Month: December 2018

iPhone XR day two

Today is day two with my new iPhone XR and Apple Watch Series 3, so I thought I’d post a few more thoughts on the phone. I’ve got all the basic setup done now, and things are working smoothly.

First, let me talk about the size of the phone. For some apps, it’s really nice to have the larger screen. For others, it doesn’t make much difference. For general usability, I’m still finding it a bit unwieldy. It’s harder to hold in one hand than the SE, and I’m finding that the back is a little more slippery. I’ve dropped it a couple of times already. I could make it a lot easier to hold if I stuck a PopSocket on the back, but I’m not sure I want to do that. I don’t really like the idea of sticking something directly to the phone. So I could buy a case and stick the PopSocket to the case, but that adds even more bulk to a phone that’s already too big. So I’m not sure if I’m going to keep using the phone as-is, or do something with it. I did order a sleeve for the phone, so at least I’ll have something to put it in to keep it from getting scratched up while it’s in my pocket, but that only solves one (potential) problem, and doesn’t make it any easier to use.

I’m still at loose ends with the headphone jack thing. My general attitude about it is still pretty similar to this guy’s (I want it back). But I’m trying to work my way over to this guy’s attitude (it’s time to move on). I tried the Lightning earbuds that came with the phone, and they’re not great. I might decide to bring them into work and use them as my “work headphones”, but I’m not sure they’re good enough or comfortable enough. I have a pair of low-end Sony earbuds at my desk that are a good fit and sound (I think) better than Apple’s earbuds, so I’ll probably stick with them for now, using the $9 adapter. If I keep the adapter at work, though, then I don’t have one for home or travel.

Maybe I’ll keep the Lightning earbuds at home; if I really want high-quality sound at home, I use my stereo and not my phone anyway. I can just use them for podcast listening at home. And maybe I’ll throw them in my backpack when I’m taking the train to NYC, rather than using the Urbanears headphones that I keep in there now, though I don’t really like that idea. Or maybe I just need to buy a few more $9 adapters (sigh).

For the car, I have the Belkin Rockstar thing to let me plug into my aux jack and charge at the same time, so that’s taken care of, though it’s going to be a little messy. And I think I’ll just keep that in the car.

I’m curious about AirPods. If not for the rumors of a new version coming early in 2019, I probably would have ordered a pair with the new phone. (Of course, if I did, I wouldn’t have them yet anyway, since they’re still not keeping up with orders on those.) Meanwhile, I’m thinking about buying a different set of Bluetooth headphones, but I don’t want to spend too much on them, if I’m just going to switch to AirPods next year anyway. But I don’t want to get really cheap ones either. So, in summary… yeah, I’m still at loose ends.

Aside from the size and the headphone jack stuff, it’s a fine phone. (I haven’t made a phone call on it yet, actually, but I assume it can do that.) It works fine for most of the usual stuff I do, but not noticeably better than the old SE. I haven’t checked out the camera much yet, so that’s another thing to play around with. It should, theoretically, be better than the SE camera (but not as good as the XS camera).

Given how much it cost, I’m hoping I can get three years of use out of it, but I know that’s a stretch. (The SE was about 2 years and 9 months old when I retired it yesterday.)

new Apple gear

I’ve been thinking about buying some new Apple gear lately. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about replacing my iPhone, iPad, and Watch.

My old iPhone SE is almost (but not quite) three years old. The battery life on it has been pretty bad lately. If I go through a whole day without getting a chance to recharge, it’s usually at about 20% by the end of the day. And if I use anything that drains the battery, like Uber, Lyft, or Apple Maps, it can drain down enough that it shuts itself down. (I had this problem one day during NYCC this year, where the phone was dead by early afternoon, largely because I’d used Uber to get to the con.) And it’s been getting noticeably slow lately too, in some apps.

The iPad I’m using now is an iPad Air that I bought via eBay in 2014. The battery life isn’t good, and it’s acting a little funny sometimes, but overall it’s still OK. I’d like to replace it, but it’s not top priority.

And my Apple Watch is a “Series 0” that I bought not long after I bought the iPhone SE. There’s really nothing wrong with it, but it won’t run watchOS 5.

I’ve been looking at the iPhone XR, but I haven’t been really enthusiastic about any of the current crop of iPhones. They’re all too expensive, too big, and none of them have headphone jacks. But, well, I decided to give in and buy an iPhone XR today. I ordered it via the Apple Store app on my old phone, for pickup at my local Apple Store. I got the “(Product)Red” 128GB version. We’ll see if I can get used to the size and the lack of a headphone jack. The total price, including AppleCare, the $9 headphone adapter, and a Belkin Rockstar adapter (so I can use headphones and charge it at the same time), came to just under $1000. Which seems like a crazy amount of money to pay for a phone. But oh well. I’m too old and set in my ways to switch from iOS to Android, so I have to pay that Apple premium.

And a friend dropped by today with a Christmas present for me: a new Series 3 Apple Watch! So now I have that taken care of too. The Series 3, physically, is pretty much identical to the Series 0. I haven’t done enough with it yet to tell whether or not it’s any better than the Series 0, in any noticeable ways, but I’m happy to have it, and to now be running watchOS 5.

Setup on the iPhone XR was a little painful, but could have been worse. It took several tries to activate it with Verizon. And, since it was running a slightly older version of iOS than my SE, I had to set it up as new, update iOS, then restore from backup. Setup for the Watch was comparatively easy. It paired with the new iPhone easily, and restored from the previous Apple Watch backup pretty quickly.

