The real purpose of the Apple Vision Pro

I have now owned my Apple Vision Pro for a couple of months, and I have been using VR goggles playing games on my PC for a couple of years.

Those of us who bought the AVP have been desperately looking for more content to make the massive price of the device worthwhile.  But I think I have actually figured out the real killer purpose for the AVP:

VR on PCs (i.e. Windows) is awful.  Oh boy, is it terrible.  

I have bought two of the very best consumer-grade PC VR headsets available, the Varjo Aero and the Bigscreen Beyond.  The Varjo Aero is a somewhat cut-down consumer version of the headsets Varjo sell to things like air force training centers, for use in their professional flight simulators.  It is (was, actually, since Varjo no longer sells it) a great big box, with high resolution LCD eyepieces, a large, air conditioned area between your face and the screen, large enough so that you can wear your own glasses, and automatic controls to figure out your IPD (interpupillary distance, or the distance between your eyes), the point being that anyone who is at least a late teenager will be able to wear the headset.  You can share it between people.  

The Bigscreen Beyond is made to be as small as possible, which it does by creating a headset that only fits the one person involved.  When you buy it, you use an iOS app to scan your face, from which they create a foam liner that attaches to the very small headset, in the shape of your eyes and the top of your nose.  You send in your vision prescription and Zeiss makes lenses that snap into the headset.  And unlike every other PC headset, the Beyond uses OLED (actually micro-OLED) screens instead of LCDs for better color resolution and perfect blacks.  

Both of them are considered "expensive" in the VR headset world.  They have the pros and cons: the Varjo is big and clumsy, but it will fit almost anyone without modification.  The Bigscreen Beyond is small, but it is still pretty heavy and clumsy to wear.  The lens inserts reflect a lot of glare from the micro-OLEDS.  But the colors are better and more realistic.    

Both headsets require external base stations (sold separately, and by a different company) in order to be used, and if you want to play true VR games you need to buy separate hand controllers also.  

And my experience is: they suck.  Not so much because of their own hardware, but because of the horrible software on the PC that is required to make them work.  Both require the Steam VR third-party software to operate, and I swear to god, every time I fire the system up, it's like it's a new experience every time.  Sometimes the headsets don't initialize, and have to unplug something.  Sometimes the view in the headset is incomplete.  The Steam VR "room" that you start in looks like a silly cartoon.  Windows is, of course, famous for making their OS work with "everything", although what they really mean is that every company that makes a Windows product has to make it work with whatever Microsoft provides, because they have the largest PC market.  And for VR, what they've provided is pretty damn terrible.  But if you seriously want to play VR games, Windows is the ONLY choice.  

And keep in mind, if you enjoy games on a PC: to get a 3D view, you have to generate the screen TWICE.  Just attaching a VR headset doubles the required resolution to play, as your eyes are very sensitive to detail and are very unforgiving.  Each eye requires the equivalent of a 4k monitor.

And then there's the Apple Vision Pro:

and as soon as you put it on, you see exactly what Microsoft hasn't bothered to provide for you.  NO third-party software OR hardware is required.  You don't even need an external PC: the AVP is basically an iPad with stereo vision, and has built-in CPU, GPU and memory/storage, although you CAN throw your Mac screen onto it, completely painlessly, and thus have a huge virtual monitor anywhere you want it.

The AVP is covered with cameras, which it uses to allow you to just use your hands directly, as long as there's reasonable lighting, anyway.  Just pinch and drag.  

We're in early days, and there are bugs and other problems, but Apple have really shown how good VR must be in order to be useful to the general public, not just for hardware nerds like me.  It's very illuminating.

Tesla, Sapiens and Software Upgrades

 One cool thing about my new Tesla is that they've moved much of the operation of the car into software, which means that, as time goes on, my car will actually improve, unlike almost any other car out there.

In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, the author, Yuval Noah Harari, points out that the main difference between Homo Sapiens and other primates is that we can organize ourselves around ideas and so we can have groups larger than just people who know each other personally.

The point being, we, as a country, are attempting a software upgrade of our humanity, trying to replace the old meme, which was good for some people but not all, with something that works for everyone. The old guard are resisting the upgrade, they're afraid of change, but eventually you have to upgrade, to get the new features.

 My friend Ken Stanley and I created a song for the times, and posted it everywhere.  

My wife told me it felt like the Apocalypse; I realized it was Tuesday and contacted my friend the ace songwriter Ken Stanley, and suggested that he create a song called "Apocalypse Tuesday", in the vein of the "Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society".  A couple of hours later he had finished the song.  I sang it and played guitar and bass on it.

Then Ken created a great video for it in the space of a couple of days!  So here it is:

Apocalypse Tuesday

Film Frame Rate

I think it's high time for people to get used to high frame rate video.  The "Soap Opera Effect" seems eerily realistic because it IS MORE REALISTIC.  24-30 fps was a way to make film cheap enough to use, but just barely fast enough to make action less jerky.  We don't have to do that anymore; we don't use film stock anymore.  Realistic video is a GOOD thing!  It's time to start working with it!

