Assorted Experience

At some point in your life you may have the mis-fortune to require a financial planner. This is not as great a misfortune as having to require a lawyer, but still ...  One interesting tidbit of information is to inform yourself of the difference between a broker and a fiduciary. The short of it is that: A broker is free to sell you stuff regardless of whether it is financially healthy to you - they are usually paid off commission and that depends on how much stuff they can get you to buy A fiduciary is required to act in your best interests and receive compensation independent of what financial decisions you make. An interesting website is https://brokercheck.finra.org where you can get the employment and educational history of a financial advisor.

As a young man, one of the things I wanted was a powerful home server - running Linux - on which I could create an AI. That desire for having raw computing power under the desk, or in the basement, decreased somewhat with the easy accessibility of servers in the lab or (now) in the office. But a man's heart wants what it wants. I finally found my excuse when the spouse wondered out loud that, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could have multiple speakers at different parts of the house and we could stream our music collection to which ever set of speakers we wanted, especially a wireless speaker placed outside on the patio, for parties? You don't need to ask me twice.  An email sent to a list where my gaming buddies hang out retrieved a few important keywords: Sonos, Chromecast Audio, Synology and S3 bucket. I had two main aims - find a good home for our photos and, as the spouse wanted, stream music to speakers.  I debated more than you would think before laying o...

I was curious about what the Chromecast audio is and how it works - both in terms of hardware and software. After a lot of needless thrashing about, I realized that the wikipedia page has the specifications for the system on a chip, though the ifixit teardown is more detailed and also points out that the Chromecast and Chromecast audio basically have the same system-on-a-chip. Interestingly, the Synology NAS also has a Marvell Armada system. Exploitee.rs says that the system runs a modified Android system. I was most curious about was how the software works: specifically, when I play music through the chromecast audio what is the flow of data? My web-search-fu failed me, and could not get any descriptions of this that went beyond user-level, google marketing speak. What I gather is that there are two modes of data transfer: mirroring and streaming. Mirroring takes the audio data stream playing from a computer (laptop, smart phone, iPad) and redirects it to the Chromecast. Softwa...