Over the next few days, I’ll have to see if I can get used to carrying and using a larger phone. The XR is significantly bigger than the SE. While the larger screen is nice, it’s a bit harder to hold than the SE, and it’s noticeably heavier. I haven’t put it in a case yet, and I’m not sure if I’m going to; it looks nice as-is, and I don’t know if I want to add to the weight. (I’ll probably write a cranky follow-up post about the phone in a few days…)

end-of-year comic book indecision

It’s getting near the end of the year, so I’m probably going to be posting a bunch of end-of-year review stuff over the next few weeks. Today’s end-of-year thoughts are all about how I’m buying comic books. I posted back in July and August about my decision to stop buying most of my comics from my local comic shop and switch back to Westfield Comics. Westfield has been fine, but I see now that I’m falling far enough behind in my reading that I’m probably going to have to give up on buying monthly books again and take a year or two to catch up.

It’s tricky deciding when to jump off the bandwagon though. I kind of like the idea of finishing Warren Ellis’ The Wild Storm series in print. There are six issues to go on that, so that would keep me buying monthly books until the middle of next year. Also, Tom King intends on writing 100 issues of Batman. So if I decide to keep following Batman through King’s whole run, I’ll be buying monthly books all through 2019 and into 2020. Of course, if I fall far enough behind on Batman, then it gets cheaper to just buy the collected trades rather than the single issues, and I can see myself doing that. I think I’m about 12 issues behind right now. (It’s easy to fall behind on a biweekly series.)

And I should probably consider the advantages of giving up on print and just sticking with digital. There’s a lot of things I don’t like about the way digital comics are sold/rented, but there are some serious advantages too. Looking at how much I’m spending on comics, I could actually sign up for ComiXology Unlimited, Marvel Unlimited, and DC Universe, and still be paying less per month than I’m currently spending on print comics.

FizzBuzz

We’re hiring a new developer in my group at work, and my boss is including me in the interviewing process. It’s been a few years since I’ve done developer interviews, so I’m a bit rusty. I suggested having candidates do a FizzBuzz test on a whiteboard as part of the interview.

Jeff Atwood wrote a good post about FizzBuzz on his blog back in 2007. It seems like an overly simple test, but it can be quite useful. I’ve only been asked to do FizzBuzz once myself, and it was a good experience. The interviewer was really sharp and asked me a lot of good questions about how I could do it differently or why I chose to do something a certain way. He turned a simple 12-line program into a good conversation.

At very least, FizzBuzz should help filter out candidates who are exaggerating on their resumes. If you say you’ve got five years of C# experience and you can’t write a FizzBuzz program, you’re lying. The two candidates we’ve looked at so far both have an MS in Comp Sci, so they’re both better-educated than I am, at least, and they should both be able to handle FizzBuzz.

Anyway, it occurred to me that I never wrote a FizzBuzz program in X++. So here’s a short job to solve FizzBuzz in X++. I might post it to RosettaCode, if I get around to it. Not that the world really needs one more FizzBuzz solution.

static void AjhFizzBuzz(Args _args)
{
    /* Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. 
    If it’s a multiple of 3, it should print “Fizz”. 
    If it’s a multiple of 5, it should print “Buzz”. 
    If it’s a multiple of 3 and 5, it should print “Fizz Buzz”. 
    */
    int i;
    
    for (i = 1; i <= 100; i++)
    {
        if (i mod 3 == 0 && i mod 5 == 0)
            info("Fizz Buzz");
        else if (i mod 3 == 0)
            info("Fizz");
        else if (i mod 5 == 0)
            info("Buzz");
        else
            info(int2str(i));
    }
}

The Internet Archive

Right now, if you donate to the Internet Archive, there’s a 2-for-1 match. I’ve been using links from the Wayback Machine to replace a lot of the broken links on my site recently, so I’d been meaning to send them a few bucks. A 2-for-1 match is a good excuse to actually do that. It’s easy to take something like archive.org for granted, but it’s not cheap to keep a site like that running.

Speaking of broken links, I’m continuing to clean them up, slowly. My broken links list is currently at 660. I’ve recently hit a vein of broken links related to “best of” lists from 2004. Some of those are gone forever. And John Vanderslice’s puttanesca recipe seems to have disappeared from the internet. No, wait, I found a copy. (I need to stop now and go to work…)

Illegitimi non carborundum

Here’s an oddball digression for a rainy Sunday morning: Somehow or other, the phrase “don’t let the bastards get you down” came into my head this morning. I vaguely remember my dad using it in a letter he wrote me when I was in college. Or possibly seeing it used in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Anyway, in the old days, this would have been a passing thought, but the internet exists now, so a passing thought can become an hour-long trip down the internet rabbit hole…

I first found a song titled Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down by Kris Kristofferson. That’s clearly not where I first heard it, but it’s not a bad little song. Then I found a reference to Illegitimi non carborundum, a “mock Latin” phrase that’s meant to mean “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” I remember seeing that Latin phrase before, probably in a book, though I still can’t find a reference to it in a Vonnegut book. (And reading the Wikipedia page for it, I see that John Boehner is apparently fond of the phrase, so that’s kind of disappointing.)

Searching further, I found a song by The Toasters called Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down, which is very different from the aforementioned Kris Kristofferson song, but still a pretty good song, if you like late-90s ska. And also definitely not where I first encountered the phrase.

And after even more searching, I found a reference to Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum, which is apparently an alternate version of the phrase, used in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I did read that book in college, so I might remember it from there. And the phrase is used prominently in the season 2 finale of The Handmaid’s Tale TV show, so that explains it’s recent popularity as a tattoo. I haven’t watched that show, and I’m so far behind with TV that I probably won’t be watching it any time soon, but I’m curious about it.

So anyway, that was my internet digression for this morning. I’m not sure I learned anything useful, but it was kind of fun. The sun is up now, so I should probably brush my teeth and find something useful to do.