Plaidophile

The first thing that struck me was how different the user interface was. Apple have yet again disregarded their own UI mechanisms in order to make iTunes look different than everything else. The window control "stoplight" is now arranged vertically, and all of the icons in the app are monochrome and low-contrast. Even for someone with normal vision like me, it makes major parts of the UI a lot harder to see and parse at a glance.

They also hid the AirPlay (nee AirTunes) stuff in a little tiny widget in the corner, which makes it much less clear if AirPlay is available, and they just use a gray vs. blue icon to indicate whether it's active. You have to click on it to learn what your particular configuration is. Considering they're really trying to push AirPlay now, this seems like a curious design decision.

I was also a bit annoyed that when I started it up, it was in "group with album art" view, which I usually turn off, but they've done a bit of tweaking to it to make it actually useful (even though the vast majority of my music doesn't have album art) and so I'm leaving it on for now.

So of course I tried out Ping, and was immediately annoyed by the following aspects:

• It requires your real name, which is tied to your billing account
• It requires your gender, which is of course the binary male/female
• You are only allowed to select up to three genres you like. The list of genres is pretty pathetic and mainstream anyway, though.
• There is no way for independent artists to add a profile (hopefully that will change in the future)
• The "privacy" settings are just "do you want to let people follow you?" and nothing like, for example, "do you want this information to be available?" Apparently, no, they haven't learned from Facebook's bad example.
• The only activity it records is actively purchasing and rating things on the iTunes store. So much for Last.fm-style discovery.

On the plus side, iTunes feels much more responsive and less laggy, and it's obviously they've put a lot of work into handling large libraries better. Hopefully they'll address the "too cool for colors" issue on the user interface, and it's not like you have to use Ping.

With my Apple wireless keyboard and Magic Trackpad, what I'd really like is a lap desk that is designed to accommodate them clipped together. I envision something like a thin but rigid plastic slab with flexible spring "clips" along the top edge which would clip on to the round back part of the trackpad and keyboard, and they'd be spaced such that you could have either device on the left or right.

(The rigid base is necessary so that the trackpad has something to click against.)

Somehow I appear to have gone over the 250GB Comcast bandwidth cap this month, and "coincidentally" my connection has been shut off. According to the handy bandwidth chart I usually use about 100GB/month, which actually surprises me since I don't do a lot of torrenting or online gaming. I suspect this is a result of my new hard drive which caused Crashplan to go crazy with re-scanning my whole disk.

At least I can get online via my Nexus One in the meantime. Sigh.

Annoyingly enough, Comcast was supposed to call me to warn me, rather than just shut me off outright. Meh.

When I was en route to Chicago, the battery in my MacBook Pro began to swell, so bad that my touchpad stopped working and when I opened the battery cover, the battery popped out with a great deal of velocity. So I made an appointment at the nearest Genius Bar (which is annoying to have to do), and when my appointment came up (after a few failed checkins) I showed my quite-round battery to the Genius(tm) who immediately just gave me a new one for free, despite my MacBook being about a year out of warranty. It never hurts to ask nicely (although I was prepared to argue for it anyway).

Also, having previously been dissatisfied with a compact Logitech keyboard and a Wacom Bamboo Touch, I bought the Bluetooth keyboard and Magic Trackpad, and while it's weird to spend $140+tax on a mouse and keyboard, these are actually quite comfortable, and I have them on a little Ikea lap desk and it's much more comfortable on my wrists than trying to put up with my horrible keyboard tray. Hopefully this will help a lot. Unfortunately, the lap desk is a bit thicker and squishier than I'd like, so I'll have to try a couple others out, but still, not a bad setup, and altogether costs way less than a proper keyboard tray (and a desk that can hold a proper keyboard tray).

In science fiction series where there's some sort of universal translation thing which uses some ill-defined 'receiving the intent' sort of thing (Farscape, Star Trek, etc.), it seems likely that all civilizations would eventually lose their own cohesive languages. After all, if all children could just understand and be understood implicitly in whatever random babbling they come up with, there's no reason for them to adjust and learn their own civilization's common language, right?

So really, when there's a scene from the perspective of someone who is without the translation conceit, it seems like everyone should just sound like squealing, growling, baby babble, and the like.

So, I'm finally getting around to reinstalling Native Instruments Akoustik Piano on my MacBook, and I'd forgotten how much of a royal pain in the ass it is.

So, about a month ago I bought a Synology DS410j NAS and four Western Digital WD20EARS 2TB hard drives to replace my old PowerMac G5 as my NAS/backup archive/etc. Now that I've put it through its paces a while, I guess I'd might as well review it.

Since I'm in a break between comics, and I've been completely redoing my MacBook because of upgrading its hard drive and adding a dedicated NAS to my network and so on, I decided to go ahead and upgrade to Photoshop CS5. Which is, frankly, terrible in how slow and laggy it is.

I've owned a copy of Pixelmator for years, and they've improved it immensely over that time, but there are still a few glaring deficiencies in the UI. They've finally gotten the brushes to work really well, but now I'm finding that all tools are set to use the same brush all the time - including the eraser, which is always sized exactly the same as the brush tool. Which makes drawing much more of a chore than it should be.

