Author: Andrew Huey

iOS 10 – iPhone

Since updating my iPad to iOS 10 worked out ok, I decided to update my iPhone tonight. That too worked out fine. I’m not seeing much in iOS 10 that’s really interesting or useful so far. The changes to the lock screen and notification center are interesting, but I don’t know yet if there’s anything useful there, or if it’s just visually different. I need to read up on that and play around a bit.

I’m not enamored of the changes to the Mail app in iOS 10. The iPhone and iPad apps are a bit different; the iPhone app still has previous/next buttons, though they look different and work a bit different than they used to. And I’m not sure if I like the way they now handle message threading. I’m sure I can live with the new Mail app, but I might as well look at some alternatives.

A while back, I gave Outlook a try, but didn’t stick with it. Maybe it’s time to try it again. They recently made some changes to it, adding some fancy calendaring stuff. I’m not sure if I need any of that, but it might be fun to play with.

 

iOS 10 – iPad

I upgraded my iPad to iOS 10 last night. It took quite a while to complete, and there were a couple of points where the iPad seemed to be locked up, making me think that something bad might have happened, but it finished eventually.

So far, I haven’t found anything in particular that I’m really liking or excited about. On the other hand, there are a few things that are definite annoyances. Having to press the home button to unlock the iPad is the first. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but it might take a while. Swiping on the lock screen brings you to the camera or the widget list, depending on which direction you swipe. So I guess that’s a reasonable change, though I don’t really feel a need to access that stuff while the iPad is locked.

The biggest change I’ve seen so far, and I haven’t seen much discussion of it, is that they seem to have removed the “next” and “previous” buttons from the mail app. There’s probably some sort of swipe action that will take you to the next or previous message, but I haven’t discovered what that is yet, so for now the only way I can navigate from one message to the next is to go back to the message list and select the next message. I know that I can’t be the only person who was using those buttons frequently. I did find one other guy mentioning it in the comments for this article on iMore. (Apparently, this change only affects the iPad version of Mail and not the iPhone version. I haven’t upgraded my iPhone yet, so I can’t verify that.) Maybe it’s finally time to switch to a third-party mail client.

I need to read up on iOS 10 some more. MacStories has a gigantic review. As does Ars Technica. Take Control has an ebook. And I’m hoping for a dedicated episode of MPU soon.

I’ll probably upgrade my iPhone over the weekend, then also upgrade my watch to watchOS 3. I’m hoping that watchOS 3 is as good as some people are saying it is. I’ve heard lots of good things about it.

For a Long Life, Retire to Manhattan

This little piece from the NY Times is fun, if a bit unrealistic. I don’t think I could ever afford to retire to Manhattan, but I like the idea. I could spend my days wandering around in museums and going to movies. I’d never need a car.

Who knows, maybe by the time I’m ready to retire, things will have changed somehow and “regular people” will be able to afford to live in Manhattan again, not just the ultra-rich.

Retiring to Manhattan is an act of bravery. It also prepares you for the end. The anonymity of metropolitan life gets you ready for the anonymity of the grave.

Source: For a Long Life, Retire to Manhattan – The New York Times

Mac OS 9

There’s an interesting (and lengthy) article up on Ars Technica today about people who are still using Mac OS 9. I’ll admit that I miss some of the stuff from the classic Mac OS (prior to OS X). And even some stuff that was in earlier versions of OS X, but got changed or removed somewhere along the way.

In particular, I’m still annoyed about what they did to the scroll bars in OS X Lion. I really don’t like the thin scroll bars, with no arrow buttons. (I may have blogged about this recently. Or I may have just thought about blogging about it. I’m not sure…) I wish Apple would allow tools like Kaleidoscope to work in OS X, so people like me could do a bit of UI customization, to suit our peculiar preferences.

I’ve been thinking about stuff like this recently, since they announced the iPhone 7, with no headphone jack. That got me thinking about all the useful stuff that’s been removed from phones and computers recently, mostly by Apple: user-replaceable batteries, user-replaceable hard drives, CD/DVD drives, and so on. (And also thinking about the mostly useless stuff that’s been added, mostly by Microsoft. Basically, all the reasons so many people want to stick with Windows 7 and skip 8 & 10. But that’s a post for another day.)

Goodreads widget follow-up

And just a few minutes after my last post, I’ve figured it out: The Goodreads widget wasn’t working, because I had Privacy Badger enabled in my browser. Well, that answers a lot of questions.

