Google Pixel 2 Phone, Pixel Buds bluetooth headphones

Edit: 2018-03-21: I do like the Ear Buds, but my criticisms of the sound quality and the lack of noise cancellation stand.  It's fun to walk with them, but not in high-noise environments. 

I have a Pixel 2, and the Pixel Ear Buds, and I'm definitely of two minds about them.  I think it's time Google put some serious money into design.

I don't like IOS, although I'm an Apple fan most ways, so an iPhone X is out of the question for me.  Nevertheless, I wish my Pixel looked like that.  I wish it was interesting looking in any way!  It's just bland.

Bland wouldn't be so bad; the phone is, at least, small and smooth and pleasant to hold and use.  And it looks OK.  However, for some unknown reason, about a quarter of the back is covered in a chunk of extremely thin glass.  Hey, it looks and feels kinda nice, but I had the phone not more than three days when it slid out of my pocket at a theater, not more than 15 inches off the carpeted floor, and shattered.  Obviously you CANNOT use this phone without some kind of box around it, which completely destroys the nice look and feel of it.  And this is a premium phone, most definitely in price.  Why should I have to wrap my $700 phone in a cheap box just so that I can dare to take it somewhere?

And they've removed the analog headphone jack, which means to use my headphones I need to use a clumsy adapter.  And the adapter/phone interface needs some work; the phone doesn't always recognize when the adapter is plugged in.  That generally requires rebooting the phone.  And it will take another clumsy and expensive adapter to be able to charge the phone while I'm playing music on it.  Which isn't even out yet.

(BTW, wouldn't it make sense to have TWO USB-C jacks on the thing?  Wouldn't that be unique among phones, a reasonable "premium" feature, and since the circuitry for the single port is already there, still save some space in the phone?)

I'm a musician; I really do want high fidelity sound from my device, and the lack of an analog headphone port means I must really use bluetooth, which has NO real hi-fi codecs available, at least not yet.  Even the best of them, aptX, only promises "nearly CD quality sound".

Which brings me to the buds.  They don't sound good.  The bass is OK, but subtle high frequency stuff, like maracas, tend to disappear.  I've certainly heard decent sounding bluetooth headphones; my old Sony SBH-50 sounds a lot better than these things.  On the plus side, once you have them adjusted, they are quite comfortable and stay in your ears.  But I'm not sure I want to live without noise cancellation in my headphones anymore.  At least the touch controls work pretty well.

Google, I have to admit, you are making me look longingly at the iPhone X and the Samsung and LG phones.  For a premium price I'd much rather see a premium design.  I'm not sure how much I want to trade groovy looks and sound for the most up to date version of Android.

Jack Reacher in the Movies, An open letter to Tom Cruise

An open letter to Tom Cruise:

Gentlemen:

The first Jack Reacher movie was really good.  We were introduced to the character of Jack Reacher, the ultimate stoic man.  Excellent action movie, awesome fight scenes.

The second movie had a good cast.  The original novel was a lot of fun.  The problem is, it is way too early in the process of adapting the books to movies to do this one.  The ultimate stoic macho guy Jack Reacher can't handle a teenaged girl!  Hilarious!  Except ... we've only met him once before.  It's way too early to tear him down like this for comedy's sake.  You really should have done another one that showed Reacher interacting with his environment and being his awesome male self in a strange environment (somewhere in America!). ;) . Those sorts of stories are, of course, the real point to Reacher's appeal.

Just a thought guys.  Loved all the books, loved the first movie despite Mr. Cruise's much different physique.  He carried it all well.  Hoping another movie will be more in the real Jack Reacher vein.

Alesis Crimson Mesh Kit Mini-Review

For those of you into drums, I’m very impressed by the Alesis Crimson Mesh Kit.  I bought one for my wife at Guitar Center recently, and it was around $800.  

It looks nice from the get-go; red “shells”, black mesh “heads”, and heavy-duty chromed hardware.   Unlike previous electronic kits I’ve used, it seems much less like a toy and much more like a real kit.

