Author: Andrew Huey

Once in a Lifetime

I mentioned yesterday that I missed out on the big Michelangelo exhibit at the Met, which closed a few days ago. I’d only gotten around to reading the NY Times review of the show (from November) yesterday. I was reading another old email from November this morning, and saw a mention of the JoCo Cruise for 2018. I’ve always heard good things about past JoCo cruises, so I thought I’d check the website and see when this year’s cruise was going to be. Well, it’s February 18 to 25. So it’s too late for that too.

The Michelangelo exhibit was likely a “once in a lifetime” thing; JoCo Cruise is once a year. But there’s one other story from November that I just read that, sadly, keeps coming up over and over again: mass shootings. I was reading some comics from The Nib from back in November about shootings and the lack of any reasonable gun control in the US.

I did a little searching to see if I could figure out which mass shooting had happened in mid-November 2017, and I actually found two. On November 15, 2017, a man went on a shooting rampage in California (including going through an elementary school, which was thankfully on lockdown when he got there). On November 5, a man attacked a Texas church, killing more than 25 people.

And two days ago, we had another school shooting in Florida. So the cartoons from The Nib about the political inaction on gun control are just as current today as they were in November. In fact, I also came across a piece in the Times by Nicholas Kristof about how to reduce shootings that was written in November, but has just been updated. (It’s a very good article, by the way. Well-written and well-reasoned. And, sadly, I doubt it required much updating since November, since little has changed, except for more shootings.)

And every time this happens, The Onion re-posts a slightly modified version of their story ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.

Good Old Email

I’m a big fan of email. Say what you will, it’s still pretty darn useful. There was news this week about Google wanting to use AMP with email. I ignored this, since I don’t use Gmail anymore, and it didn’t seem like a big thing, on the surface. But there’s a post on the FastMail blog today titled Email is your electronic memory that’s pretty interesting. (FastMail is my current email provider.) They talk about how email should be “immutable.” (Apparently, the AMP thing is more about making email interactive rather than making it faster.) I haven’t thought about it too much, but the immutable nature of email is one of the most useful things about it. The web, in general, is very mutable. Web sites and web pages come and go. URLs change. But, if I’ve got an email in my mailbox, then the text (at least) of that email is fixed. I can search for it and find it and do stuff with it.

I subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters. One of the things I notice in these newsletters is whether they contain actual content, or just links to content. In general, newsletters that actually contain content are more useful than those that are just link collections. Warren Ellis’ newsletter is a good example. He includes a lot of text content within the body of the newsletter. He also includes links out to other stuff, which is unavoidable, but the main content of the newsletter is actually in the newsletter, as text. The newsletter for Tor.com goes the other way. It’s mostly just a list of recent articles on the site, with short text summaries and links out to the articles. The annoying thing about that newsletter is that the links expire. They use a link redirection service that, I assume, gives them analytics about how many times the links are clicked and stuff like that. But the links expire after a month or two. And I’m usually a month or two behind in reading those emails. So, if I click any of the links, they just go to an error page. To find the article I wanted to read, I have to search for it. That actually discourages me from reading most of the articles. I have to really want to read it to bother copying and pasting the title into DuckDuckGo or Google.

I also subscribe to a bunch of newsletters from the NY Times. Those are somewhere in between; there’s usually some content right in the newsletter, but also short article summaries and links out to the Times site for the full articles. One of the best newsletters they have is the one for The Interpreter. It generally contains a good well-written article in the body of the email, plus links out to related articles at the Times site and other sites.

And I use an alert service from the Times to get email notifications when new articles are published on certain subjects that I’m interested in. I have alerts set up for articles about comic books, sci-fi books & movies, and a couple of my favorite museums. These are really useful, since they frequently surface articles that I wouldn’t have stumbled across otherwise. But I was disappointed to see today that they have apparently discontinued that service. I haven’t seen an announcement about it, but there’s no longer a link to the alerts page from the account settings, and if you go directly to the alerts page, it’s now a static page that says “The New York Times has discontinued the My Alerts feature.” So that sucks.

Prior to setting up the alerts through the NY Times site itself, I had them set up through IFTTT. They were useful, but sometimes they’d stop working for no discernible reason, and they weren’t nearly as good as the official NY Times alerts at finding relevant articles. But I guess I might have to go back to IFTTT now. We’ll see. There’s probably some other fancy way for me to get alerts about NY Times articles, through a different third-party service, but I haven’t done any research into that yet.

Anyway, this was originally going to be a short post about how I need to catch up with my newsletters and news alerts, since I’m three or four months behind now. I only just read an article about how great the Michelangelo exhibit at the Met is, and it ended two days ago, and I didn’t get a chance to see it. Oh well.

