at keeping me from worrying. But if I’m not able to focus, my brain just keeps churning out things I could be doing, or fun additions to fun projects in the back of my head - and these all became things I needed to then cross-file and organize. I ended up completely undisciplined: I’d be working on one thing and generating notes about something else I was thinking about, and then later I’d be polishing my todo list and discovering I’d added the same task to my inbox multiple times even though I’d already finished it.

Somehow, I had built a really effective system for capturing and prioritizing work, but without anything important to prioritize or any time to focus on it, it ended up becoming a giant fragile conglomeration of triviality.

I’m trying a couple things to deal with this:

• I did a massive burndown of my personal project backlog. I have lots of notes about things I’d like to do but that I have no particular plans to do, and all those just went into a big reference document. Other work that I don’t need to do and that I’d kinda like to do but don’t actually care about doing that much I just deleted. I hit bottom on this recently: I’m working this week on finishing the last batch of “things I actually need to do someday” from my task backlog.

• I also started minimizing my “work in progress” on my project backlog - setting aside new projects that were barely underway until I could finish long-running projects I hadn’t completed. This has been nice not only for focus, but for reclaiming space on my workbench and for being able to benefit from being Abel to make use of some of these projects.

• I stopped taking notes on random ideas I had while working on something else. I’ve proven to myself that I can come up with these ideas again, and capturing them just became an excuse for me to not focus more clearly on the task at hand.

• I’ve started claiming a little bit of “me time” some evenings - if my kids are reading or playing or working on their chores, I find a project I can work on too - something less intellectual and more physical like organizing the pantry.

• Until recently I had planned with the assumption that if something is on my todo list I need to make sure I get it done. But I’m now experimenting with another kind of plan where I can record “things I could do today” that won’t roll over to another day if I fail to do them. Some things only have value in trying to do at a particular time, and this gives me a way to think about my days in a much more open-ended way.

• I’ve started thinking of longer-term goals for myself: for the week, for the quarter, for the year. This has been a struggle - but it’s also helping me to think of day-to-day tasks as part of something larger that I care about, and has helped me to get some traction on other projects I care about.

Finally, more than anything else, I’m trying to stop treating things that don’t matter as though they do. The fact that I wrote something down doesn’t give it importance, and just because a past version of myself cared about doing something doesn’t mean I still have to pursue it.

I’m going to keep posting here - but I don’t know what I’ll post next, or when it will be, and hopefully that means I’ll be doing it more frequently and with less stress.

Thanks for reading!

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I’m a big fan of e-bikes. Atlanta is a city of hills and humidity, so having an electric motor to get me moving enabled me to commute to work by bike for many years. (I remain convinced that one of the best mass transit improvements the City of Atlanta could make is to build more bike and pedestrian infrastructure and subsidize e-bike rental services for residents.)

Anyway, I was an early e-bike adopter, and bought a 2010 version of this conversion kit that was based around a 24V, 250W motor and a sealed lead acid battery pack. It works well, but I find it hard to remove and reinstall the battery for charging - and also, it’s very heavy. Now that the battery is twelve years old and not performing as well, I started to wonder whether I might be able to upgrade to a Lithium-Ion equivalent.

I was also thinking about the Ryobi ONE+ tools we’ve accumulated at home - we started with a string trimmer, but eventually added a blower, chainsaw, and fan and a collection of batteries. We regularly use the Ryobi blower instead of our more powerful plug-in Toro blower just because it’s so much more accessible and maneuverable when not needing an extension cord. It would be very convenient to find a way to power my bike from a Ryobi battery pack. (I haven’t done this yet - but when I do, I’ll write about it here.)

Along the way, I got thinking about the weaknesses in my Lead Acid Energy Reservoir - especially how long it took to fully charge (about 12 hours). It occurred to me that a good place to start would be to adapt a Ryobi pack to augment my existing 12V setup.

This was substantially easier than I expected. Not only are there several other projects that adapt Ryobi batteries into bench power supplies, Ryobi even sells an official "inverter generator".

I found a 3D-printed adapter that would allow me to connect devices to a Ryobi pack using an XT60 battery connector. I also bought a 12 Volt Regulator to drop the voltage from “Ryobi Voltage” to “Car Voltage”; I also bought a car receptacle, and car USB-C adapter, connected everything together, and it worked great.

I also discovered a fun optimization opportunity. Many modern electronics use switched-mode power supplies to convert between voltages - not only are they typically more efficient, but they allow devices to work stably across a wide range of input voltages. So when I noticed that my USB-C car adapter was rated for 12V and 24V systems, I decided to take a chance on directly connecting the car adapter to the battery without the 12V regulator.1 And it worked great!

I’ve now used this a few times to work from public parks and other places without reliable access to power outlets. I’d assumed the biggest advantage would be the ability to change batteries so that I could drain one while another is charging - but the chargers work so quickly that I’ve been able to fully recharge my 72 Wh batteries in about an hour. I also found that there are bunches of off-brand, high capacity, Ryobi compatible batteries available, each of which has ~1/4 the energy capacity of my heavy Lead Acid setup, and more than enough energy to fully recharge my laptop.

A poem about coffee

I always knew that I would rue
    the day that I forgot to brew
  the black extract of coffee beans
    that helps me cope with MS Teams

Today I rose up from my bed
    and poured a cup to clear my head
  and start to feel, uncannily,
    it is the cup that drinketh me.

I’m going to pick up working on my videoconference series next, so watch for another post on that before the end of the month.

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I lead a team of several engineers
troubleshooting systems manifold;
and then emergent urgency appears:
“Things fall apart, the server cannot hold.”
It is not circumstance that pulls us here,
but we who change ourselves when led to see
priorities that suddenly appear
when nucleating points bring clarity.
“Root cause” so often means “the last excuse”
and thus conceals the primum mobile:
when we don’t understand what we produce,
we doom ourselves to live in disarray.
Before one can discern priority,
they must approach their work with empathy.

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This was an unexpectedly busy week at work, so the final part of the Battery Trilogy will have to wait until next week. Until then, here’s Part 1 and Part 2.

When I started writing this, I hoped to give you enough context to do some of this basic troubleshooting on your own and to decide whether to attempt a repair yourself. But this is a big, complicated problem space, well outside my area of expertise, and it’s been hard to condense - so instead, I’m going to focus on a couple examples of HVAC failures I’ve been able to fix myself.

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How Air Conditioners Work

An air conditioner is a pump that moves heat from the inside of your house to the outside. I find it helpful to imagine a machine that brings dry sponges into my home to soak up heat and then transports them outside to wring them “cool” again. Some air conditioners can be run in reverse as a heat pump to heat a home in winter.

A central air conditioner is actually two separate but interdependent machines. The inside machine has a big fan and a heat exchanger; this device doesn’t particularly care whether you’re heating or cooling or whether your cooling comes from air conditioning or cold water or magic. The outside machine has a big fan and a compressor.

Capacitors

It takes a great deal of electrical current to start a furnace fan or A/C compressor - much more than it takes to keep it running - so the fans and compressors each have their own “start capacitors” (and may also have their own “run capacitors”). These capacitors seem to fail a lot (I think I’ve replaced five of them in the past fifteen years), but the good news is that they’re so cheap and easy to replace that I now just preemptively replace my capacitors before scheduling a service call - and most of the time, that fixes the issue. I get my replacement caps at Grainger - they have several locations near my home, so I can usually get a replacement part the same day as I realize I need it

I’m not to go into detail about how to do a capacitor replacement - there are many good Youtube videos that cover this - but I do want to reiterate that if you do this, make sure:

• Your equipment is powered off and the old capacitor is discharged

• You’re wearing appropriate safety gear

• You’ve bought a replacement capacitor with the same specifications as the one you’re replacing. The type, voltage ratings, and capacitance are all Very Important.

• Make sure you pay attention to which wires were connected where!

General Troubleshooting

Even if the problem turns out to be a capacitor, it helps to be able to narrow down which capacitor needs to be replaced - your system may have three or more - and whether there are other problems as well. Here are some questions to consider:

• Make sure you don’t have a tripped circuit breaker in your electrical panel; also check whether the high-pressure switch tripped (it’s usually a little red button that looks like a turkey timer mounted on the outside unit).

• Can you identify one part of the system that isn’t running? For example, you don’t feel air blowing inside, or you don’t see the fan spinning in the unit outside. These offer a good clue of where you may want to focus your attention.

• Does the behavior change over time? For example, if you feel cold air when your system first starts running, but the airflow decreases over time, it’s probably not a capacitor. (I ran into this on a couple occasions when the coolant line was under-pressurized - the heat exchanger would ice up and block the airflow. In both cases I ended up needing to replace the entire unit.)

