State of the Ward

Computer as jukebox

When Apple released their Airport Express back in 2004, it changed the way I used my hi-fi. There was no longer any reason to use CDs: I could rip them all to my hard drive, play them in iTunes, and they’d be streamed wirelessly to the Airport Express, which was connected to the hi-fi. 

The move to lossless

In 2006, hard drive prices were low enough that I decided to have a second music library, which would contain lossless rips of all my music. That way, all my physical CDs were backed up in another medium, and the collection was future proof, because I could re-encode these files into whatever lossless or lossy form I liked. 

I started playing music from the second library more and more: instruments sounded more realistic, and recordings sounded less dense, like there was more room around the notes, their edges more distinct. 

At that point, why have more than one library, if I was so happy with the lossless files? Primarily, the reasons related to portable use:

• The iPods I had at the time were 4 GB and 20 GB. Today, I’m using a 16 GB iPhone as my main music player.
• My laptop didn’t have sufficient hard drive space for a fully lossless library, but if I only had one library on my Mac mini server/media PC, I wouldn’t be able to make changes to the music on my iPhone when I was away from home. 
• Tangentially, I have some high resolution¹ music files in my lossless library. The only thing that’s capable of making those worthwhile (and the jury is still sort of out on that) is to play them on my Mac mini, connected directly to my stereo’s digital analog converter (DAC)—Airport Express only plays 16/44.1 or 48. So I might not want to move away from having a library on the mini². 
• Also tangentially, it would be very tedious to merge the libraries so as to maintain the playlists and play counts in one, and impossible to combine the play counts of both.
• Again tangentially, people that borrow music from me would probably be pissed off at long downloads. 

On-the-fly

When the first iPod shuffle came out (the one that looked like a USB drive/pregnancy test³), the base model was only 512 MB, so Apple introduced a kind-of-cool feature: music at bit rates higher than 128 kbps could be automatically transcoded to that bit rate on-the-fly as they were copied over. Considering much of my music was 160 kbps, there wasn’t much reason to re-encode it, but the idea was good. Inital iPod syncs would be very slow, but after that only new or changed content would have to be re-encoded. 

In fact, for people with losslessly-encoded libraries, it was a great idea. Have full quality music on your computer (which had lots of storage), and convert that to a lower quality for your portable player (which had less storage). In fact, that addresses my first problem with having a lossless library. A hard drive upgrade could address the second. See the footnotes for a possible answer to the third. The fourth, is, honestly, me just being anal⁴. The fifth, well, they can deal—download and re-encode. Or go lossless. The Kool-Aid’s yummy, I swear. 

Oddly, though, this feature remained limited to the iPod shuffle⁵. I love Apple, but there are plenty of times when they choose UI simplicity over power, with the result being that an almost perfect solution falls just short enough to be unusable for my purposes. 

New developments

With iTunes 9.1, an update most notable for adding iPad support, Apple finally supported on-the-fly re-encoding for all iPods, iTunes, and iPads (though I’m not sure about the tv). 

Except it’s still hard-coded that the transcoding targets 128 kbps. Meanwhile, Apple has moved on to selling 256 kbps files through iTunes (come to think of it, that may be the motivation for this change). I’ve switched to using them as well, and I think they sound pretty fantastic. 

Often when Apple doesn’t want to clutter the UI with a power user option, they leave an option that can be set via the command line. I poked around and couldn’t find one for this, however. 

So, I could do it. But it would require me to compromise on bitrate, and on some of the other points above.

It’s under consideration.

24 bit and 88.2 or 96 kHz, versus CD standard 16/44.1. ↩ Although now that I think about it, I could probably just have the mini stream audio from the laptop. I think that would work, especially over an 802.11n network. ↩ OK, so that was just an excuse to post this video:

↩ To be honest, the others probably are too. ↩ Well, and the original Motorola ROKR and SLVR phones, but those were so horrible that they don’t even really deserve this footnote. Seriously. I had a SLVR. I know. I broke my contract over that awful phone. ↩

For the last post on the “uncanny valley” of beer, I attempted to gather some evidence to support my stance that Red Hook, Widmer, and Kona made “shitty beer”. That got a little complicated, and my results were mixed, so I’m sharing them as a separate post. 