HomePod reviews

I’ve been reading a bunch of HomePod reviews. Even though I’d already decided not to buy one, I guess I’m still kind of curious about it. Since I bought a Sonos One, I am of course looking to confirm that buying that was the right decision, so I’m paying more attention to negative HomePod reviews than positive ones.

Consumer Reports did some testing, and thinks that Sonos One sounds better. They’re pretty much the only ones though. Every other review thinks HomePod has better sound.

Gizmodo, for what its worth, thinks HomePod is only a little better than Sonos One. And they’ve got issues with the Apple-centric nature of the HomePod. (That complaint is pretty common among the other reviews too.)

I got some use out of my Sonos One over the weekend, since it was a rainy weekend, and I spent a good amount of time sitting in my recliner, reading comics. I was mostly just listening to WQXR, for background music. It works reasonably well for that kind of thing.

Got My Sonos One

I got my Sonos One this week and set it up, so I thought I’d write up a little review. Overall, I like it, but I’m not overwhelmed with it.

The setup experience was pretty bumpy. It’s done through an iPhone app, and it’s probably pretty straightforward if everything works right. For me, though, I couldn’t get it working on my wifi network and had to connect it to my router via an old-fashioned Ethernet cable. The app is pretty determined about trying to get it working on wifi. I wish it would have tried a little less hard, and let me give up and switch to the wired connection earlier. Once I got past that issue, though, it wasn’t bad. (To be clear, the device is on wifi now. Only the setup had to be done wired.) If you’re hooking up third-party services, you may have to do a lot of copying and pasting to log into accounts and authorize everything. That wasn’t too bad for me, since I have 1Password on my phone. If I didn’t have a good password manager on my phone, that part would have been difficult.

After the initial setup was done, I also installed the Mac app for Sonos. That app is a little easier to use than the iOS app, and I wish I could have done the setup with that app instead of the iOS one. (To be fair, maybe I could have, but it didn’t occur to me to try, since the instructions indicated that you should do the setup from your phone.)

As to sound quality, it’s good, but not amazing. I guess it’s pretty impressive for a speaker that size, but I still think my 30-year-old speakers sound better. (Admittedly, there are two of them and they’re much larger than the Sonos One.) I am wondering if the sound would be significantly better if I’d gone for the two-pack and set them up as stereo speakers. (But I’m not curious enough to order a second one to find out.) Last night, I listened to some Christian Tetzlaff, from MP3s that I ripped from a CD, and it sounded pretty good but not perfect. Right now, I’m listening to the same MP3s through my old speakers via Volumio, and I think that sounds better. (I hate to use hi-fi snob words, but it sounds warmer and more natural, I think.)

The general consensus seems to be that the Sonos One has noticeably better sound than the Amazon Echo, but it’s not nearly as good as the HomePod. (The Echo is on sale for $85 right now, and is probably a perfectly good speaker for most people.) I’m fine owning a Sonos One instead of a HomePod. I don’t much like the $350 price on the HomePod or the fact that it’s pretty much locked into Apple’s ecosystem.

Getting back to the Sonos, I like the fact that it works with a wide array of music services. I’ve got my Amazon Music, Bandcamp, Google Play, and Slacker accounts set up on it. I’ve only got the free versions of the Amazon, Google, and Slacker services right now. The Amazon service is useful for all the music they make available to Prime members (and access to anything you’ve bought from them too of course). The Google Play service is useful, since I’ve got their Music Manager installed on my desktop PC, which automatically monitors my iTunes library and makes all of my MP3s available in the cloud. So, with that, I can stream pretty much any music I own. (And I still kind of like Slacker, even though I’m not paying for it anymore, so I don’t get it ad-free now.)

Sonos uses TuneIn to allow you to listen to radio stations on the device. You don’t need to actually set up an account with TuneIn, which is nice. I currently have about a dozen stations set up, including WNYC, WXPN, KCRW, KEXP, and several others. The quality varies; some stations have a pretty solid internet stream and some aren’t so good. Many years ago, I was in the habit of listening to XPN every morning while I was eating breakfast. I stopped doing that when I started having too much trouble picking them up. I’m giving that another try now, via the Sonos.

NTS is interesting, in that they have their own integration with the Sonos. It’s nothing fancy; it just gives you access to NTS 1 and NTS 2. I do listen to those stations quite a bit, so it’s nice to have, even though you can also find NTS 1 & 2 in TuneIn.

