miscellaneous – Page 6 – Observations Along the Road

Unintended Consequences

Posted onFriday, September 4, 2015Sunday, September 13, 2015Authorcahwyguy

userpic=im-with-stupid The process of clearing out the accumulated links continues, although I’m getting close to caught up. This groupa-three deals with some unintended consequences:

Unintended Consequences of High Definition. Bloomberg has an interesting article about how the growth of high-definition video has made the prop master’s job harder. Simply put: the detail now visible means that props have to be stunningly believable, although that can create problems with things like realistic fake money. Wood has to look like wood, not plastic. Words on printed items need to be sensical. Logos of products need to be believable. What used to be visibility to a 2″ circle is now down to a ⅛” circle. Dust, dirt, and paint chips are visible.
Unintended Consequences of Answering Your Phone. Have you ever gotten a phone call, answered it, and … nothing. NPR explains how this simple act of answering your phone can be the start of phone fraud. This is how fraudsters determine there is a human on the other end and the number is a valid number. From there, it escalates…
Unintended Consequences of Conserving Water. The LA Times has an article about how all the water saving during the drought is creating a big problem. Sanitation districts are yanking tree roots out of manholes and stepping up maintenance on their pipes to prevent corrosion and the spread of odors. And when people use less potable water, officials say, there’s less wastewater available to recycle. Water suppliers, meanwhile, say the dramatic decrease in consumption has created multimillion-dollar revenue shortfalls. Shorter showers, more efficient toilets and other reductions in indoor water usage have meant less wastewater flowing through sewer pipes, sanitation officials say. With less flow to flush the solids down the system, those solids are collecting and can eventually damage pipes. [I’ll note there are similar problems with power districts as people move to self-generated solar: suddenly, they don’t have the revenue to pay for all their power plants.]

Logos: Successful and Unsuccessful Changes

Posted onThursday, September 3, 2015Authorcahwyguy

userpic=corporate And the process of clearing the accumulated links continues…. this collection looks at logos: those graphical elements that represent a company. It looks at some recent changes, some successes, some failures, and some what-ifs:

The Google Logo. We’re all familiar with the colorful Google logo. On 9/1, Google changed their logo: they went to a sans-serif typeface, came up with some “in process” dots, and a new single character logo. Still clearly Google, but different.
The Verizon Logo. Google isn’t the only company updating their logo. Verizon just updated their logo. Personally, I think it is ugly, but I didn’t like their logo before. I still remember when they were Air Touch Wireless. Yes, we’ve been a customer that long.
The Tokyo Olympics. On the other hand, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics just announced, and then ditched, their logo after charges of plagiarism arose. This is what is called “Doing an NBC”. Why? Those of us who are old enough will remember when NBC changed their logo from the peacock to a stylized “N”… only to find that the logo belonged to Nebraska Educational Television (whom they had to pay off). This allows me to finally connect an article that’s been sitting on the links list for a while, about how you can’t copyright facts, but you can copyright fake facts. Especially in the Internet era, it is easy to pass of the factual investigation of someone else as your own. But if there is an intentional error in those facts, that error can be proof of plagiarism (as map people know from fake map places).
Logo What Ifs. Lastly, here’s an interesting experiment. Take two logos. Swap the colors. Assess the impact. This is a great way to see the value and importance of color in a logo. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

On The Move: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Posted onMonday, August 31, 2015Authorcahwyguy

userpic=travel Continuing to clear out the links… here’s a collection of news chum all being related by the theme of travel or travelling:

Planes. Here’s an interesting article on the Hawaiian Safety Video. We saw this (twice) as we came out here: the use of the tropical locations and the employees (and their cute children) in regular clothes having fun just drew your attention to it. I found it quite well made.
Trains. When you see the logo of a transit system, you rarely thinks: why did they design it that way. Here’s an article exploring that question: Why the LA Metro logo has a notch in it. It was the outgrowth of a conscious design effort to Make Metro Cool. It has even won awards. But it is not alone: London has a conscious effort to design its Underground, including a focus on fonts.
Automobiles. Here are a list of 11 features found on older automobiles that you rarely find today. I still miss a number of these, including the vent windows. I don’t miss the cranks or the gas fillers under the rear license.

Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter

Posted onFriday, August 28, 2015Friday, August 28, 2015Authorcahwyguy

userpic=bored Another in the continuing series of clearing off the pre-vacation and vacation links.This collection all has to do with thing or concepts that are either abandoned, or should be abandoned:

Women Want To Have Extramarital Affairs. If the Ashley Madison hack demonstrated anything, it demonstrated we must abandon the fantasy that women want to have affairs with handsome married men. The New York Post actually said it best:

The Ashley Madison hack proves men are dogs. But the Ashley Madison service itself proves men are suckers.Not simply because millions of men who were trying to hide from their wives decided to use their real names and email addresses in signing up for an adultery website — though that wasn’t exactly the mark of genius. It’s because they thought that there were millions of halfway attractive, married women out there just waiting for a hot proposition from a married man so they could be unfaithful.

There aren’t. And chances are there won’t ever be. It’s hard to know how many users of the site are real (it sounds as if some were signed up by friends or enemies as practical jokes). But even taking the numbers at face value, the ratio is abysmal. There were about 28 million men and 5 million women in the account list, while the credit-card information belongs almost entirely to men.

Ashley Madison confirms what we already know about infidelity. Men are much more likely to engage in it than women. And men are much more interested in casual sex than women.

To suggest otherwise is either a male fantasy or a feminist one.

Or, as LA Observed put it:

But the bigger story is that Ashley Madison isn’t actually a website where men pay to have hot affairs with women then have their names and personal info hacked. It’s a site where men pay and try to have affairs, then have their info hacked. A real distinction.

The LA Observed article goes on with a whole bunch of statistics about the “women” on the site, including the fact that “Out of 5.5 million female accounts, roughly zero percent had ever shown any kind of activity at all, after the day they were created.”. In other words, Ashley Madison was a huge self satisfaction site for men. Now think about the fact that we’re pillorying people for being on it, even thought it is highly likely they were actually unfaithful. In fact, given they didn’t validate email addresses, it is highly likely that all the people who are on the list were really on the site.* Perhaps what we should abandon is the notion that society knows how to do critical thinking and reasoning.
Suitcases. From the 1910s through the 1960s, many patients at the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane left suitcases behind when they passed away, with nobody to claim them. Upon the center’s closure in 1995, employees found hundreds of these time capsules stored in a locked attic. Mental Floss has a fascinating article about the contents of those suitcases, and what it says about the lives and hopes of the patients.
Handwriting. Those of us in the computer generation may be of the belief that it was the computer and text message that led to the death of handwriting. Atlantic Magazine has a different opinion: they opine that it was the ballpoint pen that killed handwriting. This was because the pen used different ink that required more pressure and made writing harder. As a regular fountain pen using, I can believe it. A good fountain pen is head and shoulders above a ballpoint.

*: On Facebook, about a week ago, I wrote the following: “Re: 2nd Ashley Madison Data Dump. Perhaps it is just the way my mind works, but what is to prevent anyone with a grudge from taking any past data dump (say any Target breech), doctoring with additional information, and then dumping it as Ashley Madison data? Certainly not the reaction of the victims: they are tainted if they admit, and not believed if they deny.”

Interesting Games in the Pipeline

Posted onFriday, August 28, 2015Friday, August 28, 2015Authorcahwyguy

userpic=gaming Continuing the process of clearing out the backed up links while on vacation. Today’s collection relates to gaming. I’ve seen three interesting games come across my RSS feeds recently, and all look like things worth exploring. Part of our problem is that we’ve been without a gaming group (other than SoCal Games Days) for a few years, ever since Lauren died and Nicole moved out of the Valley. So we’ve acquired some new games, but have no one to play them with 😞. Still, we might aquire these. Live local to Northridge? Care to come over and play?