The mesh heads feel sooo much better than the hard pads on our earlier Alesis DM-5.  They feel slightly loose, or maybe a little “gooey”, but not bad; you can certainly do a roll on them comfortably.  

One of the really cool things about them is that most of the pads have more than one sensor.  You seem to have 4 “drums”, a snare and 3 toms, but each of them can play a different sound on the rim.  When emulating acoustic drums the rim sounds are samples of actual rims, but when using the crazier kits, like the 808 or latin kits, each rim can be a completely different sound, so the kit is actually much more flexible than you’d realize.  Beyond that, sounds can be mixed on a single pad and playable at different impact levels, so you can actually get 3 sounds from one head!  And the dynamic range feels pretty natural to me.

To sum up, this kit is suitably priced and feels much more “professional” than other inexpensive electronic kits.  I thinks it’s easily comparable to Roland kits costing twice as much.

http://www.alesis.com/products/view2/crimson-mesh-kit

An Open Letter to David Ayer about "Suicide Squad"

David Ayers, I loved Suicide Squad.  Loved, loved, loved it, oh my yes I loved that movie!  Best one of all time, better than Iron Man 1, better than the Avengers, better than Winter Soldier, better than Deadpool (though that's a close one) and you didn't even have an R rating to play to.

But I understand you are feeling unsure about the movie.

The first thing that hit me about it was the perfectly placed, in your face song selections.  Good music selection can make a movie so much more emotionally involving.  I know I'm reacting to the movie, though, not just the music, because if I go listen to those songs by themselves, without the visuals, they are so much less than I thought they would be.  A song might be pretty good on it's own, but when perfectly placed, the visuals and the music are a synergy and far more than either one alone.  And Suicide Squad does this almost perfectly, all the way through.  "Heathens" on the end credits.  K7 and Harley's elevator ride; hilarious!  "The House of the Rising Sun" as we enter Belle Reve.  Awesome!

The filming was wonderful.  The colors, the lights!  All intensely beautiful from the oily rainbow colors on the opening "R" right down to the psychedelic end credits.  Can't imagine better.  Oh my.

The actors!  You can't go wrong with Will Smith and Margot Robbie, but lord, Viola Davis and Jared Leto, Joel Kinnaman and Ike Barinholtz!  And they all got useful parts.  They all work together flawlessly, but the most interesting part to me was that characters that weren't front and center still had strong personalities, like the female guard in Belle Reve, pulling some shade on Captain Boomerang.  It's all wonderful.

The editing!  Down to the bone, man!  So perfect it blew my mind!

So, what was the problem?  Bad reviews?  I'll give you my review, I saw it 8 times in the theater, then bought the blu-ray, and talked it up to my friends like crazy.  But most of them "don't like comic book movies".  Neither do movie critics.

But we loved it.  And we paid soooo much money to show how impressed we were.  Frankly, man, I think that should be enough.  We PAID you.   We don't do that for crap.  Keep going, and take us to new heights, and we will PAY you!  Best we can do man.  Sorry if it's not enough.

Hugh

Project Fi, not for me

I really wanted to use Project Fi.  I'll just admit it: I wanted it to work because it's Google and it's different!  And it is both those things, but that was not quite enough reason to stay with it.

I signed up for Fi about a month ago, and bought a nicely cheap Nexus 5x when they were selling them for $200 with sign up.  I think that promotion is over now; however, I got to keep the phone when I cancelled, and I do like the phone a lot.

The real issue is that I'm not doing a lot of international travel right now, and I have the world's cheapest (as far as I know) plan for (non-family) big-data users, T-Mobile's $30/mo "Walmart" plan*, which only provides 100 minutes of talk but 5 GB of data over LTE/4G (after which you are capped at 3G speeds).  T-Mobile's LTE coverage in the Bay area is fine for me, and I hardly ever need to talk to anyone when WiFi isn't available.   It turns out I use most of that 5 GB every month, which would have given me a monthly bill over twice as high using Fi.

