About
poindexter, WHO?,

kurt weiske's
other blog.

retro tech enthusiast, photgrapher, and systems guy.

blogging like it's 1999. static blog generation, talking tech...

My Name
me@here

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I really want a desk phone...
But it seems pointless now.

I started my career in telecom, when company's livelihoods depended on desk phones. I was there when we installed the first voicemail system, something people take for granted now, but companies ran on rooms full of receptionists taking messages. The front desk had a rotating caddy with lettered bins and message slips, so you could pick up your messages when coming back from lunch.

I was there for analog phones, multi-line phones, massive phone systems that took up entire rooms, with uptimes measured in years. One phone system had Never Been Down since it was installed.

First came SIP phones, which took away the need for 1:1 physical wiring - your phones could connect to your ethernet as did the phone system. No more line cards and pairs of wires for each phone in the phone room.

Then came chat and soft phones. Your desk phone ended up in a drawer, replaced by an app on your desktop. At least you could watch YouTube videos and take calls at the same time with a headset!

At work, I have a couple of edge cases where I'd want to use a physical phone - in an office with a conference table, for example. I've looked for Teams phones and am testing out a $45 Yealink USB Teams phone. It's an interesting solution. It requires Teams and Teams voice support and connects via USB to your PC. You get a speakerphone, a handset, a dial pad, and a display. I'm sentimental about phones, as you may surmise, and liked the look on my desk.

I just finished a call with it, and it was OK - but not any better than just using my PC speakers and webcam microphone. Back in the box it goes, I'll set it up in one of the conference rooms, maybe.

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From Inside Out - the architecture of Peter Zumthor

I'm looking forward to seeing "Inside Out - the architecture of Peter Zumthor", recently released in film festivals this year. Directed by Wim Wenders, it encompasses 14 years of work outlining his work, designs and philosophy. It was created in 3D and only released in the UK for now, anxiously awaiting a US distribution opportunity.

I picked up his book, "Thinking Architecture" recently, admire his works that feel minimal but with a human feel, not brutalist.

Without realizing it, I'd seen his work this year at the David Geffen galleries in Los Angeles.

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AI Not.
Companies are adding AI into app upgrades, and I'm lukewarm about it.

I bought a Pixel Watch recently to help with a health kick I'm on. It came with 6 months of free Google Health premium. After almost a year the AI features seem unnecessary. I get a health brief in the morning summarizing my sleep and recommending a plan for the day. I can do the same thing by noting how I feel in the morning and looking at my sleep stats - which aren't AI-based.

Google Health Premium is up for renewal, I declined.

My home security system offered me an AI upgrade when I replaced a camera, and it mostly added descriptions of what I'm looking at when I'm looking at the clip. I don't need AI to tell me that a delivery person is delivering a package when I see someone delivering a package.

I declined that, too.

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Back to Analog
I've been using my Pixel Watch for some time. It's nice to have a baseline of how many steps I walk in a typical day, how my quality of sleep can shape how I feel during the day, and my typical heart rate.

What I don't like is having to charge a watch every day or so.

But, it begs the question -- if I don't wear my watch and it doesn't track my walk, do the steps still count?

Google Health Premium has an AI companion that provides guidance based on your exercise trends, sleep and their "readiness" score. It's nice, but borderline uncanny valley having a phone look at your biometrics and make suggestions for your day.

All that information is going somewhere, and maybe that isn't such a good thing. I did play with an app called gadgetbridge that lets you gather biometric data locally. That, combined with a simple fitness tracker might be a better solution. Plus, I have a handful of smart "bands" I could play with. I'd want to find a F/OSS calorie/macro tracker, and I'd have most of what I need.

I did just get a weekly notification from Google Health showing my daily activity, and it's a nice motivator. I wouldn't want to lose that. It's a slippery slope, though.

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If Only...
My family is considering retiring to the UK; We're looking for village life and being closer to family out there. We took a trip a few years back to explore some villages and to explore Hampshire county.

I loved Tisbury - it had an eclectic handful of shops on the high street, was a quick train ride to the market town, and had 2 churches, the old one and the new one (according to our ad-hoc tour guide, a friendly man we crossed paths with who took the task on with enthusiasm.)

The new one was built in the 1700s, the old one between 1180 and 1200...

Looking at a realtor's window, I found a place right on the high street with 3 bedrooms, 1 1/2 bath, a deck, garden, parking, and a retail space. The price for all this was roughly a quarter of what my California house's current value.