• Does the entire system lose power entirely, where the thermostat says something like “No power, system offline”? This happened to me earlier this summer and I eventually figured out it was due to a clogged condensate line; as the water backed up into the evaporator, it triggered a safety switch that cut off power to the entire unit.

  

Miscellanea

• To unclog my condensate line I had to cut off a section of PVC pipe. When I replaced it, I added a removable cap so that I can more easily service the line in the future. I also added a reminder to my spring maintenance checklist to clean the line.

  

• I installed 5-2-1 Compressor Saver Capacitors on my outside units. I don’t know how much they’ll actually help, but I was told in 2017 that our downstairs air conditioner was about to fail, and it hasn’t failed yet…

• Our newest air conditioner came with a ten year warranty, as long as we signed up for an annual maintenance plan that would cost us ~$300/year. I decided that the unit was unlikely to fail within ten years, and that the $3000 I’d save on the contract over ten years would go a long way toward paying for a new unit. I kept a copy of the “service checklist” from my initial visit and have used it to do my own “annual maintenance” every fall; here’s a condensed version:

  • Change the air filter (one of my units has filters that need to be changed annually, while the other needs changing quarterly. I buy these from Costco and they cost 10-20% of what they do when I paid the HVAC installer to replace them.)

  • Check the air temperature from the unit

  • Check the pressure levels in the unit outside

  • Check the defrost cycle. (Pump keeps running with the fan off, brings some of the heat back outside, keeps ice from forming.)

  • Remove screws on the outside cage to access the controls, then test the voltage on the controls with my multimeter; reference values are printed on the outside of the case.

  • Test refrigerant levels. (I’ve never done this, and don’t have the equipment to do it, but it looks like the necessary tools are available on Amazon for ~$50)

  • Clean out leaves and debris

  • Clean the coils using condensate coil cleaner.

  • Straighten coil fins if needed using a fin comb

• My downstairs HVAC has a condensate pump to pump condensate outside the house. When the drain line cracked apart a few years ago (I think the tube wasn’t rated for UV exposure), I replaced it with a longer line that connects to some drip irrigation emitters in my garden:

  

That’s it for this week - as usual, please leave a comment if you have questions or opinions about anything we wrote! Next week I’ll pick up again with the final episode of my Battery Trilogy.

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I started this as a way to keep in touch with friends and as a way to share what I’m learning with those around me. I’ve been intending to send it out every week, but my core posts have been taking me 10-15 hours, and lately I have at best 4-6 hours per week that I can spend working on any sort of side project. And unfortunately, writing this newsletter takes time away from working on the sorts of things I like to write about in this newsletter.

I’m not going to step back from it, at least not any time soon: I still have lots of things I want to write about, and I’ve received so many kind comments about what I write about that I do find that I’m getting the sense of connection I was hoping for. But, I need to figure something out - some combination of writing more quickly, writing less, and holding myself to a cadence of delivery. This week’s issue is my first attempt at this - it’s just a rollup of what’s been preoccupying my time these past few weeks, timeboxed to one hour of writing time (though of course it actually took me two).

What I’m Thinking About Now

• I have several friends who are new to management, and I’m considering spinning up a small-cohort manager support group as a way to help them and to improve my own ability to mentor other managers. If you’re interested in being a part of this, or if you’d like to join sometime as a “visiting expert”, please shoot me an email.

• In the past, I could regularly use a ballpoint pen until the ink dried out completely - but for the past couple years, I find that my ballpoint pens keep jamming up. I thought it was due to low-quality paper on the notepads I was using, but I’ve now gone through a couple Baron Fig refills and a dozen Jetstream pens writing only in Moleskine notebooks. My working theory is that oil from my hands is accumulating in the paper as I write, but I don’t have a good solution yet. Does anyone else struggle with this?

• I built a very effective task management system about ten years ago, and it has worked very well for me for many years - right up until I started working from home full-time and drew a much clearer boundary between my “home time” and “work time”. I find that I’ve been having a hard time keeping up with the sorts of tasks that need to be done during the day but that don’t belong on my work todo list - things like making phone calls or keeping in touch socially with other people. I probably just need to block off a chunk of time to work on this every morning, but I find that time gets repurposed easily. For those of you who also work from home full-time, how do you handle these sorts of tasks?

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What I’ve Been Working On

Building a Bike Trailer for a Bike

I have always loved riding my bike. (See also How to Ride A Bike.) When I was a kid, my schools were always too far away to bike to, but now I live in a small city with a small school district footprint, and I’ve been eagerly waiting for the time when I’d be able to bike with my kids to school. But because my kids get picked up directly from school for aftercare, I was having trouble figuring out how to get their bikes back home after drop-off.

Earlier this spring I found a post about How to Carry a Bike With Another Bike. The article includes a complete shopping list, and although the author doesn’t include a lot of detail about how things are connected to one another or why, I was able to figure out how to construct my own trailer in about a weekend. The total cost was about $145, but that includes enough parts that I could easily build 2-3 more of these racks. (If you’re interested in doing this yourself, email me and I can give you at least some of the parts you’ll need.)

I’ve used it every weekday for two weeks and it hasn’t given me any trouble - I can hook a bike up in about three minutes, and riding home isn’t all that much more difficult than normal.

Moldable Plastic

The bike trailer includes two custom plastic components made using Instamorph. I hadn’t used this before, and I still can’t say I’ve got the hang of it - but it’s remarkable to be able to fabricate plastic components like these at all without a 3D printer, and I have no doubt I’ll use it again in the future.

Helmet Cam

I’ve had a new appreciation for video documentation ever since our car was rear-ended a few years back. Now that I’m riding my bike to school and back every day, I’ve started recording my trips with this low-cost camera. I initially bought it to use for underwater photography – my kids both learned to swim this summer, and I wanted to capture the moment – but the camera came with a whole box of mounts, straps, and adhesives, so I decided to try mounting it to my helmet. It works great, and drivers also seem to give me a bit more space when passing. The kit also comes with a remote that can strap to my bike handlebars, so it’s easy to take still photos while I ride - you can see it in the NFC Tag photo later in this article.

Sourdough Experiments

I make homemade bread most weekends using a custom recipe based on the ones in this book. (I’ll write a whole post about this sometime). I’ve been trying to find ways to increase the sourness and flavor of the bread, but as I increase the preferment time, the gluten in the dough breaks down and the final loaf comes out too flat. I’ve been experimenting lately with starting a small dedicated batch of starter on Tuesday night, then adding that whole starter to a batch of preferment on Thursday night, and then making the bread on Friday morning, and so far this seems to be having the effect I’m looking for.

I tried adding some malt vinegar to the dough - apparently, this is a normal way of souring bread in the sourdough kits you can buy online - but I didn’t actually notice any extra flavors in the final dough. Maybe I need to add more, or maybe the flavors just don’t stand out as much as the natural ones.

Automating Things with NFC Tags

I got an Apple Watch last year. I like it, but I constantly forget to tell it when I’m starting a ride. But, with the iPhone Shortcuts App, you can create an automation to trigger when an NFC Tag is tapped - so I created one to start a workout when I put my phone in the the holder on my bike. (I’ve also used these in the past to control lights in my house or start playing music.)

Fixing a Leaky Pipe, Maybe

One of the pipes in our laundry room developed a pinhole leak a week ago. I bought one of these kits and installed it last Saturday, and although the kit promised it would be fully cured in 30 minutes, it started leaking immediately as soon as I turned the water pressure back on. But…I checked again last night, and it seems to have stopped leaking. I have no idea whether it’s actually fixed (or why), but I have a bucket underneath just in case…and if you ever find yourself doing a similar repair, I suggest letting the patch cure for longer than the box suggests. Depending on how this goes, you may see a post from me in the future about “how I learned to replace copper pipe”.

An Easy Medicine Bottle Hack

My kids’ allergies have been rough this summer. The allergy medicine we use is sticky and hard to pour without making a mess. Using a bottle pourer makes all the difference.

Stir Fry and Fish Sauce

I bought Kenji's new Wok book and have been working my way through the recipes. I’ve made the Basil Chile Chicken recipe several times recently. I had no idea how delicious Fish Sauce was - I would never have thought to try it, and would have actively avoided it if I had smelled it, but it does absolutely remarkable things to food.

Google Authentication

I’ve been working for a while to add an authentication layer to this app I used heavily at a former job. The app had been designed for use in a private, trusted network, but I wanted to find a way to run it on the public internet, and that meant I needed to find a way to validate the identity of users before they could make changes.