There are plenty of other integrated services, including Apple Music and Spotify, so all the “big guns” are covered. All these integrations are the main reason to chose a Sonos over a HomePod, I think.

I’ve also pointed the speaker at the UNC path to my Volumio, and it hasn’t had any problems seeing that as a NAS and playing the MP3s from it. I’m pretty sure AAC files work fine too. (I need to try some FLACs and see if they also work. They should.)

Speaking of the Volumio box, while I do still like it, and will probably still use it on its own occasionally, I think it’s probably going to become mostly just a NAS feeding the Sonos now. The Sonos seems to be better than the Volumio for most stuff. Volumio only integrates with Spotify and not any of the other music services (and I don’t use Spotify). And while Volumio supports streaming radio, I haven’t been able to get many stations to work with it. (All of which is perfectly reasonable for a little open source project running on a Raspberry Pi, of course. I’m not knocking Volumio.)

Sonos One also, of course, comes with Alexa. I honestly haven’t done much with that yet. I’ve been controlling the device mostly through the Mac and iOS apps. I have said “Alexa, play WXPN” to it, and it did indeed play WXPN, so that’s good. And I’ve used it to check the weather. But that’s really not that exciting to me. I’m trying to figure out if there’s anything that’s really worthwhile or interesting to do with Alexa, but haven’t come up with anything yet.

The Sonos apps, for both Mac and iOS, are perfectly workable, but not really that great. It’s easy enough to start playing a radio station, or to find and play an album in my music library, but it’s not as easy as, for instance, iTunes. I’m hoping that they do add AirPlay to the Sonos soon, so I can just route music from iTunes on my Mac to the Sonos. (And I’d also like AirPlay so I can route podcasts from Overcast to the Sonos.)

I guess that, if I’m embracing Sonos, then maybe I’m finally ready to give up on the idea of ever buying a new CD player and going back to listening to my CDs the old-fashioned way. It’s getting increasingly hard to walk into a store and buy a CD these days anyway. According to this article, Best Buy is going to stop selling them entirely, and Target is trying to change their sale terms in a way that might not work well for the music companies, and result in even fewer CDs stocked and sold in their stores. I can still get CDs from Amazon, though, and often for the same price as the MP3s, with free shipping (via Prime) and AutoRip, so I get the MP3s anyway. So I’ll probably keep buying CDs, even if I only ever treat the physical media as a backup for the MP3s.

 

John Perry Barlow, RIP

According to a post on the EFF website, John Perry Barlow has just passed away. I have to admit that I didn’t really know much about him personally, but I admired and respected him for his role in co-founding the EFF.

I’ve been following links to a few other articles related to him.

  • The NY Times also has an obituary.
  • His 25 Principles of Adult Behavior is an interesting list and worth reading.
  • And here’s a bit from This American Life, where he talks about meeting his fiancée Cynthia, and their subsequent relationship. (Warning: it’s heartbreaking.)
  • An obituary on reason.com refers to him as “The Thomas Jefferson of Cyberspace,” which sounds a bit hyperbolic to me, but I guess isn’t too far wrong.

more music organization

Since ordering a Sonos One yesterday, I got to thinking about the state of my music collection. I’ve had a long-running project to rip old CDs and copy MP3s over to my Volumio box, starting back in 2015. I’ve been working my way through stuff, roughly in alphabetical order, with occasional side-trips. The last time I did any major work on that was in September 2017, when I got through to U2. Today, I picked up on that and got the rest of the way through U, then on to V, W, X, Y, and Z. So I’m done with the alphabet at least, though I have a handful of artists I still need to look at separately. (For instance, I have thirteen Chris Whitley CDs and most of them haven’t been ripped yet.) But I felt like I should write a short post to mark the date.

When I get the Sonos, the plan is going to be to use the Volumio as a NAS that the Sonos can access. Hopefully, the Sonos can do that with no problems. If not, there’s other stuff I can try, to make my MP3s accessible to it, though I’m hoping the Volumio works out.

Sonos One

I had, up until today, resisted the urge to spend any money on a “smart speaker” device. The tech is interesting, of course. Ever since ST:TNG, all good nerds have wanted to be able to just yell “tea, Earl Grey, hot” and have a piping hot mug of tea materialize in front of them. So Amazon Echo and other smart speakers are kind of cool. But, in practice, there’s really not that much you can do with them. You can yell “play AC/DC” and, on a good day, “Back in Black” will start playing from the speaker. If you have some home automation stuff set up, you can yell at it to turn your lights on and off, but that never really seemed too compelling to me. I can just as easily flip a light switch.