First, I picked several “good” breweries and looked at their global average reviews as reported by Beer Advocate:

• Brooklyn: 3.85 (B+)
• Dogfish Head: 3.87 (B+)
• Stone: 4.11 (A-)
• Overall: 3.94

Second, the CBA breweries whose products I’m familiar with:

• Kona: 3.71 (B)
• Widmer: 3.71 (B)
• Redhook: NR
• Overall: 3.71

And, just for my own curiosity, Bridgeport, a brewery that I’m fond of but doesn’t have the respect of, say, a Brooklyn, Dogfish, or Stone, but also not the corporate overlords of the CBA have:

• Bridgeport: 3.73 (B)

So the difference between the “good” breweries and the “crappy” breweries was only 0.23, although the lack of an average for Redhook might have affected things. And Bridgeport, a brewery I respect, came out only very slightly ahead of the CBA breweries. 

I can postulate some reasons why my opinion might still be “correct” despite this: perhaps the limited release beers from the CBA breweries might bring their averages up¹. So I took what I considered to be a representative sample of beers from each brewery² and looked at their scores. You could argue with my choice of beers, but hey, this is just a preliminary study, right? 

Brooklyn:

• Brown Ale: 3.72 (B)
• East India Pale Ale: 3.67 (B)
• Lager: 3.86 (B+)
• Average: 3.75 (-0.1)

Dogfish:

• 60 Minute IPA: 4.05 (A-)
• 90 Minute IPA: 4.26 (A)
• Indian Brown Ale: 4.07 (A-)
• Average: 4.13 (+0.26)

Stone:

• Arrogant Bastard Ale: 4.23 (A-)
• IPA: 4.25 (A)
• Pale Ale: 3.96 (B+)
• Average: 4.15 (+0.04)

Kona:

• Longboard: 3.42 (B-)
• Firerock Pale Ale: 3.63 (B)
• Waihua Wheat: 3.4 (B-)
• Pipeline Porter: 3.82 (B+)
• Average: 3.57 (-0.14)

Redhook:

• Longhammer IPA: 3.21 (C+)
• ESB: 3.44 (B-)
• Slim Chance: 3 (C)
• Blonde: 3.31 (B-)
• Porter: 3.5 (B-)
• Average: 3.29 (-0.42)

Widmer:

• Hefeweizen: 3.21 (C+)
• Drop Top Amber Ale: 3.26 (B-)
• Drifter Pale Ale: 3.78 (B+)
• Broken Halo IPA: 3.63 (B)
• Average: 3.47 (-0.24)

Bridgeport:

• ESB: 3.9 (B+)
• IPA: 3.96 (B+)
• Stout: 3.82 (B+)
• Haymaker: 3.56 (B)
• Average: 3.81 (+0.08)

So, with the new numbers, the average for the “good” breweries is 4.01, 3.44 for the CBA breweries, and 3.81 for Bridgeport. Thus I’ve managed to construct (arguably artifically) a set of numbers that support my original claim. The numbers still don’t look hugely different; I suspect that Beer Advocate’s ratings are inflated somewhat—that is, the low end of the scale doesn’t get used much, because most reviewers don’t find the beers sufficiently horrible to warrant something below a 3.³ 

Maybe the numbers don’t suggest that the CBA breweries make “shitty”⁴ beer as I originally claimed, but the whole point of my post was that in representing themselves as making “real” beer, the CBA breweries set themselves up to be judged by a higher standard. 

Although this could also be the case for the other breweries, but I suspect somebody like Dogfish might suffer from limited release beers that weren’t well-received.↩ Based primarily on availability, i.e. beers that tend to be commonly available at stores that carry that brewery; and, also, when I was familiar with the product, whether I felt it was representative of the overall quality of the brewery. All very subjective.↩ I could do t-tests on these numbers to show whether they’re statistically significant, but I’m lazy.↩ Whereby “shitty”, I mean that I’m not happy when there aren’t better options available.↩

This list of “the Big Brewers’ Brands”¹ is an interesting read and a helpful tool. 

By no means should you avoid everything on the list, but the big two brewers, not content to own the lions’ share of the beer market, have either created brands that may, on a cursory inspection, pass as craft brewers (e.g. Blue Moon), or have invested heavily in existing craft brewers in an effort to compete in every segment of the market. 

In some ways, the latter category bugs me more, but not so much for philosophical reasons. Consider, for example, the so-called “Craft Brewers Alliance”, consisting of Red Hook, Widmer, Kona, and Goose Island (the last of which I’m unfamiliar with). They’re partially owned by Anheuser Busch/InBev (to the tune of 35%). 

