After seeing yesterday’s post, a friend recommended that I pull the battery from my ThinkPad, hold the power button down for a few seconds, then put the battery back and see what happens. Well, that turns out to have fixed it. I’d never heard of that trick (or if I had, I’d forgotten about it). I searched to see if I could find any reference to it, and I found this SuperUser question. There’s not much information there, but heck, if it works, it works. So that’s one less thing I need to worry about today. Thanks!
Category: hardware
The ThinkPad Might Be Dead
My ThinkPad locked up today, and, when I rebooted, it didn’t think it had a hard drive. So either the hard drive is dead or something is wrong with the ThinkPad, and it’s no longer recognizing the drive. I wasn’t really in the mood to spend a lot of time troubleshooting today, but I went as far as pulling and re-seating the drive. That didn’t help. If I have some ambition tomorrow, I’ll remove it and try to mount it externally, maybe connected to my desktop or my MacBook.
I’m not too worried about this, since the ThinkPad has basically become my “third choice” computer. I use my MacBook the most (every day), my Dell desktop PC second most (generally for more “serious” stuff), and the ThinkPad gets booted up maybe once a month. I also don’t have anything really important on the hard drive. Everything important is in OneDrive or Evernote. If the drive is dead, I probably lost my saved game of Neverwinter Nights, but I’d pretty much given up on that anyway.
I bought the ThinkPad in 2011, and replaced the original hard drive with an SSD in 2014. So the laptop is more than six years old and the drive is a bit more than three years old. If the machine is dead, well, it was probably time. If the drive is dead, then I’m a little disappointed with that, since I think an SSD ought to last at least five years.
I’d like to get the machine working again, if I can, but if I can’t, that’s fine. It’s a pretty old machine and it might be time for a new one. Or maybe it’s time to give up on the idea of owning three computers. The desktop and the MacBook are good enough, especially when you add in the iPad, the iPhone, the work laptop, the work iPad, and all the other random computing devices in my apartment. Maybe it’s time to downsize a bit!
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.
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.
Router Follies
In an act of unmitigated hubris, I decided to try upgrading the firmware on my router today. I’d read about a security issue that could affect DD-WRT last week, and checked my router. I saw that I was running a pretty old build, and that there was a newer one. I had installed DD-WRT on that router about a year ago, and haven’t had any trouble with it. So I figured upgrading it wouldn’t be a big deal.
Long story short, I guess I maybe bricked it. I think I might have been able to get it going again by doing a complicated restart and TFTP procedure, but I checked Best Buy, and I could get a new router for only $50, so I did that instead. The old router dates back to 2010, so I was due for a new one anyway.
The new one is a Netgear N600, pretty similar to old one. I have no immediate plans to try DD-WRT or any alternate firmware on it. I’ll probably do something like what I did with the last router: when it’s more than five years old, and Netgear isn’t updating the firmware anymore, then I’ll look around at open source alternative firmware. But for now, Netgear is likely to keep this one up to date.
Now all I need to do is reconnect all my wireless devices to the new wireless network. (I seem to have a lot of wireless devices, now that I’m making a list. MacBook, iPhone, iPad, TiVo, Apple TV, Volumio…)
trying a vertical mouse
I’ve been using a trackball, left-handed, at work for the last few weeks. I’ve found that it helped with my shoulder problems a bit, and it wasn’t that hard to use. But I never got really good at precise positioning with it. So now I’m trying a vertical mouse (right-handed). I’m using this cheap one from Anker. A friend recommended an Evoluent VerticalMouse, but that’s $90, compared to less than $20 for the Anker, so I decided to give the cheap one a try first. It’s working OK so far, though I’ve noticed that double-clicking is more trouble than with a regular mouse, since clicking the button tends to move the mouse a little, and if it moves between clicks, it doesn’t register as a double-click. So I’m getting used to that.
I may try to switch back and forth between the trackball and the mouse occasionally, just to keep myself from relying on one hand or the other for too long. And I think I might try a trackpad at some point too.
Kensington Orbit trackball
I’ve been having trouble with my right shoulder recently. (Well, OK, by “recently,” I mean for the last twenty years or so. But it’s been getting worse lately.) I’m doing some exercises now, at the suggestion of my doctor, that might help. But I’ve also decided that maybe I’ve got a mouse problem. I currently use an ergonomic mouse, from Contour Design, and it works really well. It’s much more comfortable than any other mouse I’ve used. But I’ve been thinking that maybe I should give my right arm a rest, and try using a trackball with my left hand for a while, and see how that works.
So I bought a Kensington Orbit trackball and started using it today. I’m not having as much trouble with it as I thought I would. I’m not nearly as accurate with it as I am with my Contour mouse (and my right hand), but it’s workable. And I suppose I’ll get better at it if I keep using it. I might switch back to right-handed use at some point too. Maybe I’ll see if I can switch between left and right once a week or once a month, and see if that helps or if it just confuses things.
The Kensington Orbit is a pretty simple trackball, and cost me less than $30. It’s got just the ball, two buttons, and a scroll ring. The scroll ring works well; I think I’d be lost trying to use a pointing device of any kind that didn’t have some sort of scroll function. I miss having a third button though. I’m used to using three-button mice, and I do use the middle button (though mostly just in Firefox). I used Kensington’s software to map it so that when I press both buttons at the same time, that registers as a middle-button press. But pressing both buttons at the same time is a little awkward. Maybe if I decide that I like the trackball, but can’t live without having more than two buttons, I’ll trade it in for a fancier trackball.
Data Privacy Day
So I’ve been told that today is Data Privacy Day. In honor of that, I… got a haircut and cleaned my bathtub today. Seriously, I’ve had a lot of fairly mundane things to take care of today. But I did also want to do some computer maintenance, so I thought I’d try to continue with my effort to encrypt the hard drives on all my computers.
A few weeks ago, I turned on FileVault on my MacBook. That’s working well. It hasn’t noticeably slowed it down, nor has it gone horribly wrong and destroyed all my data.
So I thought that today, maybe I’d try to enable BitLocker on my ThinkPad. I didn’t get too far with that. Apparently, you need a TPM chip to use BitLocker, and I don’t have one of those. I did a little research, and you can enable it on a computer without TPM, but you need to store an encryption key on a flash drive, and insert it every time you boot up the computer. I don’t think I want to do that. It seems pretty risky and inconvenient. So I guess I’m going to put that idea aside until my next laptop.
I’ve also thought about enabling BitLocker on my desktop PC. That’s new enough that it probably has a TPM chip. But it also has a regular hard drive (not an SSD), and it’s a desktop PC. So there’s not as much risk of the drive being stolen, and there’s more of an issue with performance. So maybe I’ll put that idea aside too, at least until I replace the drive with an SSD (which I’m probably going to do at some point this year).
Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about anti-virus software a bit more. Both of my PCs are now running with just Windows Defender. I’m a little uncomfortable with that. It’s still kind of hard for me to accept that I probably don’t need third-party anti-virus software anymore. One thing that’s made it a little easier to accept is this blog post from a former Firefox developer, and some discussion about it on Slashdot and Hacker News. It’s really sounding like the consensus is that the MS anti-virus software is not only “good enough,” but probably better in many ways than the third-party options.