And, on the speaker side of things, I don’t think an Echo would compete that well with my big old-fashioned speakers, connected to my old-fashioned tuner. I still have my Raspberry Pi Volumio box hooked up to my tuner, and it works reasonably well, for most stuff. There are a few issues though. When I use it as an AirPlay receiver, it stutters occasionally. (I’m not sure if that’s Volumio’s fault or network problems.) And, for some MP3 files, the sound quality is a little off. Also, while it can play streaming radio, it only supports a limited set of stations. (You need to find a specific kind of streaming URL to use, and not all stations support it.)

So when I think about my current setup, there are definitely limitations. I like listening to old-fashioned FM radio, but the particular area I live in is a bit too far from both New York and Philly to pick up stations from either area reliably. I used to be able to pick up WXPN (Philly) and WNYC (New York) reasonably well, but reception has actually gotten worse over the last few years for some reason, so now I can’t pick up much of anything anymore, except for a few local stations. And I have a good CD collection, but no longer have a working CD player. Volumio was supposed to solve that problem, but I’m not entirely satisfied with it.

Anyway, this all leads me into looking into smart speakers. Apple’s HomePod is interesting. All the reviews I’ve seen indicate that it has great sound quality. But it’s $350 for a single speaker, and it doesn’t work with much other than Apple Music. It’s supposed to support AirPlay 2 at some point, and apparently supports the current version of AirPlay now, so I could always stream to it from my iPhone. But I can already do that with Volumio. It might sound better than Volumio, but it’s still $350.

The Amazon Echo is only $100, and the speaker is probably reasonably good, but most reviews I’ve read would lead me to believe that it’s probably not better than my current speakers. It does support a variety of music services and streaming radio stations, but of course it’s likely happiest with Amazon Music.

The Sonos One seems to fit well into a niche that’s somewhere in between the Echo and the HomePod. It’s $200 for one (or $350 for two, right now). The sound quality should be better than the Echo, but not as good as HomePod. (I haven’t actually heard one yet, but it’s possible that it could actually be better than my current setup, though I’m not convinced about that.) And it supports a wide range of sources, so I should be able to listen to WXPN, WNYC, NTS, and a bunch of other radio stations, if I want to. And it supports playing MP3s from a file share, so I should be able to access all of the MP3s that I already have on my Volumio box. It also has Alexa support, so if I want to yell at it, I can, but I don’t have to. (It’s also got an app I can use instead.)

There are some vexing limitations to the Sonos One though. It’s got no analog input, so I can’t pipe my TV sound output through it. And it doesn’t work as a Bluetooth receiver or (current) AirPlay receiver, so I don’t think I can pipe anything through it that isn’t explicitly supported by Sonos. (That’ll change when they add AirPlay 2 support, assuming they actually do that.)

So, anyway, I ordered one this morning. Sigh. I based my decision in part on this comparison at iMore, which definitely favors the HomePod, in terms of sound quality, but which points out some of its limitations. And on this article at recode, which talks about how Sonos intends to compete against the HomePod. I like Sonos’ approach of trying to support as many services as they can. And I read this review of Sonos One from Sound and Vision, which was very positive about the sound quality of the Sonos One. So I’m getting one, and we’ll see how it works. If it’s no good, I guess I can return it. But I’m hoping I’ll like it.

First museum trip of 2018

I haven’t been to the Met or MoMA in some time. Between bad weather and bad health, I just haven’t been able to get into New York. I finally talked myself into it today, despite today being a fairly grey and rainy day. I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to check off my wish list.

First, I wanted to see at least one of Ai Weiwei’s Good Fences Make Good Neighbors things. So I saw the “Gilded Cage” at the south end of Central Park. (That was kind of accidental. I had some transportation difficulties that left me at Columbus Circle, so I walked over from there.) I’m glad I saw it, but there’s really not much to it. I understand the point of it, but it didn’t really do anything for me.

Then, from there, I decided to walk up to the Met Breuer. They only have two exhibitions running right now, but one of them is the Edvard Munch exhibit, which I really wanted to see. I really liked that one. I’d never really seen much of his work before, so a lot of it was new to me, and unexpected.

After that, I walked up to the Met (5th Ave), wandered around, and saw a few exhibits, including the David Hockney exhibit, which I’ve been wanting to see since Thanksgiving. That was really good, but very crowded. (They had members early hours on that yesterday and Friday, but I didn’t want to take the day off Friday, and I didn’t want to go in so early yesterday.)

From there, I took a cab down to MoMA. There wasn’t much going on there that I was interested in, but it was fun to wander around a bit. And I had an idea that I’d get lunch near there, at Xi’an Famous Foods. But it was way too crowded in there, so I gave up on that. (Getting some cumin lamb noodles was definitely on my wish list for today. Maybe next time.)