Now, that doesn’t have to be inherently bad. But when you try a beer and find it substandard, and then later determine that it’s part-owned by one of the big boys, well, you do feel a bit vindicated. That’s happened to me in particular with some of Kona’s beers², most of Widmer’s, and all of Red Hook’s.

In robotics (and computer animation), there is a concept called the “uncanny valley”. The idea is that we have no problem with robots that do not look particularly human (for example, a Roomba), or that look cartoonishly human (Roomba, sort of, or a smiley face), but when robots start to look more like actual humans, the more we are disturbed when their appearance and actions fall short of being fully human. The same thing happens in computer animation—non-human characters in Pixar movies, or even human characters with exaggerated features are cute and endearing, but failed attempts at photo-realistic humans (think Polar Express or Final Fantasy) look creepy and soulless. 

Red Hook and Widmer, and Kona to a lesser extent, are to me the uncanny valley of beer. If I order a Bud Light or a Lonestar (because it’s free, cheap, or the only option), I know I’m getting beer-flavored water. But when I order an ESB from Red Hook or a heffeweissen from Widmer, it creates the expectation of a real beer. And when the beer falls short, I revile it. 

I hate Widmer and Red Hook because they make shitty beer, not because they’re owned by AB. But, finding out that a company that’s owned by AB makes shitty beer? No surprise there. 

Or faux-craft beer, as I call it.↩ Although I think their Pipeline Porter is pretty good, but I haven’t seen it this year.↩

First, the Mac had iTunes. iTunes played music; the name made sense. 

Then, Apple added the iTunes Music Store. It had AudioBooks, but I guess that’s close enough. The name still made sense. 

iTunes Music Store added Video. Well, that was just an exception, right? The store was still primarily about selling music. 

Then the iPhone comes along. It doesn’t have an iTunes app; it has an iPod app. I don’t really like the idea of abstracting a hardware device to a software app, particularly when the UI didn’t make reference to the iPod hardware itself. The iPod was supposed to be a device that let you access your iTunes content, right? So shouldn’t the software be iTunes? But it was still fairly clear and to the point. 

Then the iPhone got an app for accessing the iTunes Music Store, with its icon labeled, simply, “iTunes”. That’s a little confusing, because now there’s a program called iTunes that’s not for playing music, just for purchasing it.  

The iPod touch is released as (eventually) an “iPhone without the phone”. It doesn’t have an iPod app. That seems reasonable, since it is an iPod. Instead, it has separate “Music” and “Video” apps. These are essentially the same as the iPhone iPod app. That’s getting a little confusing. Then the iPod gets the iTunes store, and all of a sudden your iPod is running iTunes, but iTunes doesn’t play music. 

And then there’s the App store, which is its own app on the iPhone/iPod touch, but is part of iTunes on the desktop. 

So the lack of consistent logic and organization bothers me a bit, but it gets worse. The iPad comes out. iPad is sort of a big iPod touch right? Or the other way around. Anyway, the iPad has, basically, the iPod touch Music and Video apps… except the Music one is called “iPod” and looks very much like the desktop version of iTunes. The Movies one is still called movies. And there’s still iTunes, except it’s just the store. And then iBooks, which lets you buy books from the iTunes store, is also responsible for displaying those books. So:

• Desktop: iTunes
• iPhone: iPod, iTunes, App Store, (eventually) iBooks
• iPod touch: Music, Video, iTunes, App Store, (eventually) iBooks
• iPad: iPod, Video, iTunes, App Store, iBooks

Can we just start from scratch and reorganize all of this? I know it’s inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but there were a few seconds when I was playing around with the iPad and was confused because I launched the iTunes app and couldn’t get it to play music. I figured these were the sort of details that would make Steve Jobs’ brain itch—I’m surprised nobody at Apple has pushed for some consistency. 

I was fully aware that it was a huge ($500–$829) risk, but I went Thursday night and checked out the iPad at my local Apple store. I managed to walk out without making a purchase, but that’s in part thanks to the unavailability of the 3G model. 

I like to think that tech is my job (although I so rarely make money on it and so often spend money on it that “hobby” is probably more accurate), so I felt I had a professional responsibility to see the future of computing. Plus, Cindy’s thinking about getting one, so that gave me an excuse. 

Interestingly, it was probably the first time I’d been in the Apple Store in at least a year. 

Anyway, here are some relatively free-form impressions. 

