Category: Economics

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Surface Pro 3

“Desktop or Laptop?” a guy behind me in line at Starbucks asks his companion.  “Macbook!” he replies confidently and proudly. “Lot of RAM?” …. “16GB! It works pretty well!”… wait…. what? pretty well?

“I do have the i7” he announces proudly, “but I don’t find it to overheat . Wait…what? You pay top dollar for a machine (>$2000 prolly for that config) and it overheats in a professional setting? You’ve GOT to be kidding me. When the other dude starts talking about ‘cooling pads’ for laptops the hilarity is complete. I mean, that’s what Windows gamers were using 15 years ago to much ridicule from Apple heads… this is too rich!

On a brighter note, I picked up a Surface Pro 3; incredibly cheaply by the way thanks to a less than accurate listing on Ebay! It was billed as a “Surface 3”, but in the picture it clearly showed a Pro, with even a sticker on the back stating the i3 processor! Add a messed up Windows 10 Educational install, a little dent near the USB port (not affecting operation at all) and nobody bid. I low-balled him at $80 and he took it! With shipping it came to $96. When I got it, I made a fresh Windows USB installer and did a fresh install. A few driver updates and 10 Pro activated just fine with the embedded BIOS key. All was beautiful except……oh no!…….there’s a one inch strip across the screen where touch doesn’t register! Don’t worry, all it needed was a digitizer calibration and everything is perfect now. My styli from the Surface 3 work and even the Type Covers attach and work perfectly, although they’re a little smaller than a Pro, so I start looking for a matching one.

Mind you, the Surface Pro 4 Type Cover fits as well and is much improved, with a bigger trackpad and better keys, but it’s $150 new… ouch! There are used ones for $50-$60 all day on Ebay, but there’s an even better option and it’s thanks to something I care very little about: the NFL. You see, they had a partnership (still do? don’t know!) and made a whole range of Covers for all the different teams. A Packers one is more than an unbranded one, but I guess nobody is proud of the NY Giants because a new-in-box cover with their logo cost me $68 shipped. I did have to buy a charger for $20 but for under $200 total this is now one of my favorite machines. The XPS 13 I’m typing this on still has a better keyboard, but the Pro 4 Type Cover is quite good really, much better than the old ones, and with the tablet together weighs barely over 2 pounds. The screen is gorgeous, its 3:2 aspect ratio wonderful; full size USB port, good speakers and surprisingly good battery life and sleep behavior. I love the magnetic charger connection (credit where credit’s due: thanks Steve Jobs!)

Installed Cakewalk on it, with the Lounge Lizard, B4, Ivory piano: flawless. It sits perfectly on the sheet music stand on my P115 together with a Korg Nanokontrol, Zoom G3X on the floor as an interface, Korg Microkey velcroed to the piano: incredible sounding super-compact gig system. Apple users eat your heart out, you can’t even get this from the big fruit if you took a second mortgage out on your house! I’m having a flashback to seeing my dear friend with a touch screen hooked up to his Mac, trying to figure out how to make the drivers work on this (Windows 95 days….ouch). Mac OS does not natively support and thus understand touch… and that’s not because Jobs is gone; quite the contrary, it’s because of him, because he said that touch is for iPads, and because he decided to separate development between ‘computers’ and ‘tablets’. Microsoft was fucking right! CPU power will catch  up sooner than later and tablets ARE computers! Windows 10 is awesome and touch works on software that was never even designed for it (Ableton Live 9 I’m looking at you!)

So there it is: I can HIGHLY recommend the Surface Pro, even the 3 that I have with i3 and 4GB of RAM. You can pick these up for $350 or $400 used with a Type Cover and Stylus, they’re incredibly well made and as long as there are no cracks in the screen I would not worry about buying used. If you fly a lot, it’s amazing to be able to take the keyboard off and use it as a tablet which is allowed during taxiing and landing. The battery will last for 7 hours on mine watching video in airplane mode, and probably for 12 on a new one. The screen is gorgeous, headphone output sounds excellent and loud, and operation is super snappy. Oh, and you can add a micro SD card. Another thing Jobs thought was a bad idea…..