Ticket To Ride UK/PA. Evidently Days of Wonder has been continuing to add to the Ticket to Ride series. We love the game, but don’t have all the expansions (in particular, I’d be interested in the 2 player Nordic Countries expansion). We have the base game, Europe, Märklin, 1910, and the Switzerland version. So I read with interest the announcement of new expansion maps: Ticket to Ride UK/Pennsylvania. The changes they are making to the train system sound intriguing.
Patchwork. A mention in one of my RSS feeds led me to the game Patchwork, a two-player game where players compete to build the most aesthetic (and high-scoring) patchwork quilt on a personal 9×9 game board. Given I’ve got a wife into the fabric arts, and we need some more two-player games, this sounds worth ordering. [ETA: Dennis Donovan also pointed me to another quilting related game: Quilt Show]
Sushi Go. This game was discovered by a mention on Boing Boing: Sushi Go. This is a card game where you choose a card from your hand and then pass the rest to the player on your left (receiving a new hand from the player on your right). The goal is to score the most points by strategically collecting groups of sushi (or a piece of sushi and a spot of wasabi to dip it in) while working to block your opponents from collecting what they need. Each type of sushi has a different value, which is listed at the bottom of the card. For instance, egg nigiri is worth one point per card, while sashimi is worth ten points for every three you collect. According to BGG, it seems to accommodate 2 players as well.

Space, The Final Frontier

Posted onSaturday, July 18, 2015Sunday, July 19, 2015Authorcahwyguy2 Comments

2015 iPods userpic=ipod [Excuse the barrage of posts today — I’m finally catching up after a busy two weeks]

This week, Apple finally announced a refresh to the remaining members of the iPod line. The new refresh brings a faster processor, updated display, and multiple sizes. Commentators are going on and on about its benefits, and the major drawback discussed deals with its place in the new Apple streaming ecosystem.

Color me unimpressed.

Mind you, I seriously would have thought about getting one of these beasts had Apple deigned to increase the memory to 256GB, or at least made the memory a micro-SD card that was capable of taking the largest micro-SD card currently made (2TB). But 128GB? That’s less memory than my current iPod Classic at 160GB (148.79GB capacity for music). I’d have to delete music just to fit on a 128GB memory. As it is, I’ve only got around 13GB free on my iPod Classic, and that will be going down in a week or so (Amazon order going in on Monday).

Folks, we’re seeing industry trying to push us back to the future. They’ve successfully convinced people that you can do everything in the cloud — computing, storage, etc. Us old timers realize that’s just a move back to time-sharing on a central computer — the way computing was done in the 1970s. Apple and the rest of the music industry is attempting to convince us that we don’t need to own our music, we can listen to whatever we want by streaming; in fact, if we don’t want to pick what we listen to, they’ll do it for us. Us old timers realize that’s just pushing us back to the AM/FM model, where you would hear DJs programming a playlist of tracks out of a station’s vast library. Any music you had wasn’t portable. That’s the model of music we had until cassettes hit the market in the 1970s.

I’m sorry, but I like to have my own computing power that I control. I like to own my music, and I love the freedom to listen to whatever I want, whenever I want, and most importantly, whereever I want without worry for data usage or streaming capabilities. I want a dedicated music player so that it does not consume my phone’s battery, and that tries to do one thing right instead of many things wrong. Most importantly, I want a dedicated music player that has room for all the music I currently own AND all the music I will purchase in my lifetime. Most players cannot handle that. [Oh, and it would be a plus if it worked with the iTunes ecosystem so that I could preserve my play counts and all my smart playlists.]

Currently, there are NO music players currently sold that do this. Sorry, updated iPods, but 128GB doesn’t cut it. I’m sticking with my 160GB iPod and its twin.