Physical

• Screen is absolutely beautiful. Needs to be seen in person. 
• Size is perfect. Not too big, not too small. 
• 4:3 aspect ratio makes sense. Notably, it’s very close to the aspect ratio of a sheet of letter-size paper. Pushing the aspect ratio higher would have produced awkward results—when was the last time you picked legal size paper over letter size? (Lawyers being the exception.)
• Single biggest physical drawback is the weight of the device. It really doesn’t work well one-handed. Even two-handed, I was frequently tempted to set it down on the nice pedestal Apple had set up—especially for typing. I wondered if I’d prefer a half-size battery in a lighter model, but things aren’t that simple. 
• Feels great having a decent-size screen that could easily be picked up and manipulated. It definitely feels like it’s made for sharing. This would be great for meetings, or anything requiring a visual portfolio. 
• 256 MB of RAM seems stingy with multitasking around the corner. I hope this doesn’t mean that the fourth-generation iPhone isn’t getting a RAM upgrade.

General

• New UI elements (pop-overs, multi-pane views, etc.) are very nicely executed. 
• Landscape keyboard is great for two-handed typing on a surface. Portrait keyboard is, literally, a bit of a stretch when holding the iPad and trying to thumb type. Hand-held iPad + landscape keyboard typing does not work well. 
• In some cases, apps recycled their landscape view for portrait view or vice-versa, leading to some ugly letterboxing and pillarboxing. For example, the now-playing screen is designed for portrait view; when viewed landscape it is pillarboxed. This looked a bit sloppy on a product that has such beautiful design in most other areas. 
• The default wallpaper, while beautiful, does indeed give the impression of a scratched screen. Similarly, the wallpaper that was used for iPhone OS 4.0 demos was on one of the iPads, and the screen looked very much like it had water damage. Odd (but hilarious!) choices. 

Built-in apps

• From the screen shots, I expected I’d spend quite a bit of time staring at the beautiful calendar, contacts, and notes apps. They weren’t as captivating in person, though. 
• Maps is absolutely killer. Zoom and pan at the same time; it responds flawlessly. Street view is amazing; much better than the desktop version. With the 3G iPad, this will be great for road trips. 
• Safari feels just a bit slow. Using it is enough of a computer experience that I mentally benchmarked it against my laptop, not my iPhone. 
• However, web page rendering in Safari on the iPad screen was just gorgeous—for some reason, hardware or software, pages were much more attractive than when rendered on a computer screen. 
• Scrolling in Safari seems to have less friction/more momentum—that is, if you flick it, it scrolls farther and with a longer deceleration period. Compare the scrolling on a list on your iPhone (songs in the iPod app, for instance) to scrolling in iPhone Safari, and you’ll see that iPhone Safari doesn’t travel as far with the same amount of finger motion. It’s long been a complaint of mine; I wonder if this was changed because Apple felt that the larger screen made it necessary (or more usable), or if it’s an issue of computational power. At least, I think this was true. I didn’t bother to side-by-side against my iPhone. 
• Google did a great job with their new Gmail web app. Why isn’t the desktop version divided into panes?

Other apps

• iPod (keep wanting to call it iTunes—Apple’s naming conventions for media apps need an overhaul) app is very nice but I can only see listening to music on it if I’m, say, in a coffee shop working, i.e. when it’s being used like a laptop. Otherwise it needs to either fit in my pocket (iPhone’s job) or broadcast to my stereo. 
• On that note, Apple still hasn’t updated their iTunes Remote app that allows iPhone OS devices to remotely control Mac or Windows computers running iTunes. iPad would be a killer way to browse my music library and control playback of my home theater Mac mini. 
• Video playback seemed… bland on a clip (Nick & Norah) that was fairly dark, but I later realized that the brightness on the iPad I was using was relatively low. I suspect it would have been more impressive otherwise. 
• iWork apps felt imprecise with touch input. 
• Wanted to check out Omni’s apps and some other productivity apps, but the App Store was not set up on the demo I was using. 

Games

• Plants vs. Zombies is beautiful. It looks great on the iPhone but you don’t realize how much of the art you’re missing. 
• Flight Control benefits from the larger screen size—it’s much easier to draw the precise flight paths you want. 
• Real Racing was very impressive—I like the way the view tilts to match the rotation of the device. The game felt very much like holding a steering wheel and looking out a windshield. 

Closing thoughts

The whole device was definitely very, very cool. I want one. But, it’s the sort of thing where it’s not clear how you’re going to use it ahead of time—I think you have to have one and find ways to integrate it into your life. With the iPhone, hell, I needed a cell phone anyway, and wanted e-mail, web browsing, maps, and music playback. It was easy to justify (though a stretch at the original $600 price). But with the iPad, it’s easier to walk away… for now. 