I put a few random photos from the trip up on Flickr. Nothing impressive; I just snapped a few things for the hell of it.

Oh, and I didn’t realize until I got home, but today is Jackson Pollock’s birthday. I did manage to see my favorite Pollock paintings at both the Met and MoMA during this trip, so that’s cool.

I really needed to get out of my apartment and spend the day looking at art. This coming week is going to be rough. The State of the Union speech is on Tuesday. I’ve told myself that I’m not going to watch it, but I know I’m going to read about it, and it’s probably going to anger, depress, and/or annoy me. Then, I have the anniversary of my Mom’s death on Thursday and the anniversary of my brother’s death on Friday. So it’s going to be one of those weeks. I think I’m going to need art, and comics, and music, and maybe a little booze, to get through this week!

Five year work anniversary

I hit my five-year anniversary at SHI this week. I don’t really have much to say about that, but I thought I should mark it with a quick blog post. I mentioned SHI in my New Year’s Day post, so that covered my current status pretty well. I first mentioned the job on my blog in March 2013, after I’d been there for a couple of months. My current projects are a mix of straight Dynamics AX work in X++, some .NET stuff, using C#, and some research into Power BI. So it’s a pretty good mix. I think I might see some opportunities to do stuff with Power BI in the cloud and maybe some Azure stuff this year. So that could be fun.

We recently (finally) got current Visual Studio subscriptions at work, so I now have access to VS 2017 Pro and the other random fun stuff that comes with a VS subscription. (Previously, we had some kind of standalone licenses to VS 2012 and 2013.)

I’m always a little worried about stagnating and turning into “that guy” who has been doing COBOL programming for years and hasn’t learned anything new since the Nixon administration. But SHI seems to be giving me enough opportunities to work on new and interesting stuff, and I’m still trying to keep current independently, via services like Pluralsight and Safari, and podcasts like .NET Rocks and Hanselminutes. So I guess I’m still on the right career track.

Learning Power BI

I’ve recently started trying to learn about Power BI, since it looks like we’ll be using it at my job soon. We first started talking about Power BI in 2016; at that time, I looked into it a bit, decided it probably wasn’t something that was going to work out for us, and didn’t really follow up on it. And my boss didn’t follow up with me on it, so I figured it was dead or on the back-burner. I guess it was the latter, since it’s come up again. This time, it sounds like maybe we’re a bit more serious about it than last time, so I’ve been spending a lot more time trying to figure it out than I did back in 2016.

I’ve never really done much BI work, though I’ve done plenty of work around the edges of BI, and have dipped my toes into more serious BI from time to time. I’ve done a lot of ETL work, and that seems to be a big aspect of BI.

To get myself up to speed, I first took a look at what was available on Pluralsight. I started with a course called Getting Started with Power BI, which was a pretty good intro course that just zoomed through a lot of stuff quickly. Then, I watched a course called Introduction to Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence, which helped me get some background info on the current state of BI and data warehousing. (I was already somewhat familiar with the general idea of cubes, but didn’t really know much about them.)

After that, I decided to dig more deeply into the Power BI Desktop tool. This is a free tool from Microsoft that’s actually pretty good, and could be useful as a standalone tool, even if you’re not plugged into the whole Power BI cloud thing. I’m currently reading a book titled Pro Power BI Desktop. It’s covering the product in a lot of detail. (Maybe too much detail. It feels a little like this book doesn’t really need to be 761 pages long. But it’s a pretty good book, overall.)

There’s also a free course on EdX about Power BI. I might give that a try, if I feel like I need to. The course is part of a Microsoft Professional Program in Data Science that’s all available on EdX, and which looks pretty interesting. I’d love to do it all, if I had a lot more spare time than I currently have, and if I wouldn’t miss the $990 it would cost to officially enroll in it and get the certificate from it. The path I’m on now is more about simple BI rather than fancy data science, but I’m really curious about that stuff. I was listening to an episode of Hanselminutes this morning on machine learning and data science, and it was really interesting. I wish I had the time to figure it all out.

Back on the subject of Power BI itself, I was leery about it back in 2016. Microsoft sometimes introduces products like this that don’t last long, or that are overly complicated or expensive, given what they do. Power BI looks like it might actually be a winner though. The Desktop tool is quite versatile and useful even without the cloud service. I’m still trying to figure out whether or not it’s worth buying into the whole ecosystem though. You can do a lot with it for free, but the cost could get pretty high if we start using it for a lot of enterprise-level stuff.