It’s been a really long time since I worked on anything that ran directly on the public internet, and Javascript does not come naturally to me. I kept tripping over rabbit holes that required me to work with node.js or React or OAuth2 - all things that I’m sure are worth learning more about, but that weren’t a priority for me to learn at this moment, especially when I just wanted to finish this project. I finally thought I had gotten things working a year ago using “Sign in with Google” - but then discovered that Google Identity Services provides only “authentication”, not “authorization”, and that I would still need to implement a separate system for tracking session state.

Well, last week I finally discovered FirebaseUI, a drop-in system for authenticating to a dozen different backend providers. I fiddled with it for a few days, then successfully dropped it in as a replacement, and now I’ve been able to deploy this app to Google App Engine so that I can continue iterating on it.

Building an Apple Watch Charger

I’ve struggled to figure out where to leave my Apple Watch charger - it slides off my desk top, and I hate having loose cables around. My wife discovered that the same magnet that holds the watch to the charger will also hold the charger to the side of a metal object like a desk or a fridge, so I built a little adapter out of a toilet paper tube to keep the charger in place on one of the monitor stands on my desk.

Epilogue

That’s it for this week. Please leave a comment or send an email if you liked anything I shared this week!

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This is the Empire Strikes Back portion of this trilogy - it’s moodier and some stuff gets broken - but I promise things will get happier in part 3.

Battery Interchangeability

I love batteries. They felt so expensive and rare when I was a kid, and now it feels like such a luxury just to have a drawer full of AAs, AAAs, and watch batteries.

I enjoy trying to figure out how to make Battery A work for Device B, or how to use a battery to power something that has no business being battery powered, or how to build an AC adapter for a nominally battery-powered device. For example, I might use a sabot to use a AA battery for a device that expects a D battery[1], or might even cut open a 9V battery to get six AAAA batteries and use these batteries to make an AAA-powered device weigh less. These swaps all work because most consumer alkaline batteries provide the same electric potential of 1.5 Volts.

Similarly, because USB ports offer a standard voltage and minimum power output, one can use a laptop or portable USB phone charger to power all sorts of 5 Volt devices - for example, using this cable so that I can power this network switch from my laptop if I want to build a small wired network on-the-go. This standard 5V platform has lead to the emergence of all sorts of ridiculous USB-powered devices.

You can even get a 5V to 12V converter, connect that to a car power inverter, and use that to power a Hue light bulb from a USB battery pack in case you ever need to help with your daughter’s “Planet Party”:

My family has a collection of Ryobi ONE+ tools and 18V Battery Packs, and I began to wonder if I could adapt these to work with my electric bike or as a portable power source. (More on that in a future issue). Could I find a way to utilize these as a more-portable power option?

The Challenge

My time is scarce these days. I get up a couple hours earlier than I’d like so that I have time to run and meditate. Hopefully, I also get 30 minutes for miscellaneous exploration and personal development time. But sometimes it’s hard to focus on something big when it might take weeks or more to wrap it up; other times, it’s just hard to feel motivated. So when a spark of passion comes, I often feel like I just need to carpe the diem. One of those moments came this spring when I learned that Apple was selling a USB-C to MagSafe cable for their newest MacBook model.

I previously talked about how I built a home energy reservoir. This works great for charging phones and USB-C laptops, but to charge a pre-USB-C MacBook I needed to connect the laptop power supply to an AC power inverter. I didn’t like how wasteful or complicated this was. And after all - I have a few MagSafe to USB-C Adapters that I can use to charge newer laptops from old power supplies. I finally had found a way to go in the other direction.

Well, I thought I had. It’s only compatible with newer laptops. But now I was even more preoccupied with solving this problem.

Attempt Number Two

I investigated whether Apple ever made a car adapter for the MacBook. (They haven’t.) But I did learn about the MagSafe Airline Adapter, which is designed to connect to an EmPower outlet on an airplane or a “20mm port” with an adapter. But that “20mm plug” looks an awful lot like a plug for a 21mm car cigarette lighter receptacle. People say it officially doesn't work…but people say all sorts of things. Maybe it would?

I ordered one on eBay for $10. It didn’t work.

Attempt Number Three: Oops

I started exploring whether there was a way to adapt the MagSafe Car Charger to work off a 12V supply. I first found this article, and then finally found an awesome analysis of how to convert a MagSafe charger to work off 12V:

Now that I have a solar-powered 12V battery, how can I charge my laptop from it? An inverter would seem absurdly inefficient, converting from 12V DC to 110V AC just so I can connect my Apple charger and convert back to DC. It would work, but surely there’s some way to skip the cumbersome inverter and charge a MacBook Pro directly from DC?

…

The moment of truth. Would my expensive computer burst into flames when I connected this jury-rigged DC MagSafe charger? I held my breath, plugged in the cable, and… success! Of course it worked. The orange/green indicator LED on the MagSafe 2 connector worked too.

…

This charging method is about 95% efficient, according to the claimed efficiency rating of the boost regulator. I can also leave the regulator permanently connected, since its no-load current is less than 20 mA. In comparison, charging with an inverter and an AC wall charger is about 77% efficient (85% for the inverter times 90% for the wall charger).

It was as though this author had read my mind. I immediately started working to replicate what he did: I grabbed an extra MagSafe 2 charger, cut the cord in half, and soldered an XT60 connector on the Magsafe side.

I’m not used to working with XT60s connectors. There was a decent chance I’d reversed my wires accidentally or damaged the MagSafe cable, so I grabbed my multimeter to check whether the voltage on each pin was correct.

Mistake #1: My multimeter probe bridged the gap between the power pin and ground. I accidentally arc-welded the probe to the pin[2]. I was able to pull them apart, but there were a lot of scorch marks:

I cleaned the connector and everything seemed okay still, so I decided to test it. I connected it to my nearest MacBook. The light didn’t turn on - so clearly it didn’t work. I plugged the MacBook back in to its normal adapter…and that didn’t light up either. Uh oh.

Mistake #2: I’d turned a small error into a big one.

It’s an unnerving thing to watch a laptop run out of energy for the last time - to know that you have one last chance to archive materials before everything goes dark. It felt eschatological, like a technological memento mori.

I hate breaking things, and I was grouchy about this mistake for days – though I don’t know whether I was more upset that I’d broken the laptop or that I couldn’t possibly justify doing further testing on my 12V MagSafe adapter.

Recovery

Burning out a laptop wasn’t the last compulsive action I took in this project.

That same night, I ordered a replacement MagSafe receptacle. It came in a week or so later:

It took me about 2 hours to disassemble and reassemble the computer, but when I was done…it still didn’t work.

Next, I set up a saved search on eBay. Within a few weeks, I found a replacement Logic Board for less than $100. I ordered it, spent two more hours installing it…

…and this time, everything worked.

Epilogue

A week or two after burning out the laptop, I stumbled on to this magnificent connector on AliExpress:

I got two for less than $15, including shipping. They work great, and I can use them with my existing battery backup, including with my now-repaired MacBook Pro.

Obsessions and Scars

Many years ago my finger brushed against a spinning CPU fan. I jerked my hand back and got a cut from the PC case that left a small but still-visible scar.

I think about that accident often; I use it as an illustration to teach my kids. It’s a tidy parable of the importance of not being reactive. And that’s what I had in mind when I first planned this article two months ago: a litany of shame over my maxima culpas on this project. There are certainly things I wish I’d done differently: not starting a project at the end of a long day, testing more carefully, or even just testing on something older and cheaper. And in hindsight, the efficiency gains probably don’t justify the work, especially since I use these old laptops rarely - and there’s no reason to throw good money after bad.

But also…I really wanted to build it! It was a project informed by rational analysis, but not one fundamentally driven by it. Instead of viewing this all through a lens of shame and waste, perhaps I should focus on trying to understand myself better. There’s a place for obsession and variance from the norm, and if I consistently anchored myself to “what is reasonable”, I never would have built my awesome teleprompter. The fact that something is simple or obvious doesn’t always mean that it isn’t novel or useful.

I wish I hadn’t needed to spend the extra cash to get the computer working again. I wish the adapter I built had worked. But if my initial plan had worked, I never would have thought to second-guess my testing methods, and I absolutely would be telling everyone about this awesome adapter I’d built. What I probably need is a practice of rate-limiting or circuit-breaking: when something goes wrong unexpectedly, “fail fast” and make sure I take some time to reorient and update my priors before moving forward. I’ll be thinking about this; if you have thoughts or opinions, please do share.

Next week I’m going to go on another tangent to talk about some recent Air Conditioner troubleshooting I had to do. If you’d like to hear more about thatgm

or just want to make sure you know as soon as part three of this series comes out, please subscribe!