I turned around and there it was, directly across the street.

I was ready to buy it - to diversify from our all $USD investments, get our foot in the door, so to speak, and have some rental income. My family wasn't ready.

I did some poking around on Instagram and found the Fox and King bookstore, now at home in the space I wanted to buy. The mind boggles at living in another county, in a picturesque village, with a BOOKSTORE on the ground floor of my house.

I bet I could have negotiated a landlord's discount...

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Playing with Claude Code
I tried an experiment this weekend. I have an old photo gallery that I used back in the 2000s called Minimal Gallery. I used it for a toy camera gallery; I liked the simplicity of it.

At some point in the past, it stopped working, throwing PHP errors. It was written for PHP version 4, and a statement in use in the code were deprecated and causing the errors. I googled possible causes and found one statement that was no longer supported. Despite having no PHP skills to speak of, a quick search and replace got it working again.

Recently, it broke again. I tried with Google Gemini some time back to take a look at the code but wasn't able to resolve the issue.

This weekend, I uploaded the file archive to Claude Code, went off to make an espresso, came back and was presented with a modified source code archive. Replaced the existing scripts with the new ones, and it works!

https://lowresolution.kataan.org is back up and running.

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Heating Up...
I loaded temperature sensors into my proxmox server's UI using this link and am realizing that ignorance is bliss...

Time to re-install thermal paste and route some more air into my server cabinet!

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Backrooms. Or not.
I took my son to see Backrooms last night. Movie timing is odd nowadays - you don't need to get in line any more with advanced ticketing and seating, so there's no stress about getting there on time - you know you have a 10-20 minutes of trailers before the movie starts and your seats are (hopefully) waiting for you.

We went to dinner beforehand and got there a few minutes early. The theater was lit, and that annoying commmercial/trivia quiz thing wasn't running.

It got to 15 minutes past the movie time, still lit, still nothing on the screen. People started getting up to check, and the manager came in to announce that the "projector couldn't validate (sic) and they were calling tech support". We ended up taking a refund, as they're planning on re-releasing a director's cut next week with 16 more minutes added.

I'd heard about digital projection systems before with DRM and authentication, heard about some 3D theaters leaving the projector in 3D mode for 2D movies because they didn't want to risk locking out the projector when they switched modes.

Not quite a dystopian nightmare of Gibsonian proportions, but still a pain in the ass.

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To blog or not to blog?
I've had my other blog for over 25 years, mostly with the same web provider. Over the years, it's been a place for personal musings, technical references, a photo blog, home to FAQs I'd written and a brand site for my consulting practice, among other things.

My account is up for renewal next month, and the prices are increasing to the point that I'm questioning whether I need it. When I originally signed up, I liked the ability to create mailing lists, host a jabber server and run a full-functioned email server with POP3/IMAP/SMTP support, webmail and spam filtering. Who reads mailing lists any more?

Now, most of the time, I just forward email from my domain to gmail.

At one point, they offered Jabber services. They're now discontinued.

At one point, they offered mailing lists. They're now discontinued.

My current provider offers web statistics, I expect soon they'll point you to Google Analytics.

There are cheaper options out there for web hosting, but most offer mail as a separate paid option. I'm wondering if it makes more sense in 2026 to stick to web hosting only and use mail redirection to a webmail account?

Another concern in the back of my mind is wondering how how long those add-on functions will be offered. My current offering is grandfathered in, I could imagine them making their offerings just web hosting, at which point they'd be overpriced. Or, just degrade services for the grandfathered accounts and offer them the "new" accounts, faster, slightly more expensive, less features.

I'd hate to be committed for 2 years at $13.99 a month while services and value decline to the point where the service is equivalent to the much cheaper option.

My current provider wants $13.99/month with Ai web builders, full email support and other goodies. By comparison, My domain registrar charges $2.08/month on a commitment, but with no email. Mail is another $14.88/year, which is still cheaper.

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Google Watch, Five Weeks in.
I've had my Pixel watch for 5 weeks, and so far, it's been a pretty positive experience. It's helped with my sleep tracking, as my older wearables were pretty bad at it. Notifications aren't a distraction, I've turned most of them off except for calls.

Most of the time, I use a simple watch face with just hands and a date complication - doing that makes it as simple an experience as an analog watch.

I received the upgrade to WatchOS 7 a few days ago, and battery life is definitely improved. I'm looking at around 50 hours from full charge to completely dead. That's enough to keep me going without feeling paranoid about charge levels.

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