If I was doing a lot of international travel, I might change my mind.  I used T-Mobile's Simple plan when I last went to New Zealand ($70/mo) and it more or less worked in most places, but the data rate cap was sooo slow.  I would have been better off buying a local SIM (and pointing my Google Voice number at it!).  Project Fi uses a 256kbps data rate cap internationally which, although also pretty slow, would have been a big step up!

Generally, I was a little disappointed that Fi seemed to use Sprint a lot more than I expected; given that my T-Mobile coverage is generally good I was expecting to use that more than I did.  And Fi's vaunted high-quality WiFi coverage didn't seem to add much to my experience.

Still, it was kind of cool, and I got a cheap 5x out of the experience.  And if my wife starts dragging me to international destinations in the future, I'll give some thought to trying it again.


* The "Walmart" plan is available at Walmart or online at T-Mobile, but nowhere else.

systemd

I have to admit, I've been kind of pissed for a while about RedHat going with systemd as a replacement for init.  I spent a lot of time becoming fluent with init, and all of that is now defunct on the platform I work with the most.

I've spent some time with systemd now, though, and I have changed my mind.  systemd has some really strong advantages over init:

1. The files are so much simpler!  systemd has the most obvious init functions, like stop, restart, status built-in, so you don't have to come up with shell scripts to do them; you only really have to tell systemd where your binary is and what it should be called.  100+ lines of BASH or SH code can be distilled down to about 7 lines of systemd.

2. It's much safer.  Once again, the files are not scripts, they are simply metadata.  It would be difficult to make systemd do something weird and unsafe.

3. init is still supported, mostly.  Not a bad feature!

So, check me off as a reasonably happy systemd user.

More astrophotography ...

Here's a picture I took of Jupiter with the Samyang 800mm lens.  It is about 100% cropped.  You can see a little color and (just barely) you can see a couple of dark bands running almost vertically.

Very difficult to photograph with the Samyang, but it's still a lot of fun to try!

And here's a pic of Saturn; note the space between the rings and the planet!

Astrophotography with Sony a6000

I'm dipping into doing some astrophotography with my Sony a6000, the replacement for the Sony NEX-7 mirrorless.  It works pretty well; my location isn't great (SF Bay Area), but my camera is, arguably, as good as it gets for an APS-C camera (and it's much less expensive than similar DSLR cameras).  It has very good high ISO performance.

I also bought, kind of on a whim, a Samyang 800 mm lens (plus 2X "barlowe" lens, ~$200 for both!).  The lens is very simple, there are no electronics, so focus is a bit of a challenge with it, and it's not exactly a high-quality lens.  But it works.

Here's an example; a shot of the moon, 2X "barlowe" lens (so 1600 mm equivalent), NO cropping, ISO 3200 and slight contrast enhancement.

The Sony has the option to zoom in while framing and focusing the shot, and as long as your camera is very stationary, it works pretty well.  I've got a fairly heavy-duty tripod, but I wish it was even heavier; the camera still shakes quite a bit while I'm focusing.  I've assigned the electronic zoom to one of the buttons on the camera, and it's very easy to fire it while I'm setting up for the shot.

I always use shutter-priority mode.

I am looking forward to trying it on Jupiter and Saturn.  In a couple of weeks I will try this at Yosemite.  Stay tuned.

dreams

I once dreamed an entire song about a woman I had recently moved in with.  The song was very dark in content; the woman had led a terrible life and we had bonded over music, so this seemed like a very proper response to our relationship.

Are dreams a way to store our feelings in memory, using nonverbal symbols?

It might also be the opposite, that is, you are "storing" a feeling and your brain is building a visual (and in this case, auditory) story around the feeling.  That's kind of art in a nutshell, isn't it?

Using NIS/ypbind with Linuxmint 13 (and probably Ubuntu 13)

I finally got it working, more or less.  I eventually put restart directives for both the ypbind and autofs processes in /etc/rc.local.  It works, as long as I wait about a minute after the machine boots up before trying to log in.  I don't know why it has to be kluged like this; bug reports for problems like this are opened for EVERY Ubuntu release, and no one ever feels any need to fix it.  At least, with Fedora/RHEL, I can be assured that NIS will work out of the box.