Still, with only 13GB left, I keep exploring replacements. Here are the likely contenders:

Fiio X5 2nd Generation. Fiio focuses on the sound quality, aiming at the high-def market. Me? I focus on the fact that it has 2 128GB microSD slots, giving a total capacity of 256GB. What I don’t know about the Fiio is whether it views the two cards as unified storage, or you have to pick where to store things. I also don’t know whether it can handle playlists (esp. smart playlists), or work with the iTunes ecosystem. The price is reasonable: $349 for the player; microSD cards extra (~$80 for 128GB). According to one review, “Fiio is confident that there should be no issues handling larger capacity cards as they are released, so expansion options look good for the future.” However, the internal software usability seems markedly below that of the iPod Classic. [Edited to Add: It looks like there is software to help connect with iTunes for both the PC and MAC; the MAC software looks more polished. You can shuffle all music, but it looks like smart playlists are not supported and support for podcasts is unclear. Here’s the Fiio X5 Manual. Note also that the Fiio X3 2nd Generation is a possibility if they truly comply with the SDXC standard, and update the firmware to handle 256GB-2TB cards (such support would also make the Fiio X1 viable as well). Now, just imagine an X5 with 2x2TB cards. Wow!]
Astell and Kern. These are the high-end products from iRiver. The upper end (AK240, AK380) all have 256GB internal and support a 128GB card (the AK Jr is also a possibility if they up the SDXC card supported; however, it is only at 64GB onboard + 64GB Mini-SD). These have gotten good reviews; however, they require the user to determine what music is onboard and what music is on the card. I also don’t know a lot about the interface, but I suspect it is album oriented and not smart playlist oriented.
Sony 64GB Walkman. Although 64GB is in the title, it can also support a 128GB microSD card, giving 192GB. However, you have to indicate where music is stored, and I haven’t heard that much good about the user and software interfaces. However, at $299, the 64GB is much better than the $1200 128GB player. The $1200 player is overpriced (plus, once you visit the Sony site, adds for Sony start appearing everywhere).
Pono Player. $399 for a 64GB internal plus 128GB microSD. Pono got a lot of buzz when they started as a Kickstarter, but they seem to be being eclipsed by the competition both in form factor (they are Toblerone shaped, not deck-of-cards), and the interface. They have their own iTunes replacement called Ponoworld that appears reasonable; I’ve seen no mention of whether it can import from iTunes. It is also unknown whether Pono can be managed through MusicBee or other managers. Pono has gotten mixed reviews (Ars Technica, C|Net, Stereophile, Stereogum); the conclusion isn’t that the Pono is bad but rather that it isn’t significantly better than the others. I’ve seen some comparisons with the Fiio and AK, and the Pono does not eclipse the competition. The major advantage of the Pono, truthfully, is that the company is headquarted in the US. All the other players are Asian: Fiio is China, Astell and Kern is iRiver from Korea, iBasso is Korea, and Sony is Japan. If that is important to you, Pono may be the choice.
iBasso DX50. It looks like this product can support up to a 2TB microSD (i.e., it supports the full SDXC standard). The manual is here. Interface looks a bit rudimentary. Price is reasonable, but you need to add the card (still, having a single card is an advantage). It has gotten some good reviews.

None of these have good software for the computer side of the management interface. However, I’ve done some searching, and it looks like MusicBee is a great alternative (at least if you’re on Windows, as I am). I’ve read a number of reviews and writeups (Lifehacker, GHacks, Softpedia, Wikipedia), and it looks like it can import from iTunes, build smart playlists, and synchronize to DAP (digital audio player) devices.

I looked at the Cowon X9, but it seems to only take a 64GB memory card, and have a maximum file limit of 12,000 songs — I have triple that. The Sansa Clip+ is also recommended, but doesn’t appear to have sufficient capacity, even when Rockboxed.