And now that I can see what the Jetpack Goodreads widget does, I see that it is likely just a wrapper around the HTML/JS widget that I could have added directly in a code block. I’m going to leave it on the page for now, but I might drop it later.

Sigh. Well, back to that whole iced coffee idea. And lunch. Yeah, lunch sounds good.

WordPress widgets — On This Day and Goodreads

After updating to WordPress 4.6.1 recently, I also updated all my plugins, and decided to spend some time messing around with the site a bit.

First, I found that updating the On This Day plugin broke something; it started showing a PHP error. After looking at the code a bit, I figured out that just changing something in the widget config would fix the problem. If I was more ambitious, I would actually go ahead and see if I could fix the error in the PHP code, and maybe even see if I could get the original author to merge it in. But I don’t have the energy for that right now. We’re in the middle of a late summer heat wave, and I’m not up for PHP debugging right now. Maybe next week.

After messing with that a bit, I noticed that Jetpack had added a Goodreads widget recently. I like the idea of showing what I’m currently reading in the sidebar, so I added and configured it, but couldn’t get it to display anything. This is possibly because I have my Goodreads profile set to private. (Or at least partially private.)

I’d previously messed around with adding a Goodreads widget, using a general-purpose RSS widget, but (for some reason) had never added it to my live site. Looking back at that, I see that there’s a key associated with the RSS feed URL, so that’s probably the issue with the Jetpack widget; it doesn’t have the key (or anyplace to enter it in the widget config). And looking at the RSS widget that I’d experimented with previously, I see that I’d have to expose the key on my site to use that one. So I guess I should leave my “currently reading” list off this site, since I’m not sure what else somebody could do with that key.

Goodreads also has a customizable HTML/JavaScript widget that I could use, and which probably works with private profiles (without exposing the key), but I’m not sure I want to add that right now, since I don’t want to go down the road of starting to add miscellaneous JavaScript widgets all over my home page. (Been there; done that.) So if you want to know what I’m reading, you’ll have to add me as a friend on Goodreads, I guess.

After some spelunking into the Goodreads account settings, I’m a bit confused about all this though. I’m not entirely sure which stuff in Goodreads is public and which is private, and I’m pretty sure the “currently reading” list isn’t private. So I really think this is a rabbit hole I shouldn’t have gone down at all.

The weather app on my phone says it’s 86 degrees out, and feels like 96, so I should really stop messing around on the computer and go get an iced coffee or something.

Opera

I recently finished watching all of the Inspector Morse episodes that are available on Netflix, and that’s gotten me off on an opera kick. On the show, Morse is a big fan of opera in general, and Wagner in particular. I’ve never been that interested in opera, and have generally avoided Wagner, as his work seems a bit intimidating at first. But Morse got me curious.

I decided to start with Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde. I was already somewhat familiar with these two, based on having read P. Craig Russell’s adaptations of them, years ago. (Though, now that I’m looking at his opus list, I only see Parsifal. Weird. I could have sworn he did Tristan und Isolde too.) And (for no particular reason) they sounded less intimidating than some of his other operas.

I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, so I initially found copies of them that I could listen to via Amazon Prime Music. That got me started, but the versions I found there didn’t sound that great, so I wanted to actually buy copies of them. That led me down a rabbit whole of searching through Amazon, iTunes, Arkiv Music and various classical/opera web sites to try and figure out which versions of these works to buy. In the end, I settled on buying a $5 performance of Parsifal from iTunes, and a $20 4-CD set of Tristan und Isolde from Amazon. I’m sure there are better versions, but these were affordable and had good reviews.

I’ve been listening to the $5 Parsifal for a couple of days now. I like it a lot, though I don’t know nearly enough about the work to be able to say anything other than “it sounds nice.” The sound quality at some points isn’t great, but I’m not sure if that’s the recording or my crappy earbuds. (I need to listen to it through better headphones or speakers at some point.)

I ripped the Tristan und Isolde CDs last night, but haven’t listened to them yet. The metadata that iTunes pulled in for the CDs is really scattershot, so I want to clean that up, which led me down another rabbit hole, messing around with tools like MusicBrainz Picard and stuff like that. The process of cleaning up the metadata and copying the files over to my Volumio box is going to take a while, so I may not even get around to listening to it until the weekend.