Jobs

I'm so, so disappointed by "Jobs". It had nothing in it that I wanted to know about; nothing about the visit to Xerox PARC, nothing about his spiritual journeys, nothing about NeXT. Going by the movie, Jobs was nothing but an ungrateful SOB with no talents and nothing interesting in his life. I thought Kutcher did a fine job with the part, so to speak, but surely there was enough to Steve Jobs' existence to make a movie that was worth seeing other than as an hour and a half impression of him by Ashton Kutcher.

All right, I'm a bit of a fanboi, but you know, there was no other personal computer that made your room a little prettier, a little more interesting, just by being in it. I don't think it's overstating it to say that Jobs played a major part in making computers into household appliances. I was getting ready to enter the world of law in 1989; instead, because my boss had several Macintoshes around the office, I'm in tech instead. And now, I'm taking an iPad to band rehearsals and plugging my guitar into it, and then plugging a keyboard into it. This movie barely gives us a hint as to the good things that he was responsible for. Why?

McCartney at Outside Lands

My God, three hours of McCartney ... he sang lead on every song, and simply kicked ass for three hours straight. He seemed genuinely excited to be in San Francisco (well, who wouldn't be?). The band rocked like mad. OK, the whole show was rocking, but ... after 2 and 1/2 hours, he played the last song and left the stage. You'd think he'd be a little tired, but no, he comes back and does fucking Helter Skelter. And wrecked it. Later he came back for the 2nd encore, and it was the the medley from Abbey Road, starting at "Golden Slumbers". That was just a deeply satisfying show, from beginning to end.

Getting compiz to work on Linuxmint 15

Woo boy, this is getting more and more difficult.  Compiz and especially comizconfig seem to be so spotty right now.

I installed all the compiz packages, but compizconfig would explode whenever I enabled anything until I installed dconf-tools as well.  Now, I can enable things; I have my beloved "Opacity, Brightness and Saturation" working (which means I can make windows transparent with a key-click) and "wobbly windows" (which always amuses me).  However, if I then close compizconfig and open it again I lose all those settings.  It's better than compiz just crashing, but annoying anyway.

I have yet to get the cube working, though.  Working on it ...

Analog versus Digital Multi-track Recording

I have quite a few musician friends who say they like the sound of analog recording better than digital.  Well, yeah, and there's a reason for that, but the price you pay for it is not worth it, in my opinion.

Yes, of course you can hear the difference between digital and analog.  The point to digital is that it doesn't sound like anything; it's supposed to sound exactly like what you put into it, no more, no less.  (how close it gets to that is a different, complicated question, but I think it is not really debatable that analog might be MORE "accurate" than digital).  Whereas, using analog THESE days (when something better is available ;) ) is actually because analog doesn't sound transparent, and doesn't sound like what you put in.  It's the equivalent of turning an amplifier up until it distorts at bit.  Yeah, you might like the sound, but it's distorted just the same.  And once it is distorted, you can't un-distort it.

Also, keep in mind that, unless you are going to listen to your recording on a 90 min cassette or on your old turntable, you are going to be listening to "digital" anyway, or at least a hybrid of analog on backend and digital on the frontend, whether you listen to an mp3, to a CD, or stream a song online.

I contend that it is quite possible, these days, to make a digital recording that sounds "warm" in the way that an analog recording sounds.  Hell, you can make them sound "warm" in any way you like!  Want the "warmth" of a Neve recording desk and an Otari multi-track?  Or maybe you'd prefer SSL and Tascam?  There must be plugins for this, but in any case, it can be done.