So, once again I'm looking at alternate drawing apps. I have VectorDesigner as well, but vector drawing has never really agreed with me for a number of reasons (usually tablet pressure support is rudimentary or even nonexistent, and I also like being able to screw around with things at the raster level which I find to be much more flexible, even with its "inaccuracy"). This also pretty much rules out Inkscape, although I might give it a try again anyway.

GIMP on OSX is of course a joke (the various native efforts are in perpetually primitive states, and the X11 version doesn't support tablet pressure since X11 on OSX doesn't support much of XInput).

Basically, I need a drawing app with the following features:

• Runs on OSX
• A drawing/sketching-friendly workflow
• Tablet support (pressure, subpixel brush positioning)
• Layers (ideally with groups, and group blend modes)
• Magic wand selection and filling, as well as fast selection refinement (expand and contract at least, ideally with fast keyboard access)
• Is affordable and I can justify paying for it with the understanding that I'm an amateur who likes drawing for fun and doesn't intend to ever make money on this

There's a lot of free/cheap drawing apps out there, but most of them have critical flaws that make them pretty much not worth working with. It seems like there's a whole bunch of niche apps which work pretty well for their niche, and then Photoshop is what everyone else turns to, ignoring that it's slow, bloated, and massively overpriced for just a drawing app...

So, I've had an idea for a site pinging around in my head for a while, and I'd like to program it up, but I'm being a virtuous (i.e. lazy) programmer about it, and I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for things that would make my life easier.

I want to design an antisocial network. It would work by starting you off seeing everything that everyone in the whole world posts, and instead of friending people, you have to block them instead. You have a "people I don't care about" list. But if you don't post a status update regularly, it nudges you automatically. Everyone in the world is automatically signed up for it. There is no way to leave. Ever.

Today I was at the Alameda Antiques Fair, and came across what purported to be an original animation cel from the Star Trek: TAS episode Yesteryear. I of course bought it (after failing to convince Mark that he should), and then after framing and hanging it, I decided to watch the episode it supposedly came from.

Here is a simple procedure for setting up a simple transparent proxy to conduct basic network testing of some connected device, when your desktop box is running Ubuntu Linux.

1. Disable NetworkManager with sudo update-rc.d NetworkManager remove; killall nm-applet
2. Set up your network cards explicitly in /etc/network/interfaces (this isn't hard, but NetworkManager's duty in life is to crap on this configuration, it seems) and do a sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
3. Install dhcp3-server and squid, and configure them as appropriate. Most important is to change the squid.conf line like

   http_port 3128

   to

   http_port 3128 transparent

4. Use FireHOL for the actual iptables configuration, because life is too short to screw around with iptables scripts and tutorials that don't specify where said scripts go if you want things to actually, you know, work. My /etc/firehol/firehol.conf file is like this:

   version 5
   
   transparent_proxy 80 3128 proxy
   
   interface eth0 outside
   	policy accept
   	server http accept
   	server ssh accept
   	server https accept
   	client all accept
   
   interface eth1 inside
   	policy accept
   
   router nat inface eth1 outface eth0
   	masquerade
   	route all accept

5. Angrily post this article to your blog because seriously why does Ubuntu documentation have to suck so bad

The (only) downside to FireHOL, aside from its website being a bit difficult to figure out and its documentation being hard to navigate, is there's no way (so far as I can tell) to specify which interfaces get the transparent proxy, so you can't restrict it to a certain set of clients on the lan side. So if you're doing this to, say, test how transparent proxies affect cantankerous embedded devices, you're going to have to accept it also screwing around with your desktop's web browser. C'est la vie.

The Swinger is a simple Python app which uses a music-analysis web service to automatically convert any straight-rhythmed song to a swing rhythm. Of course, my music tends to be a bit weird in the rhythmic department, so I decided to try a few of my songs through this.

I especially like what it did to Baby, Be Quiet — it completely changed the song's character. Run Faster didn't fare as well (although it gets better once the guitars kick in). &counting actually worked pretty well; it's a bit ironic that it had an easier time with the beat on that than with some of my other songs. And of course, Sometimes It's Hard To Keep Yourself Moving was conventional enough that it worked out.

I did try a few other songs, which just became unlistenable (due to stretch artifacts) and didn't even get any rhythmic modifications (such as Sorry To Inform You and Double Take).

As great as technology was for my road trip (giving me a lot of flexibility and ad-hoc decision making without a lot of preparation), where my road tech of choice fell flat, it caused a lot of aggravation which seems like it would be pretty easy to make better.

Most of these are related to the Google Nexus One, but I have a couple of iPod issues too.

So, now that I have a nicely-rebuilt balcony, I decided to get an electric grill. (California fire codes ban the use of charcoal, propane, or other combustible-source grills within 10 feet of a combustible wall of a multi-unit building.) There are a few models that I was looking at, but based on what I read online, the Weber Q 140 seemed like the best bet. Of course, all the online purchase options would have cost just as much as just buying it locally, so I decided to go to Bed Bath and Beyond to buy it.