I really need to find video versions of these operas, with subtitles, that I can sit down and watch, so I can actually learn the stories, and get a clue as to what all the yelling (sorry, singing) is about. I couldn’t find any interesting opera material at all on Netflix, though maybe I’m not doing a good job of searching. I found a version of Tristan und Isolde on Amazon Prime Video, but with no subtitles, apparently. And there’s a good bit of opera material on YouTube, though I’m sure some of that is unauthorized.

The Metropolitan Opera has its own streaming service, but it’s not cheap: $15 per month. I can’t imagine watching enough opera to justify that. Medici.tv looks interesting too, but is also expensive ($13/month). So I don’t think I’m going to sign up for either of those. I’ll just stick with what I can get through PBS and other free options for now.

I’m not really sure how long this opera kick is going to last, but I’m finding myself somewhat interested in the new season at the Metropolitan Opera. They’re doing Tristan und Isolde later this month, as their first opera of the season. I’ve never been to an opera, and I’m not getting any younger, so maybe that would be a good thing to try, at least once. On the other hand, sitting still for four hours while people yell (sorry, sing) in German is a lot to ask.

playing with Volumio and organizing my music

Without really intending to, I would up spending a bunch of time today organizing my music collection and copying stuff over to my little Volumio box. I set up Volumio about a year ago, and still haven’t quite finished copying music over to it. But I’m now all the way through to the letter “P”, so that’s pretty good. I don’t use the thing too often, but I use it enough to justify the time I spent setting it up, I think.

My adventures today started out with a desire to listen to the Gorillaz album Plastic Beach last night. I was pretty sure I had it on CD, but I couldn’t find it anywhere, nor did I have it ripped on my Mac or PC. After spending too much time looking around for it this morning, I decided to just buy a new copy of the CD. So I wouldn’t have two copies of exactly the same thing, I bought a used copy of the “experience edition” version on eBay, which should include a bonus DVD. (I’m really not sure if I ever actually had a copy, but I think I did.)

That got me interested in getting back to organizing my MP3s and CDs a bit more, and copying more stuff over to the Volumio box. I got through the letters “O” and “P” today. There’s wasn’t much under “O”, but there was a lot under “P”, including Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd, and Phish!

My McCartney collection was a little disorganized, so I tried to fix that up. I found that I had exactly one song in there that was a DRM’d iTunes file. I thought I had replaced all of those with the DRM-free versions quite some time ago, but I guess I missed this one somehow. Normally, this wouldn’t bug me at all, since I can listen to it on my Mac, PC, and iPhone, no problem. But Volumio, of course, can’t handle DRM’d files. There’s supposed to be a way now to delete and re-download a track in iTunes, in such a way that you replace the DRM’d file with a DRM-free version. But I couldn’t get that to work. I just kept getting the same DRM’d file. I thought about just buying a new MP3 copy of the song from Amazon for $1.29, but decided to just live with it for now. I get the feeling that it’s going to bug me enough that I’ll eventually do something about it, though I’m not sure what.

And, when I got to Phish, I remembered that I had a copy of the Live Phish 01 two-CD set that got ruined by spending too much time in the trunk of my car. The “Live Phish” series of CDs were packaged in a weird way; the CDs are in a folded plastic page that can be inserted in a binder. It’s kind of nifty, but if you leave it in the heat for too long, the plastic melts a bit and adheres to the CDs, rendering them useless. And I’d never ripped those CDs. So, today, I decided to just go ahead and buy the FLACs for that concert from LivePhish.com. So now I have those CDs back, but in FLAC form. And FLACs play fine through Volumio, so that’s good. (I’m listening to it right now, and it sounds nice.) If I want to listen to it in my car, though, I need to figure out how to press FLACs to CD, or convert them to MP3 or something like that. It’s been a while since I was on a FLAC kick. I did a little research on that, to refresh my memory, but decided that I didn’t want to go too far down that particular rabbit hole today. Maybe tomorrow!

paying my bills. (or not.)

I’ve moved almost entirely to paying my monthly bills online, and receiving the bills online. I’ve been doing it slowly and carefully though. I only just recently gave my electric company the OK to send my bill electronically. I just went online to download the first one, though, and I got a message saying “Error: Injection found.” Well, that’s not very reassuring! I assume the “injection” they’re referring to is SQL injection. If I try to log in via their home page, it says they’re “making some upgrades.” I hope that’s true and it’s not that they’re madly scrambling away trying to clean up after a successful SQL injection attack. Either way, if I’d just kept receiving my bills on paper, I’d have paid that one by now, instead of having to defer it until tomorrow or Monday.