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[1] The price per-joule of the energy in “Kirkland Signature” AA batteries is the same as that of Duracell D cells. The AA batteries hold about a fifth as much energy, but I use D cells very rarely, so I’d rather just keep more AA batteries on hand.

[2] A better approach would have been to test continuity between the pin on the XT60 connector and the pin on the MagSafe connector with the power disconnected.

I like riding now, but I had a really hard time when I was first learning. It seems like many people do. But why is it so hard? And what can we do to make it better?

In this issue I’ll share some general thoughts about bicycles and culture and on why it’s hard to learn to ride a bike; then, I’ll share a technique I’ve used to help my kids and friends learn to ride.

Bicycle Culture

Bicycles are a microcosm of human progress and development and culture. Bike development coincides with the rise of mass-consumer goods, interchangeable parts, and iteration-driven design. Bikes drove the adoption of paved roads. The memory of a lost bike prompted Herman Mankiewicz to write Citizen Kane. Susan B. Anthony believed that bicycling did “more to emancipate women than anything else in the world”, and bicycles can still be a powerful class signifier. Bicycles are a liberating partnership between people and machines, so Apple Computers were “bicycles for the mind”. We build bicycle expressways and bicycle elevators. We sing about bicycles. We even teach computers to sing about bicycles and robots to ride bicycles.

But also, bicycles are full of contradictions and counter-intuitive qualities. They’re such a simple machine, but if you think you know why a bike stays upright, you’re probably wrong. Bikes don't move the way we expect them to, and many people can’t even draw bicycles accurately. A 2006 study found that “When their understanding of the basics of bicycle design was assessed objectively, people were found to make frequent and serious mistakes…The results demonstrate that most people’s conceptual understanding of this familiar, everyday object is sketchy and shallow, even for information that is frequently encountered and easily perceived…”

Bike riding is a skill that, famously, is never forgotten once learned. But I’m fairly confident that most people who know how to ride a bike don’t actually understand why they’re able to ride a bike[1]. In engineering, we regularly make use of new discoveries long before we figure out why they work (e.g, the cat's whisker detector before the discovery of the transistor), and you’ll likely still take a Tylenol for a headache even though we’re still not certain why acetaminophen works. However, we are bound to encounter complex problems any time we believe we understand something simply because we’re able to use it. And if we don’t understand it, how can we hope to teach it?

[Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard] Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, “Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.” Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But he came back a few days later to say, “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don’t really understand it.” [source]

Why it’s hard to learn to ride a bike

There’s a popular myth that learning to ride a bike is mostly about confidence - that kids are scared because they don’t believe they’ll be able to do it, and if we just push them harder to “suck it up” they’ll eventually realize they can do it:

A young girl is riding a bike with training wheels.

Her father approaches. “It’s time to take those training wheels off!”

The daughter cries. The training wheels come off anyway.

The daughter now sits anxiously on a bike with no training wheels.

The father pushes her down the street. The daughter grips the handlebars and cries “Don’t let go!”

The daughter suddenly realizes that the father is gone – that he has let go without her realizing it – and that she’s riding a bike all by herself!

Lots of people were taught to ride a bike this way. I was too. It took a long time and I crashed a lot, sometimes out of spite when I noticed my parent had let go. And in spite of that, I still couldn’t ride on my own. It wasn’t that I just needed to realize I didn’t need the magic feather after all – it was that this technique wasn’t actually exposing me to the core skills I needed to develop to be able to ride a bike.

Bikes and Birds

One thing that stuck with me when I read David McCullough’s book about the Wright Brothers was how much time Orville and Wilbur spent studying bird flight - and specifically, how much a bird’s flight depended on how they changed the profile of their wing and tail feathers[2]. The Wright Brothers considered this the key unsolved problem in flight and spent years practicing with models and gliders to build effective control systems before they ever attempted to fly a powered airplane.

The Wright Brothers were bicycle retailers before they were aviation entrepreneurs. I wonder if that experience contributed to their insights about flying, because successful bike riding is also primarily a problem of control and not of power or balance. Unlike tricycles, bicycles must be countersteered, and this counterintuitive movement plays a key role in keeping the bike balanced. This brief video illustrates these steering differences between bicycles and tricycles well:

Until a rider builds intuition about countersteering, they will often find themselves moving in the opposite direction of where they intended to go. This can be catastrophic when trying to steer away from an obstacle.

This is also why training wheels can make it harder to learn to ride a bike: they convert a bicycle into a tricycle and eliminate the need to countersteer. They may still serve a valuable purpose - for example, cultivating a love of riding a bike and a desire to learn to ride on two wheels, or just enabling a whole family to go on a ride together when one child cannot yet ride - but as with swimming with pool floats or paper training a pet dog, training wheels can cultivate habits that a rider will need to unlearn in order to progress.

Learning to ride a bike

I’ve used this technique to assist my two kids (and one coworker[3]) in learning to ride a bike, so use your judgement about whether that makes me believable. I’m not sure it’s fair to call this approach “teaching” – it’s more about “creating an environment where someone can learn”, like Montessori on wheels.

The way I see it, for a person to learn to ride a bike, they must build intuition about how to control it. To learn to control a bike, the rider needs to learn how to accept the feedback the bike offers. To accept that feedback requires taking a risk, since that the feedback may come in the form of crashing, so people are more likely to take risks if they know they won’t fail catastrophically and don’t feel like they’re embarrassing themselves in public. This technique is based around first teaching the rider to not fail catastrophically; then, giving them a chance to learn steering and counter steering; and finally, learning to peddle in order to keep moving indefinitely.

I’ve long thought this would be a great in-school entrepreneurship opportunity for a kid: “Learn to ride a bike, $10; learn to teach someone to ride a bike, $50”.

Prerequisites

• A large, smooth, flat riding surface with few obstacles or hazards and some degree of privacy. A gentle slope is very helpful, but only if it slopes toward something safe like a patch of lawn and not a busy street. The parking lots of suburban office parks are ideal. My driveway slopes down into my back yard, so I used that.

• A multi-speed bike that has been previously damaged. It’s heartbreaking to damage a brand new bike while trying to learn to ride it. Multispeed is useful in being able to keep a bike in low gear when learning to peddle up hills and in being able to brake using handlebar controls. I bought two used seven speed bikes with twenty inch wheels on Craigslist for ~$100 each. You may want to consider removing the pedals for steps 1 & 2; remember that the left-side pedal is reverse-threaded. It’s helpful to start with the seat low enough that the rider can just barely place their feet on the ground and to raise it slowly as they build confidence.

• Wear grubby jeans and closed toe shoes; you probably won’t get scraped on the ground, but you feet may hit the ground at odd angles, and you might bang your knees against a pedal.

Step 1: Learn how to not ride a bike

Objective: learn how to walk a bike and to mount and dismount it without getting hurt. By the end of this step, the rider should feel 70% confident that they can get on and off a bike on their own at any time and that it won’t roll away from them or roll away with them on it.

• Practice walking next to a bike with two hands on the handlebars or one hand on the handlebars and one on the seat.

• Practice using the brakes to slow or stop the bike’s movement.

• Practice getting on and off of the bike - climbing over the bike and raising it up; holding it up and placing one leg over it, all while controlling the bike with the brakes.

• Practice making an A with legs protruding out diagonally toward the ground on each side of the bike. Try falling sideways and landing on one leg.

• Practice dropping the bike and letting it fall underneath you.

Step 2: Learn how to ride a bike

Objective: build intuition about how a bike moves and how to countersteer. By the end of this step, the rider should generally feel like they can steer a bike to go where they want it to.

• Mount the bike and give a gentle push forward to start rolling. Hold legs out in an A shape while moving. Use the brakes to stop, or put a foot on the ground; let the bike drop to catch yourself if necessary. Repeat, and attempt to roll further each time.

• Try making a gentle turn. If the turn doesn’t work as expected, try a quick intentional countersteer. Experiment with leaning and notice how that impacts your turn.

• Start at the top of a gentle slope and coast down to the bottom. Practice using the brakes to stop. Experiment with making gentle S curves. See if you can make a U-turn and coast to a stop, then use the breaks to hold yourself still. Try to turn in a circle. Be sure to use the brakes to avoid rolling backwards.

• Keep practicing until you feel pretty comfortable pushing and steering the bike indefinitely. This can take as little as fifteen minutes or can go on for months. Don’t rush it, and find ways to make it fun - the rider will start to feel what it’s like to ride a bike.

Step 3: Learn how to not stop riding a bike

Objective: incorporate pedaling. By the end of this step, the rider should feel comfortable pedaling and steering a bike indefinitely.