My conclusion at this point is… wait, and if I get closer to filling the iPod Classic, move more of the less popular music off the iPod (or only sync playlists). Moving it off does lose playcounts and ratings — I’ve done that for some music already that I hadn’t liked at all, or stand-up comedy I rarely listen to or do not plan to listen to any more (Bill Cosby, I’m looking at you. Thump. Thump.)

I really wish Apple would wise up, and come up with a 256GB iPod Touch. It’s not that I want the touch screen — I want the larger storage in the iTunes ecosystem. Hell, come up with an iPod Touch that takes a microSD card. But I fear Apple will never do this; large capacity devices go against their current market, which is streaming, not stored, music.

I Come Not to Bury the iPod Classic

Posted onTuesday, December 9, 2014Authorcahwyguy3 Comments

userpic=ipod In October, Apple discontinued the iPod Classic. Do you think that made the iPod Classic worthless? Hardly. In fact, the iPod Classic is currently the most expensive iPod out there, commanding almost double its original shelf price. This makes me very glad that I picked up a backup iPod when I did. However, I’ve only got 15GB left. So I thought I would do a post on iPod Classic replacements. To me, the biggest drawback on all of these replacements is that they don’t have iTunes. Music is installed by dragging and dropping it on the device. They don’t support playlist, and I doubt they would move over my ratings and play counts from iTunes. Here’s what I found in looking for devices:

Fiio. The Fiio X1 has no internal storage, but supports a microSD card up to 128GB (so add that to the price), and might support even larger when they are out. So so user interface. It’s sibling, the Fiio X5, can support up to 2 128GB cards — meaning up to 256GB of storage. Again, not the greatest user interface. The X1 is about $100 plus the storage cards; the X5 is pricier.
Astell & Kern. The Astell&Kern products (from iRiver) both have large storage and great sound quality. The AK100 has 64GB internal, plus 128GB SD Card. The AK120 II has 128GB internal, plus 128GB SD Card. Both have a good user interface, but are pricey.
iBasso. The iBasso DX 50 supports microSD cards up to 2TB. User interface seems reasonable.
Cowon. The Cowon X7 still is hard-drive based, with up to 160GB of storage. Most of the other Cowon products have SD slots, although the maximum size supported isn’t stated.

As I said, the two drawbacks of the alternatives are price (the price of the player doesn’t include the SD card storage, making the overall price high), and the lack of a good music manager. You can move the music easy (but note that you’re moving MP3s or AACs, and these machines are designed for non-compressed music and high fidelity).

Is A Puzzlement?

Posted onThursday, October 30, 2014Monday, November 24, 2014Authorcahwyguy

userpic=record My wife recently picked up an Israeli CD at an estate sale. While importing that CD into my iPod, my thoughts turned to a puzzlement from many years ago, where I had another Israeli CD. That time, no amount of searching could find me the artist name, album name, or track information. I tried again tonight, and still no luck. So I’m asking you. Below are scans of the front cover and back cover (click on the images for the full size versions). Can you help me figure out album artist, album name, and the track names so I can import this into my iPod?

[ETA- 11/24/14:]

For those in the future finding this message, my step-brother-in-law transliterated the song titles for me:

Ve Begin | Because of (Aramaic)
Raza Dae Shabat | The Sabbath secret (Raza is Aramaic)
Techiyat Ha’Metim | Resurrection
Ha’Mehara | The Cave
Berich Shemayah | Prayed to God
Eilat Eilat | (like the southern city)
Adam Holech | A person walks
Zevagim | (No such word in modern Hebrew, probably Aramaic)
Zakif | (It has a double meaning : 1) stalagmite 2) a guard)
HIlulah | (In free translation as there is no specific word for it in English)
Asher Barah | (That he has created)
Hineni | (Here I am) (public celebration in memory of a saintly rabbi)

The album’s title is “Sod Ha-Echad” (Secret of the One), and the artist is Adam. It is a product of the Kabbalah Center, and appears to have something to do with the Zohar.