And digital has so many other advantages:

   * digital is much cheaper, in every way
   * quick, easy and safe cut and paste of songs.
   * non-destructive post-mixing eq and other manipulation
   * did I say cheaper?  You replace the thousands of dollars in buying and maintaining a recording tape deck and a desk with a few hundred dollars in an analog to digital converter.  You also save the space.
   * your digital recording may last forever, with proper backups.
   * copies of digital sound files are identical to the original.  copies of analog masters are yet another generation removed from the pristine quality of the original.
   * analog recordings degrade EVERY time you play them.  Imagine your turntable needle being pulled through the soft, hot vinyl of a record, or a vinyl tape been pulled over a magenetic tape recorder head, over and over again.  Digital recordings are not degraded by playing them.
   * analog recordings must generally be played back on the same type of machine that created them.  You are out of luck if your tape machine format is no longer manufactured.  Whereas digital data is just bits; converting that data to a new format is just a matter of writing a program to do it.
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The Next Right Wing Anti-Global Warming Meme

The new right wing anti-global warming meme will be (my prediction): it's too late.  That even if we stop with the massive man-made CO2 emissions completely, right now, global temperature will still continue to rise and we will reach many of the "drop dead" temperatures that will lose us many low-lying cities and communities (and sometimes whole countries), and which will cause mass extinctions of vulnerable animal species, etc.

Here's the thing: it's not true.  Technologies exist, right now, to pull unwanted CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it where it can't hurt anything.  But all such technologies will work much better and do less of their own kinds of damage IF they are not competing with increasing CO2 at the same time.  When the time comes, when we are not increasing atmospheric CO2, we WILL be able to clean the current over-enriched CO2 out of the atmosphere.

WE CAN FIX THIS.

AS LONG AS WE DON'T GIVE UP.  AS LONG AS WE DON'T ALLOW VESTED ENERGY INTERESTS TO CONTROL THE DEBATE.

If you believe in God, you must believe in a Woman's Right to Choose

Do you believe in God?  God put women in charge of their babies, right from conception until birth (and, arguably, afterwards; try taking a woman's baby away from her!).  If a woman wants to kill her baby she can do it, even if it comes down to suicide and both dying, it's still all in her hands.  If you believe in God and the perfection of "his" designs, then you have to believe that women are in charge of the zygotes, fetuses and babies, because God put them INSIDE of her.  That's all there is to it.

Google Earth 7.x on 64-bit Fedora 18

I finally got Google Earth 7.0 Free to work decently in Fedora 18 running on my Mac, running the proprietary catalyst drivers


kmod-catalyst-13.1-2.fc18.4.x86_64
xorg-x11-drv-catalyst-13.1-1.fc18.x86_64

The error was:


libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast
libGL error: Try again with LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose for more details.


Info:

1. Despite the fact that I installed the 64-bit version of the Google Earth RPM, it's actually 32-bit and needs 32 bit OpenGL drivers
2. With the proprietary ATi drivers installed, the default libGL.so library (/usr/lib/libGL.so.1) is incompatible with the display, yet this seems to be what GE is trying to use.
3. GE will use anything in it's own directory FIRST, evidently
   /opt/google/earth/free

So, I ended up copying /usr/lib/fglrx/fglrx-libGL.so.1.2 to /opt/google/earth/free, and made symlinks to it as libGL..so.1.2, libGL.so.1 and libGL.so in the same directory.  Now it works.

I really, really wish that Google would get their shit together with the 64-bit versions of Google Earth.  I'm running fast, clean 3D graphics on this workstation every day, and no other programs ever seem to have problems like this.  Why in god's name does it have to be so picky about where everything is located, and, well, who runs 32-bit anymore?

Bandaids

When washing your hands, there is no way to avoid soaking the bandaid on your finger, so don't try. I think that's a lesson for life.

Rush Limbaugh's Job

Rush Limbaugh's job is to convince ignorant xenophobes that the world and it's browner people is complicated and scary not because they themselves are cowards, with shrunken little hearts, too lazy to do their homework, but because of conspiracy; it is all someone else's fault.  It must be quite a relief.

Benghazi is the anti-Bin Laden

Ah, I finally get the right-wing freakout about Benghazi. Remember, it's always been the strategy of Karl Rove and his horrible acolytes that, if your foe is heroic in some way, you don't avoid that, you attack it, you reverse it. So war hero John Kerry becomes, through swift-boating, a coward.

President Obama got Osama Bin Laden. How do you counter that? Why, Obama must be responsible for Americans killed at an embassy in the Middle East! And lied about! It's perfect.