In that same vein, it became even more obvious that the iPad is very much an auxillary  machine still. It’s not just the reasons I was already aware of: of loading/backing up data, and the fact that I can’t use my standard RSS-reading workflow (go through stories, open the interesting ones in their own tabs, go through tabs at my own convenience, sometimes months later) while also monitoring IM, Twitter, and e-mail. It’s also that things like iWork suggest that while it’s a good work machine in a pinch, there’s lots of things that will require the precision of a mouse and cursor. 

I can also see other people having better uses for it than me. I think for Mom & Dad, it would be a computer they would really enjoy using. Becca needs one for free-hand drawing, for showing off her portfolio, and for showing off design mockups to clients (on the occasions that she does freelance stuff). Cindy should have one to take to bed with her instead of her laptop. 

Possibly as a result of not knowing how I’d use one, I’m also not clear on which model I would want to buy when I buy one (which could be in a couple weeks or could be in a year). If if doesn’t have to hold my music and video libraries (and given that it’s not an iPod replacement, I see no reason it would), 16 GB seems like plenty of storage for apps and associated data as well as some music and movies. Is there some use-case I’m not anticipating that would require more storage, though? 

That leads to the 3G vs WiFi question. I’ve been advising people to buy the 3G as insurance, since it’s no-contract, pay-as-you-go. But the WiFi model would be very useful in and of itself, I’m sure. And do I need an excuse to give AT&T more money every month? But the lack of GPS in the WiFi model certainly argues for the 3G version…

So I briefly mentioned figuring out how to import my old Blogger posts to Tumblr. 

This is the tool you want. For what the author implies is basically a hack, it works very nicely. Of course, you’ll have to trust him with your password, but if you’re paranoid, you can always change it to something temporary for the import and then change it back. 

I initially had a problem where Blogger seemed to cap the feed of my posts at 500. In the URL for the feed, there is a max-results variable that in theory should work, but setting it above 500 (or removing it altogether) changed nothing.  

So instead, set the number of posts to 500 (or even n, where n is some number that’s not quite so close to the limit as 500; perhaps 250) explicitly, and then use start-index to grab the posts in batches. The final result will look like this, where ####### is your blog ID number: 

http://www.blogger.com/feeds/#######/posts/default?max-results=500&start-index=1

http://www.blogger.com/feeds/#######/posts/default?max-results=500&start-index=500

http://www.blogger.com/feeds/#######/posts/default?max-results=500&start-index=1000

etc. I haven’t even bothered to check whether my pictures or comments transferred over (doubtful). If I decide to keep my old blog content archived here, perhaps I’ll investigate making those things work and I’ll report back if I find something useful. 

I’m past-due to make my return to blogging. 

Confession is good for the soul; writing is good for the mind; and Cindy probably (definitely?) gets tired of hearing me ramble about how the iPad is a big step toward the future of computing, or why digitally-corrected sealed-box speakers are the way to go. I need an outlet to talk about stuff I like, so here we are.

The question, of course, is, whether I will use it. This thing could be abandoned in a few months. But like other things that are good for me that I’ve fallen out of the habit of doing (e.g. reading books), hopefully I can pick this back up.

Also, it’s better than looking for a job. 

I figured out how to import my old Blogger posts to Tumblr. But I wonder if that’s a good idea. That was the past, this is the present. I may just use this as a fresh start. In any event, the old blog will be forever, timelessly preserved, as if in carbonite. 

Similarly, my next step at revitalizing my web presence is to create a new homepage that’s a portal to my various web-based activities (tumblr, twitter, etc.). Chris Miller has the right idea. I’ll attempt to get Nick to help me come up with something original. But as a byproduct, the classic “Welcome to Ward” site will also remain in all its abandoned glory. 

The final bit of shop-keeping is that there’s a question of what bit will go on Twitter and what bits go here. Obviously, longer form stuff goes here, shorter stuff on Twitter. But pictures, links, etc.? There may be some overlap. Plus I think I’ll continue to have my tweets archived here, because, really, can I trust the Library of Congress as the sole custodian of my priceless tweets? So hopefully you’ll forgive me some redundancy. 

Anyway, you can expect more here soon… or probably already, because I doubt I’ll post this until I have more posts queued up. 

I hope I still have readers.