BB&B didn't have the Weber in stock, but they did have the Sanyo HPS-SG3 on sale for only $40 (same as Amazon's price, although obviously I had to pay sales tax this way), and the helpful sales associate who pointed me to it spoke very highly of it (and apparently America's Test Kitchen reviewed it very favorably), so I decided to buy that instead.

It is basically just a heating element integrated into a cooking surface (in an extremely well-designed manner), a plastic (but also well-designed) stand, and a metal drip tray. I don't expect the plastic stand to really hold up very well, though. I'm already thinking of making some sort of metal stand for it (maybe by adapting a cheap charcoal grill ) that would allow me to also put a lid on it (some of the Amazon reviews recommend using an aluminum baking pan as a makeshift lid, but I'd be worried about that melting the plastic base immediately) which would then also make it suitable for smokier cooking.

At the very least, this electric grill and a Stovetop Smoker together cost less than even the cheapest electric grill+smoker I could find (and most of them cost at least twice that).

I will be sure to keep people apprised as soon as I have a chance to actually cook with this thing (which will not happen until I get a sufficiently-large patio table and an extension cord).

I also realize how silly it is to take an item that is supposed to bring an outdoor cooking technique indoors and then immediately try to make it an outdoor thing.

A post on Matt Haughey's blog reminded me that I never shared my secret to making an excellent and cheap iPod/iPhone holder.

Materials:

• One large metal paperclip
• (Optional) Some insulation taken off of some wire or a bit of shrink wrap or whatever (or use an insulated paper clip)

Procedure:

1. Bend the paperclip to look like this:
   
2. Insert iPhone/iPod/whatever:
   

As a device, the iPad is pretty interesting, although as a platform, I'm just not that excited about it very much. I do see a lot of potential for it in the music space, though. The obvious thing is to use it as a controller for Logic, but there's a different sort of app I want it for: sheet music.

Specifically, what I'd really like is the ability to load a MIDI file or Logic/Sibelius/whatever score, select one or more instruments to display, and one or more instruments to play as accompaniments, as a means of practicing my instrument.

Although I suspect that I could already do exactly this with any number of MIDI-based scoring environments on the Fujitsu tablet PC I just bought off eBay for $260. (But that wouldn't be Shiny and Revolutionary.)

Anyway I guess what I'm saying is that I don't really care about the iPad, and I will roll my eyes severely at "the first iPad band" because it's like people forget that musicians always use whatever they have available to make music, and it's not like music software is anything new.

So, a while ago I switched to Chrome, because I got sick of how unstable Firefox had gotten on all of my systems (even after a full profile purge and removing all extensions and so on). For the most part I like it a lot, and most of the niggling UI things I've gotten used to, but I still don't like how it's missing some of Firefox's awesomebar functionality.

In particular, in Firefox, you can have multiple-keyword search that spans both URLs and page titles within a history, with very tiny fragments, while in Chrome, it seems to only work if you give it the full domain name, and even then it's inconsistent.

On my site I have several backend scripts that I use regularly. The two big ones are the Movable Type publication interface and my comic buffer validation script, which in Firefox I was able to access by typing "be mt" and "be va," respectively. With Chrome, the best I've managed to get is typing "be" brings up Movable Type as the default option, but in order to get the buffer validation I try typing different things which never end up bringing it up consistently, and in the end it ends up being quicker to just type the whole URL. Obviously I could set a bookmark, but bookmarks are kind of silly nowadays.

I know Chrome supports multiple address bar search backends, but I've yet to find anything which basically just does a grep on the history sorted by access frequency. I'm also not interested in learning yet another damn API to write my own.

Any ideas?

My home network had an outage pretty much all day because my UPS failed shortly after I left for work today. Is it ironic that it is only because of the UPS that I had any downtime?

On that note, any good recommendations for cheap UPSes?

So, after several days with this, there are already a few bugs cropping up. Nothing severe, but hopefully they can be dealt with:

• The placement of the microphone hole happens to be where my pinky naturally goes during a long conversation. I'll have to get used to not moving my pinky there.
• The phone seems to reboot overnight, no explanation given. I lock my SIM, so I always find that my phone is completely inactive until I unlock it. For now I've just unlocked my SIM, since the phone has the pattern-unlock and I don't care so much about locking my service anymore since it has nearly unlimited service and there's a PAYG-enforced cap on things that aren't unlimited. This is an issue that others are reporting too.
• Sometimes the phone goes to complete silent (not even vibrate) mode when it's in my pocket. Hopefully I can figure out what causes it. I have a feeling that it's one of those dumb human factors problems, since if you hold the power button for several seconds (even when the phone is locked) it brings up the silent/airplane/power menu, and the touchscreen is sensitive enough that it detects my skin through my pants pocket. That is definitely something to complain to Google about; a similar issue is what led me to finally abandon the Ericsson R520m (which I was otherwise perfectly happy with, although granted I wouldn't be happy with it now).