• If you took off the bike’s pedals earlier, this is the time to put them back on. Make sure you put the correct pedal on the correct side of the bike.

• Start at the top of a gentle slope and push forward as usual. Repeat the exercises from step 2, but lift feet up to rest on the bike pedals. Try pedaling backwards to see how pedaling changes the balance of the bike.

• On a flat surface, push the bike to start it moving, then put feet on the pedals, then practice peddling gently to keep moving forward.

• Try riding down hill, then making a U-turn and peddling to go further up-hill. Try peddling in circles

• On a flat surface, try pushing down on a pedal to get the bike moving forward.

Conclusion

By this point, a rider knows barely enough to stay on top of a bike by riding, but is stable enough that they can start to learn from their experiences as they ride.

Thanks for reading! Next week I’ll get back to talking about expensive mistakes with batteries.

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[1] I’m increasingly convinced that this is true of all human endeavors.

[2] Atlanta has a remarkable population of predator birds.

[3] Hi, K.R!

I started writing this issue because I wanted something quick to talk about as a break from my teleprompter series. But this is going to end up as a three part series too.

Irmageddon

Hurricane Irma had slowed to a Tropical Storm by the time it hit Atlanta, but it was still the first time Atlanta experienced a Tropical Storm Warning. It was also my first time experiencing an extended power outage.

I’ve come to expect certain things when the power is out – it will be dark, it will be hot, the kids will get bored – but this extended outage brought many surprises. Without power to my 4G Signal Booster, I could barely get a signal on my mobile phone. My wired internet connection still worked, but only if I had a way to keep my router powered. And there were so many small discomforts: the frustration of knowing how to fix a broken battery-powered device but not having a way to power a soldering iron; having running water and a gas stove, but no way to grind my coffee beans. My freezer became a Schrödinger box, where the only way to be sure whether my food was spoiling would be to open the door and release any lingering cool air. I started making a list of things I wanted to fix once the emergency passed.

We made it through with no major property damage or food spoilage - and I started exploring ways to work around the problems I’d experienced. I found good solutions (a better UPS; butane soldering irons; hand-crank burr grinders; wireless fridge thermometers), but so many of these problems would have been easily solved if I’d had some sort of energy reservoir I could tap into.

Design Considerations

I really wanted to find a way to generate energy mechanically via a hand crank or slowly descending weight. But powering a small radio is a very different than recharging a laptop or phone - a full phone recharge could require over an hour of intense cranking or the energy equivalent of an adult climbing to the top of a 54-story building[1]. (There’s a reason energy consumption became so much cheaper once we discovered we could extract oil from whales or the ground.) I also thought about water power, but using thousands of gallons of water to recharge a phone during an emergency is pretty reckless.

The normal way people solve this problem is with a portable generator, but I didn’t want to follow that path: with the exception of my refrigerator, virtually everything I wanted electricity for was low-voltage and low-power, and I didn’t want the unnecessary expense and overhead of maintaining a generator and storing fuel. I wanted something with the portability and reliability of a generator, but optimized for keeping small devices like phones and laptops charged. As of 2017, portable power stations built around lithium-ion batteries were starting to become available, but they were largely glorified USB phone chargers and were very expensive. The market has improved considerably since then, and it’s now possible to buy a fully-integrated portable power station for a per-watt-hour cost of about 3-5x what I eventually paid.

(I did want to find a way to power my refrigerator during an emergency, so I eventually bought a heavy-duty power inverter that I could connect to my car. Powering my fridge with my car is less efficient than a dedicated generator would be, but at a much lower upfront cost and with none of the maintenance overhead.)

What I Built

Two months earlier I’d seen an article on Hacker Newsletter about building a stand-alone Solar Generator. Solar power isn’t an effective choice for backup power in Georgia - I tend to lose power during thunderstorms and hurricanes when sunlight is minimal - but I latched on to the idea of using commodity 12V Sealed Lead Acid batteries as the basis for a battery system.

Here’s what I bought:

• A U1 Deep Cycle Sealed Lead Acid Battery for ~$65. U1 batteries seem to hit the sweet spot for minimizing the cost per watt hour of storage; this battery holds 420 Watt-hours.

• A Battery Tender for about $40 - this charges the battery when it’s low and keeps it charged during non-emergency times.

• A battery box for $12

• Two sets of Fused Cigarette Lighter Receptacles for $12 each

• A 150W Power Inverter for $15

• A USB Car Charger for $15

I plugged it all together inside an old backpack - battery in the main pouch, battery tender in another pouch, cables and accessories in little bags.

Takeaways

Here are a few notes after five years of use:

• I had planned to use this primarily to charge mobile phones, but thanks to USB-C I can charge most of my laptops too. I’m now able to work remotely from anywhere with a cell signal even if I don’t have access to a power outlet. The battery holds so much energy it feels virtually unlimited - I’ve only ever drained it once, and that was during a five day camping trip filled with phone, tablet, and laptop charges.

• Because it’s built around 12V batteries, I can run anything that will plug into a car cigarette lighter outlet (like a soldering iron). If I connect a USB Car Charger, I can also run anything that can run off 5V (like a network switch, using this cable). And with a universal power adapter or a buck boost power supply I can adjust the voltage to supply most other low power household devices. I’ve even connected it to my heavy duty inverter and powered my fridge for a couple hours.

  

• This works really well as an uninterruptible power supply for USB-powered devices like the Raspberry Pi. And by connecting a wall-powered USB hub in between the Pi and the battery packpack, I can also disconnect the Pi from the wall or from the battery without the Pi powering off.

  

• Be careful. Although I haven’t had any issues, lead acid batteries are dangerous. They’re made out of sulfuric acid and lead, neither of which I really want to be around, and if something goes wrong they will vent poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas. (Keep in mind that most batteries are dangerous in some way or another - it’s the reactiveness of these materials that makes them effective as a way to store and release energy, as with gasoline and gunpowder.)

• I really like how modular and upgradable this setup is. When my battery wears out, I can replace it for $70 rather than having to buy a completely new kit. For my needs this still makes it a better option than most of the standalone lithium ion power station options that are now becoming available.

• I don’t yet have a good way to measure how much energy I’ve used, but I’ve purchased some current monitors that I hope to build into a low-power monitoring system someday.

Further Experiments

This project succeeded because I could depend on an established market of 12V devices to use and because USB-C has become such an effective platform for powering higher-power electronics. Still, I had a couple old laptops that didn’t support USB-C, and I was hoping to find a way to find a way to power them without the overhead of a power inverter. I was also interested in using this same “platform” idea to use lower-cost power tool batteries as a higher density, faster-to-charge, more portable extension of this project.

Spoiler alert: I made some gigantic and expensive mistakes, though I did also find some interesting solutions. I’ll tell you more in next week’s issue!

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[1] This charger has a capacity of 38.5 watt-hours or roughly 138.6 kJ. Since Gravitational Potential Energy is the product of mass, gravity, and height, an 80kg weight would need to be lifted ~178m or about 54 stories to produce an equivalent amount of potential energy.

This issue has taken a lot longer to prepare than I expected. I had a certain set of ideas in mind when I first completed this project, and a different set of ideas when I first started writing about it. By the time I was done writing about what I built and why I built it, those ideas had changed again. I decided to take a little longer to revisit what I was trying to say, and to meditate on the role of incorrect knowledge in the discovery of new things.

The Videoconference Series

1. Starting and Finishing

2. Early Prototyping

3. The Camera (this issue)

4. The Display (coming soon)

5. The Desk (coming soon)

6. Detailing (coming soon)

Camera Placement

Here’s another reason why video calls feel different than live meetups: when video calling, we see people placed in their environment in positions that we never would choose for a face-to-face meeting. I wanted to create an impression that was less like two people sitting in the middle of a crowded space…

…and more like two people sitting side by side for a conversation:

Our house has a lot of shared spaces and it’s not uncommon for my spouse or kids to enter my office while I’m on a call. Moving the camera to the side helped to minimize this distraction while also giving me a greater feeling of privacy.

Balancing Tradeoffs

Design decisions often seem obvious in retrospect even as they’re confounding at the time. I had three key problems to evaluate:

Which camera should I use?

I had decided where I wanted the camera to be and roughly how the picture should look. I wanted the optical effects that come with a wide aperture and decent lens, but my Canon dSLR was too old to support the EOS Webcam Utility. I was curious about the Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera, but didn’t own one and wasn’t sure how practical it would be to use as a webcam.

What should I use for a display?

I’d been prototyping with an old iPad running Duet Display, but it really taxed the CPU on my laptop, and I wanted something I could leave permanently attached. Yet it is surprisingly expensive to buy small monitors; as of April 2022 I could buy a 55 inch 4K TV from Costco for $300…but a 10 inch 1080p monitor costs $130.