The only movie I’ve heard of that was actually filmed to use a high frame rate was Ang Lee’s “Gemini Man”.  A kinda standard action movie starring Will Smith.  And the thing is, it looked pretty cool!   It bombed, but it looked cool.  But I agree with Lee: digital is not celluloid, and we don’t need to be limited to what celluloid can do just because of movie audience nostalgia for a crappy motion format.


https://www.indiewire.com/2019/10/james-cameron-disagrees-ang-lee-high-frame-rate-avatar-1202184115/

Containers

[geeky]
Containers.  The new buzzword.  The latest iteration of the desire to make applications invulnerable.

I've been working with Docker a lot recently.  I have to admit: I'm basically offended by containers.

Containers simply gather a lot of technology that already exists into one place and let you use it all at once with yet another interface and set of commands.  Some parts of virtualization, some parts of more advanced, kernel-based security features, all bundled into a single thing called a container.

The thing is,  we could have made running apps on single unix machines much safer and easier to do.  For instance, let's just admit that dynamic libraries were a bad idea.  They were meant to save space when hard disk space and RAM were expensive, but the price was library/DLL hell.  We don't need to deal with this anymore.  One time I begged my manager to let me statically link the older version of OpenSSL to a program.  It would save so much time and effort on the customer's side to not have to install our antiquated version of OpenSSL themselves, but the manager didn't want the responsibility for having to issue new binaries if another "Heartbleed" was found.  Fair enough.  But boy, does that manager want to get us working with Docker!  What?  Now we're not going to just be responsible for our own binaries, we're going to be responsible for the entire OS installation in the container?

Star Trek

I like many aspects of the new Star Trek series, but ... the writing.

SPOILERS!

The entire premise for the series is that Spock has a previously unknown adopted human SISTER.  Does that sound like a fanfic from a 15-year-old girl?

The first season is yet another trip into the “Spock’s Beard” universe.

The premise for the second season is that Spock (the real one) and his sister have to, um, save the universe. Yes, Mr. Spock is a really popular character.  Does he really need to dominate yet another series?

I mean, I often think about writing sequels to my favorite tv episodes.  Doesn’t everyone?  What most people DON’T do is write original stories.  I would think that’s what you pay actual writers to do.

Social Democracy

I'm one of the last of the Baby Boomers. Me and my parents' generation were deathly afraid of Communism and, by extension, Socialism as well. But those days are long over, the Soviet Union is dead and gone (despite the efforts of Putin), and China continues to be an example for the problems of both Socialism and Fascism in the 20th Century, that is, the problem was really Authoritarianism all along.

It's time for all true non-Classical Liberals and Progressives (which basically includes everyone to the left of Ayn Rand) to get over our fear of the "S" word and get behind Social Democracy. No one wants to have workers control the means of production (unless they really want to) and no one wants a "strong man" in control of everything; Social Democracy is key. It's what we and all our cousins in Europe and Scandinavia were already using, we just didn't have a name for it. Let's embrace it, and get to work!

Do liberals think Trump supporters are dumb?

I've seen many statements by Trump supporters that they are angry because liberals think they are "dumb" or "evil". I've even been told this by someone I know who feels this way. So, let's break it down:

Trump has been a celebrity almost his entire life. Everything he's ever done is out there, documented. All the philandering, all the bankruptcies, all the screwed employees, all the racism. Anyone who wanted to know about Trump and exactly what he was could have found out, long before the 2016 election.

Given that, there are three possibilities:

a. You didn't bother to check into Trump before you voted for him

b. You checked, but you didn't believe the bad stuff, despite it being posted by many, many sources that had no intrinsic anti-Trump bias, they just posted what he did, or

c. You liked what he stood for, even knowing what it was.

Now, which of these options should make me think you aren't either dumb or just plain nasty?

Can't go Back to iPhone

I decided to do a little experiment; I wanted to see if I could stand iOS well enough now that I could use an iPhone full time, specifically the iPhoneX, perhaps the most beautiful piece of tech I have ever seen. 

But once again, iOS has stopped me.  For instance, I want to copy a FLAC file to my phone and play it.  On my Android phone that's a drag and drop operation.  On the iPhone, however, the native iTunes can't handle FLAC, and so I can't use iTunes to transfer the file to my iPhone.  I could use a third-party app, but I'd still have to use iTunes to transfer the files.  It's too much of a pain.

So I want to arrange the locations of my app icons on my Home screens.  On Android, I can do this.  But using iOS, I can do no better than to limit the amount of icons on each screen in order to show some free space.  And I can choose which icons are on which screen, but I can only change their order, not where they are actually displayed.  And the big icons still look awfully Windows 3.1 to me.  

I want to buy a new Kindle book.  On Android, I can do that from within the Kindle app.  On the iPhone, I have to open up a web browser session at Amazon, buy the book there, then load it on to my iPhone using the app.  What a non-elegant operation.  Pisses me off.

Apple, it's time to join the 21st century.  Oh, I'll probably keep using my iPad; Android just doesn't have what I need there yet.  But phone-wise, do the following, and I'll consider returning:

1. Let me drag and drop music and video files onto the phone from my computer, and not just from a Mac.

2. Reduce the size of the damn app icons and let me arrange them how I want.  It's a beautiful phone, let me keep it beautiful-looking!

3. Let me buy stuff in the apps I want to use.  Preventing it makes you guys look like idiots.

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?