How will I mirror-flip the video on the display?

Because the image I see in my teleprompter has been bounced off a piece of beamsplitter glass, everything will appear reversed or upside-down unless I mirror-flip the video feed – and this isn’t something natively supported by MacOS. This feature is available through secret menus on larger-screen TVs or very small video monitors, but to flip the image on an HDMI feed otherwise required a dedicated piece of equipment that cost $500 or more.

Unpacking Complicated Choices

I was overwhelmed by the number of choices I faced. Every time I came up with a good solution for part of the design, I found several new challenges in other areas. I realized that that I needed to stop thinking in terms of pieces and start exploring the technical areas with the greatest number of unknowns, and for that, I was going to need to buy some extra hardware. I ordered a Raspberry Pi Zero W, a High Quality Camera, and the official telephoto and wide angle lenses; I also bought a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B to use to experiment with options for video flipping. (I’ll talk more about those experiments in the next issue.)

A Lucky Break

It took a few weeks for my parts to arrive, so I spent most of my time exploring how to interface the Raspberry Pi camera with my computer. I started with this article that described how to configure a Raspberry Pi to behave as a network-connected video camera (similar to a baby monitor or security camera). A followup article documented how to use a Pi Zero in “on-the-go peripheral mode”. And then, as I investigated that, I found Show-Me Webcam. This software combines several existing composable pieces: v4l2 for the video processing, uvc-gadget for the Pi to advertise itself as a USB webcam, and buildroot in order to create a custom image that will boot within a couple seconds.

I can’t overstate what a remarkable piece of software this is - not because the elements are novel or difficult, but because of the way it ties everything together into a coherent, reliable product. I plug in my Raspberry Pi, and within a couple seconds my computer recognizes it as a USB webcam. It feels like it’s not even there. It was a complete game-changer for me.

The software and electronics side of the camera had turned out to be a lot easier than I expected…but I still needed to figure out the optics.

Building The Camera

I enjoy photography, and somewhere learned that portrait photography should be done with a full frame lens with a focal length of 50-85mm. This seemed like a good starting point in selecting optics for my webcam - but it turns out to have taken me the long way around the block to where I wanted to go.

I have a decent 18-55mm zoom lens I’d planned to repurpose for this. I set up a prototype and took some pictures:

However, I hadn’t anticipated the impact of the much-smaller image sensor in the HQ Camera. Reducing the size of the image sensor has the same impact as cropping a photo, so wide-angle lenses act more like telephoto lenses. The High Quality Camera uses a Sony IMX477 sensor with a 1/2.3” sensor format and a crop factor of about 5.6. Even with my widest-angle 18mm lens, I’d get the zoom level I’d expect with a 100mm lens on a full frame camera, and not nearly as much background blurring as I wanted:

I’d tried the official Raspberry Pi telephoto and wide angle lenses, but the telephoto lens was still too close, and the wide angle was too wide. I bought this awesome 2.8-12mm C-mount varifocal zoom lens that would give me an equivalent focal length of 16mm-67mm and gave me some room to experiment; then, when I found a zoom level I was happy with, I purchased this 8mm lens, which had an equivalent full-frame focal length of 45mm. I think it looked pretty good.

Learning More About Lenses

I didn’t know the word for it at the time, but I’d been seeking to build a Normal Lens. From Wikipedia (emphasis added):

In photography and cinematography, a normal lens is a lens that reproduces a field of view that appears "natural" to a human observer. In contrast, depth compression and expansion with shorter or longer focal lengths introduces noticeable, and sometimes disturbing, distortion…Lenses with longer or shorter focal lengths produce an expanded or contracted field of view that appears to distort the perspective when viewed from a normal viewing distance…Such is the extent of distortions of perspective with these lenses that they may not be permitted as legal evidence

This GIF by Dan Vojtech shows how lens selection can distort a person’s features:

But there’s a key feature I was missing, and I didn’t realize it until months later when I first attempted to document my work. Although lenses are selected to avoid perspective distortion, the lens is not the cause of the distortion. From Wikipedia’s article on Perspective Distortion (emphasis added):

Note that linear perspective changes are caused by distance, not by the lens per se – two shots of the same scene from the same distance will exhibit identical perspective geometry, regardless of lens used. However, since wide-angle lenses have a wider field of view, they are generally used from closer, while telephoto lenses have a narrower field of view and are generally used from farther away. For example, if standing at a distance so that a normal lens captures someone's face, a shot with a wide-angle lens or telephoto lens from the same distance will have exactly the same linear perspective geometry on the face, though the wide-angle lens may fit the entire body into the shot, while the telephoto lens captures only the nose. However, crops of these three images with the same coverage will yield the same perspective distortion – the nose will look the same in all three. Conversely, if all three lenses are used from distances such that the face fills the field, the wide-angle will be used from closer, making the nose larger compared to the rest of the photo, and the telephoto will be used from farther, making the nose smaller compared to the rest of the photo.

I’d started by trying to calculate a focal length for my lens and worked backwards…but what I actually needed was increase the distance between my face and my camera. Since I wanted to present a particular view of my office on camera, I decided to move my camera as close to the opposite wall of my room as possible. I didn’t want the teleprompter screen to be any further away, so I built an extension tube out of an old shoebox.

I had to revisit my lens selection again to get the head-and-shoulders perspective I was looking for - and in the end, the telephoto lens I’d bought at the beginning was perfect for this. The results have been excellent - it’s what I used to take the sideways headshot at the beginning of this post - and I now use this setup for many hours every day.

Living With Uncertainty

I started this piece expecting to say “I thought I needed to do A, but ha ha ha I actually could have done B and here’s what I learned about changing your mind”. But by the time I got to describing B, I realized the answer was actually C…or maybe 🍍 or 暃. A photographer chooses a focal length and distance from the camera as part of the overall image composition process, but there are a lot of other factors too, including where the viewer is expected to be relative to the picture they look at. A “normal” lens for a movie is different from a photo because the viewer is expected to be in a different place relative to the image. I didn’t think about that at all. And there are a bunch of other factors, too.

I was working in the technical arts, and I had unknowingly crossed from technical work into art. In both these areas choices are often informed by good practices but not defined by them. Reality has a surprising amount of detail, and learning a little bit more often leads me to realize I know less than I thought I knew when I started; my known-unknowns accumulate faster than my known-knowns. I had reasons for the decisions I was making, but they were based on a shallow knowledge of the field I was operating in. It was just a bunch of stuff that happened.

It occurred to me that this might help to explain why so many impactful companies are also terrible places to work. It’s well established that cultivating psychological safety improves creativity, and as an engineering manager I’ve focused my attention on creating environments where people can flourish. But it also seems that people can find that same feeling of safety simply through a deeply held feeling of “being right” - even in cases where “the truth” is difficult to substantiate or is even obviously different. Sometimes this conviction leads them to identify the moons of Mars and the spot on Jupiter, or decipher Linear B Greek, or guarantee Trial by Jury when founding a new republic. Sometimes a false belief is too convenient to check because it provides a compelling illustration about the risk of gradual change or of power being neutralized or simply provides a path home through the Alps. And sometimes, a false belief means you just build a product with poor market fit. Sometimes they ridicule you and then build monuments to you. And sometimes they just laugh at you because you’re a clown.

I built an awesome camera based on a bunch of naïve assumptions about photography. If I’d known what I didn’t know when I started, I might never have actually started. But I got where I wanted to go, however it is I got here, and in the end, I have a result I’m satisfied with.

Coda

I will talk through the final three parts of this camera project in future issues:

1. I’m going to talk about the awesome way I learned to mirror-flip my display;

2. I’m going to discuss all the complexities of attaching this setup to my desk;

3. I’m going to share a bunch of other little details that enhance my experience of videoconferencing.

However, writing this project up has taken a lot longer than I expected and it’s kept me back from the weekly posting schedule I’m striving to maintain - so you may see a few mini-posts on other topics before I finish off this series.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe – and thank you to everyone who has written to me or commented on my past issues!

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My desk was a folding table propped on scrap lumber. The monitor was eighteen years old. The ergonomics weren’t great, but it gave me a strong incentive to experiment, and I had lots of extra time at home for that.

In my last post I discussed why I was improving my videoconference environment and what I eventually ended up with. Today I’ll share some early ideas and prototypes I came up with along the way.

The Videoconference Series

1. Starting and Finishing

2. Early Prototyping (this issue)

3. The Camera

4. The Display (coming soon)

5. The Desk (coming soon)

6. Detailing (coming soon)

Early Prototyping

I didn’t start this working on this with a clear outcome in mind - I just spent my first few months experimenting with ways to improve individual elements of the videoconference experience. Here’s what I tried.

Chromebooks

When having face-to-face meetings, I would close my laptop, set my phone aside, and take notes on paper. I wanted to find a way to do something similar for videoconferences. My first effort was to try using a dedicated “conference-only” laptop using a spare Chromebook. I appreciated the absence of distractions, but because the laptop was so old, I looked terrible on camera. I didn’t want to upgrade to a newer laptop just for this one narrow application, so I started looking for ways to improve my camera quality.

dSLR

Ira Glass once spoke of the way that creative people can be held back by their own taste: that they appreciate something enough to want to do it, but they also appreciate it enough to know that what they’re doing is not very good. I think the classes on photography and videography I took in High School were just enough to give me an appreciation for “video done well” that as I started to videoconference constantly in early 2020, it really started to bother me that my video didn’t “look right”.

Some of this I was able to adjust through lighting and composition adjustments - but I was really frustrated by the absence of bokeh. A camera’s depth of field for a given subject depends in part on the distance between the camera’s lens and image sensor, and because most laptop cameras must fit into a narrow portion of a laptop’s lid, they have such a deep focus that objects in the foreground and background are equally focused. (In recent years smartphone cameras have started to work around this by using parallax or LIDAR to apply different levels of blur to objects based on how far away they are.)

Canon offered a great high quality solution to this when they released their EOS Webcam Utility - the video it produces is absolutely remarkable. But although I had many great lenses, my camera was too old. A friend suggested that I look into Magic Lantern, a community-created software upgrade for Canon dSLR cameras; although it didn’t enable webcam mode, I was able to turn off all the on-screen overlays and feed the “live view” output into my computer using a $16 USB HDMI capture adapter. This worked except for one thing: the camera wasn’t designed to have the video sensor exposed for long periods of time, and it would often overheat and power off after about twenty five minutes of use. I thought about buying a used version of one of the older supported camera models, but decided to explore some other options first.

Phone Cameras

I really like working outdoors when the weather is nice, but my old laptop battery could rarely make it through an hour-long video conference, and power outlets in shared spaces can be scarce. I found a great solution to this when I purchased a “Selfie Tripod” that could hold my phone at eye level in front of me. This remains one of the best overall video conferencing options I’ve explored, and is by far the cheapest, with many good options available for less than $20. My phone camera is much higher quality than my laptop webcam, the battery life on video conferences is much better, and it’s even easier (and cheaper) to supplement the battery using an external battery pack. However, these tripods wobble and fall over easily, and you suffer from all the limitations that come with phone implementations of videoconferencing software.

Camo

My phone had the best video quality of anything I tried, but I wanted to conference from my laptop, not my phone. Then I found Reincubate Camo, a tool that lets you use your phone as a webcam. This software is fantastic, and if I’d found about it earlier I might have taken a different path on this project. I still frequently use it when I need a document camera for a presentation.

Projector

By late summer I’d purchased a higher quality webcam and had reprioritized around creating a more natural conference experience with better eye contact. I found an incredibly cheap picoprojector and wondered…what if I projected my screen onto a sheet with a camera hole cut into it?

The experience was not quite so natural as I’d hoped for and I moved along to other ideas.

70/30 Glass

The hardest part of a project like this is often figuring out the correct names for the components I need. I’d been thinking about trying some sort of mirrored glass layer over the camera but couldn’t figure out where to get it until I learned to search for beamsplitter glass. I planned to build a frame to hold a piece of glass at an appropriate angle between a monitor and camera - but then, late in 2020, I stumbled on to the Glide Gear TMP 100 Teleprompter, a device that solved many of my problems at a cost only slightly greater than would have paid for the glass alone.

My First Prototype

Here’s my first fully functional prototype:

As a camera I’m using my old dSLR running Magic Lantern. For the monitor I’ve used a fourth generation iPad running Duet Display. Mirror-flipping the iPad video turned out to be a persistent problem (I’ll speak to this more in the next issue), but I figured out I could do this using OBS. The whole thing is mounted on a spare tripod balanced on a box on the edge of my desk.

It worked, but just barely. My laptop fans would blow like crazy. The video would stutter. The camera’s image sensor would frequently overheat. Occasionally things would just crash hard or get knocked off the desk. But it gave me a new adjacent possible to explore, and left me with enough optimism to invest in additional dedicated equipment.

There were some very hard problems ahead: how would I flip the monitor display? What should I do for a more reliable camera? Should I operate this as a dedicated machine or as a secondary display? How do I keep it all from falling off my desk? I’ll speak to all of these and more in my next issue, so if you haven’t already, please subscribe!

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People ask a lot of questions about my camera and audio, but they don’t often know all the other stuff that factored into this design too, so I’m recording my thoughts here to document what I built and to try to communicate the design choices I made as I built it. This first post covers the “Why” and the “What” of what I built; in future weeks, I’ll go into greater detail about the “How”, “When”, and “Where” of individual components. This will probably take five more weeks to get through.

I’d very much appreciate your comments and feedback.

The Videoconference Series

1. Starting and Finishing (this issue)

2. Early Prototyping

3. The Camera

4. The Display (coming soon)

5. The Desk (coming soon)

6. Detailing (coming soon)

Starting and Finishing

Why Spend So Much Effort on Video Conferencing?

I used to actively dislike working from home. I liked my office, I liked seeing the people I worked with, and I spent most of my workday in face-to-face meetings that were much less enjoyable over video. That all changed in March 2020.

I was not well-prepared to work from home. My spouse also worked full-time, and we had two young kids to care for and guide through virtual school and no access to childcare. I was halfway through a Masters degree in Analytics. Everything was hard, nothing was comfortable, and there was more to do than ever. I was in a “Problem Rich Environment”.

On top of that, talking on video for many hours per day was exhausting, and in new, unfamiliar ways. Everyone started talking about Zoom Fatigue. I began to draw on lessons I’d learned from my coworkers (especially Nassim) about how to have higher-quality remote work experiences, but I also developed my own hypotheses based on the challenges I encountered in my own conversations. Here are some of the key things I noticed:

• It’s very easy to be distracted (or seem distracted) during video calls. When the screen I see your face on is the same place I see Slack notifications, a private 1-on-1 can feel more like chatting while waiting in line to buy coffee. This can easily transition from being a subtle form of disrespect to an overt one - there are many people I talk to regularly who start multitasking any time they’re not the one talking[1]. Caring for young children while working makes this even harder: even if I’m not actively distracted, I may be causing distraction for the people I’m talking to.

• Eye contact gets weird. If someone is making eye contact with my image on their screen, they’re not looking at their camera; if they make eye contact with their camera, they can’t actually see my reactions to what they’re saying. This is especially bad when people use their laptop’s built-in webcam as their main camera but an external monitor as their main display: they may feel like they’re “looking at me”, but from my side of the camera, it looks like they’re refusing eye contact.[2]

• People look unfamiliar on video calls. We’re used to seeing people a certain way when they appear in TV or in movies, and another way when we see them face-to-face, but video calls feel entirely different due to a combination of focal length, bokeh, lighting quality, perspective, and other factors. We may feel a need to touch up our appearance. And if we choose to avoid distractions by maximizing the conference video window, the other person’s face now appears at a size and perspective that we rarely experience outside of intimate or dystopian contexts.

• Some features reinforce artificiality. Even as virtual backgrounds can mitigate distractions, they make it clear that you are not in an ordinary conversation. Echo cancelation makes it easier to have a good call even with a low quality microphone and speaker, but it also makes it harder for people to talk at the same time and can make interruptions seem like a much greater transgression.

My approach to Engineering Management depends on effective, focused, high-bandwidth communication between me and the people I work with. I realized that if I wanted to continue to be effective as a remote employee, I needed to mitigate these problems not only for my own sanity, but to support the other people I regularly work with.

Next week I’ll tell you more about how and where my investigation started – but right now, I’ll go ahead and tell you where things have ended up now, two years later.

What I Built

Here’s a listing of the key components and where I purchased them.

The Teleprompter

• Glide Gear TMP100 Teleprompter Frame - everything else was built around this. It features a tray to hold a monitor, a bracket to hold a camera or phone, a piece of 70/30 beam splitter glass mounted at 45 degrees, and a cloth enclosure to keep the light out on the camera side.

• Elecrow 10.1 Inch Display

• Whiteboard MDF for anchoring electronic components.

• Wheel Weights to counterbalance the heavy back half of the teleprompter.

• Impact Super Clamp for attaching everything to my desk.

• Impact 2-Section Double Articulated Arm for holding the teleprompter in the air at that peculiar angle.

The Camera

• Raspberry Pi Zero W running showmewebcam. This software is remarkable - it allows the Raspberry Pi to mimic a USB web camera, so I don’t need any special drivers or streaming configuration changes to use it as a video input on my laptop.

• Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera with a 12 megapixel image sensor.

• 16mm Telephoto C-Mount Lens

• 11 Inch Magic Arm for mounting the camera to the MDF and positioning it correctly.

• Powered USB Hub with Individual On/Off Switch. Sometimes things go wrong and I need to reboot individual components; the individual power switches make this easy.

• Shoe Box to allow me to place the camera further back than the teleprompter was designed to accommodate.

The Display Controller

• Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, 4 GB running rpiplay to allow me to use the teleprompter as a network-connected monitor with an inverted screen.

• Lusya Standard HDMI-Compatible to CSI-2 Adapter Board. I’m not using this yet - but I hope to someday.

The Microphone

• Blue Yeti USB Microphone. I know very little about microphones, so I bought it based on The Wirecutter’s recommendation.

• Moukey Microphone Pop Filter to help prevent plosives.

• Blue Radius III Shockmount to minimize the noise carried through the microphone when I bump my desk.

• Samson MBA38 Microphone Boom Arm to move the mic out of the way when not needed

• Peter Rabbit book shelf my mom made me when I was little.

That’s it for now - please be sure to subscribe if you’d like to hear more about this in the coming weeks.

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-Peter

[1] I think many people don’t realize how much the lighting on their face changes when they switch applications on their monitor or how loud their keystrokes can be.

[2] To be clear, I’m much less concerned about whether someone is making “good eye contact” with me than whether they feel like I’m giving them my full attention. Video conferencing is a new experience for a lot of people and we’ve all needed a lot of extra grace these past few years.

The United States has a famously complex, obscure, and difficult-to-engage-with tax code. Taxes are withheld from our paychecks throughout the year, and our employers, banks, and mortgage providers all provide documentation on our income and expenses directly to the Internal Revenue Service – and then, by mid-April each year, we must file a copy of that same documentation along with Form 1040 and hope that the tax calculations we've performed are similar enough to what the IRS expects that we get a refund quickly.

Nevertheless, I look forward to doing my taxes every year. Some of this is sentimental – I remember my mom sitting all day at our dining room table in her jammies and robe while doing our taxes when I was a kid, and “doing my own taxes” always felt like a Very Adult Thing To Be Doing. Another part is more like engineering: it’s like taking apart a complicated machine to understand why it works - and then, occasionally, finding some money hidden inside. But for me, it’s also a matter of civics: I live in this country, and this country has an income tax that applies to me, so I should understand how it works and how it impacts me.

John Brooks devotes an entire chapter of his 1969 book "Business Adventures" to a discussion of “The Federal Income Tax”. He writes: "If the single most important law now on the statute books of the United States is the income-tax law, it would follow that we must have the income-tax law we deserve...the income-tax law, that is, should be to some extent a national mirror." Complaints about taxation certainly do mirror challenges we see elsewhere in society: about "regulatory capture" by tax preparation companies who prefer a complex tax code; about the "dark patterns" in software design that trick people into paying for tax preparation that they're often entitled to have done for free; about the way that the tax system has been repurposed to replace other types of social aid; and of course, about the ways that the complexity inevitably favors those with the wealth to pay for novel business structures and dedicated tax advice. On top of all this, I also suggest that this “tax industrial complex” also has a more pathological impact: it deprives people of the ability to understand what taxes they actually pay (and why) and to change their behavior in a way that would save them money.

This is a good time for me to make something clear: I am not a tax professional, nor have I received any form of financial certification or registration. Nothing I'll be discussing today is or should be considered as tax advice or financial advice. If you know better and think I'm wrong, please tell me.

There is a populist elegance to the fact that all American taxpayers file Form 1040 – just like we all end up going to the DMV when our license expires, or waiting in the same big room when we’re called up for Jury Duty. Because Form 1040 comes with an instruction manual, you can work your way down the form, line by line, and figure out more-or-less what's going on. This turns out to be an effective myth busting tactic as well: have you ever been told that bonuses are taxed differently than salary? Have you ever worried that a higher salary will actually cost you money by pushing you into a higher income tax bracket? Both of these ideas are widely believed, though neither is true, and it’s easy to see that this is the case when reviewing Form 1040. It is also surprisingly straightforward to calculate one's effective tax rate - but few take the time to do it, because most people don’t take the time to review the forms.

It’s true, there are some parts that get a little complicated – but tax returns are complicated because the tax code is complicated, and much of this complexity comes in the form of carveouts for preferred behaviors such as installing solar panels, or installing a high efficiency furnace, or operating a certain type of business, or adopting a child, or being an educator or a performing artist, or a huge number of others. Tax reform always sounds compelling until people realize it means taking away tax breaks for teachers or eliminating interest deductions for homeowners - so rather than making the tax code less complicated, recent tax changes have focused instead on making tax returns seem more "simple". The most recent tax change in 2017 prioritized "being able to file taxes on a postcard" - so it shrunk Form 1040 to a double-sided half page of paper, and then moved all the lines that wouldn't fit onto six additional forms you might need to file. Simple, right?

I had an unnerving realization recently - one that led to me writing this first newsletter issue about taxes rather than something fun and electronic: I didn’t enjoy filing my taxes this year.

It took me a few days to realize that it was because of the tax prep software I had to use. [1] The technical exploration of filing my return had had transformed into a wicked domain where I had no idea how my inputs mapped to results. The entire process was gamified around “maximizing my refund”, but with very little context for why a particular choice did or did not reduce my taxes. It’s analogous to the neighborhood kid who comes by to fix your computer and also offers to “optimize your registry” - but you have no idea what they actually did or whether it was a good thing to do.

Even worse, in at least half a dozen places, the software could have offered me constructive advice about how to actually save money on the next year's taxes by changing my HSA withholding, or donating appreciated stock instead of cash, or by contributing more to a retirement plan - behaviors I’m already familiar with, that the tax code is actually written to incentivize, and that a competent tax advisor would be able to recommend to you. They could even have made some suggestions about how to change my tax withholding so that the taxes withheld each paycheck would more closely match what I’d actually owe next April - but then again, that would make the "refund maximizer” a lot less compelling.

Worst of all, there were a couple things on my W2 that indicated problems that could have cost me a lot of money in wasted taxes or retirement distribution penalties. I knew about these issues because I’d already had to make calls to fix them, but there was no way to know that from my W2. This is exactly the sort of thing that tax software is well-positioned to warn about, but doesn’t. But on the other hand, they’re perfectly happy to encourage me to pay extra to assuage irrational fears: preemptively upgrading to a Premium edition of the software in case I might need to file any “complicated” extra forms, or paying $50 for an “audit protection” service.

I wish I could be optimistic that this will get remedied, but there hasn't been a major overhaul of the US Tax Code since 1986, and much of the national energy seems to be going toward things like wealth taxes or national sales taxes. In "Business Adventures", Brooks quotes IRS commissioner Caplin as saying "There's a mystic quality about our tax system. No matter how bad it may be from the technical standpoint, it has a vitality because of the very high level of compliance...I'm optimistic that fifty years from now we'll have a pretty good tax." Fifty years later, our tax code doesn’t look all that different, but I’m also not even sure we still have that same “level of compliance” - for example, the Build Back Better Act is projected to be funded in part simply by more thoroughly enforcing tax laws on high-income earners. And the bipartisan "Taxpayer First" act of 2019 very nearly included a permanent ban on the IRS offering free tax filing, and was sponsored by several legislators I respect and admire.

I do have two small hopes. When Intuit purchased Credit Karma, they were forced to sell off the free "Credit Karma Tax" product to Square. It’s the one option I’m aware of for e-filing both state and federal tax returns for free, and their willingness to step on the toes of others in the tax prep industry gives hope that they might be willing to also offer a higher quality tax service as well.

A second hope is more of a dream - but so much of the magic of today's World Wide Web was built off of open API endpoints and free software. Perhaps someday the IRS will offer something similar for tax filing - an IRS managed endpoint that community-supported free software packages could use to submit tax returns.

Until then, we'll always have Form 1040.

[1] - There are certain Georgia tax credits I’m eligible for that I can only claim when filing electronically – but there is no way to simply e-file a state tax return in Georgia: it must be done through an approved software provider, and these providers won't allow me to file a state return without also filing my federal return. And none of these give me the option to “simply fill out the form”. I’ve now used Tax Slayer, TaxAct, and TurboTax, with no substantially different results between the three.