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How much?

There’s plenty of talk about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies these days; from endless banter from people who don’t even understand the basic premises, completely nonsensical information from folks who have no concept of money and finances in general and even some discussions anchored in fact and knowledge. One kind of vital piece of information is impossible to be found though: how much money has been put in BTC and its derivatives? It’s easy to calculate to the total value of all Bitcoins: quantity times price, just like the market cap of a stock, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I want to know how much money all of us together have spent on buying them and that’s not that easy to figure out.

One more thing: please, PLEASE take all these analyses on the web about BTC’s price movement (moving averages, death cross etc etc) with a pallet of salt. The people writing them are using methods that may hold value when applied to stocks representing companies, for predicting the value of something completely different, and that’s asking for trouble. You see, even if investors would lose trust in Ford as a company, its stock would still be worth something, based on, if nothing else, the company’s assets (factories, inventory, cash), but BTC could be worth $0 overnight if something bad enough happens. I’m not exaggerating; its price is 100% dependent on trust. I’m certainly not saying it’s worthless; I believe we have something incredibly valuable here in the long run, but our old methods of analysis can not be blindly carried over.

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Of strength and vulnerability

All this renewed talk about the ‘alt-right’ and fascism has had me thinking about strength and where it is found in this universe. The biggest fallacy of Nazis and the like is the notion that a genetically pure people is a strong people; it just doesn’t mesh with the way the universe works. Just look at the difference between pure-bred dogs and mutts: genetic diseases are more common in the former. Similarly, in the world of finance, the most robust investment portfolio is a diversified one. We don’t have the saying “Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Basket” for nothing, do we? In my opinion it resonates in just about all situations and I have made redundancy one of my main objectives regarding everything that matters: I’d rather have 2 computers than one, even if that means getting less fancy ones perhaps, I have accounts with multiple banks, bought 2 of just about everything that my life depends on. What it means is that half the stuff I own could get stolen and I would hardly be affected! The peace of mind that comes from that position, especially put against the increasing fear I see in others concerning the possessions, is truly priceless. What’s strange is how few people seem to understand it at all…..

Looking forward, digital security and strength is becoming more and more important. In my opinion, trusting one company with your entire digital life is not smart, especially in such a fast-changing world. We’re seeing more and more hacking of digital systems and it’s probably only a matter of time before a major bank will have its systems so compromised that it will become inoperable, at least temporarily. Think about that for a moment, if your checking account is unusable, what does that mean for your day to day life? Do you really want to be late on your mortgage due to no fault of your own? It might sound dramatic, but really we have no way of predicting what’s gonna happen. What we do know is that as everything gets more and more connected, bigger and bigger damage could be inflicted by smaller and smaller groups of people. Just this last weekend hackers broke into a California transit system and allowed everyone to travel for free, demanding a ransom to undo the hack. In this case the IT department was able to fix the system, but in others, notably a hospital here, huge ransoms have been paid. The bottom line is we don’t even know how vulnerable we are! As we move away from cash, multiple credit cards, and even a couple of checking accounts, in SEPARATE banks are the best hedge.

Another example is cellphones! We’ve all seen how people freak out at even just the thought of losing their iPhone or Galaxy; it’s about the $800 they paid for it, but also at the thought of being unable to communicate. Project Fi is just awesome in that regard, as they will give you a second data-only SIM for free, you just pay for the data you actually use. It’s allowed me to get a secondary phone, a Honor 5X I picked up for $170 BTW, which has my business number in it and a slot for a second SIM! Now I can get my texts, voice-mail and data access from my main account on a second device. I can even make and receive calls from my main number on it through Hangouts. Losing two phones is so much more unlikely than losing just one, isn’t it? Result: peace of mind.

The final example I want to bring up is food. Imagine a world in which every single person ate rice from the same patty; and now imagine there’s some kind of deadly contamination of said patty. You get the idea, everybody would die! Diversification is especially important when it comes to nourishment, on ALL levels. When you think about nutrition, the most effective way to make sure you get all the various nutrients you need is to eat a wildly diverse diet. Conversely, the best way to make sure you get deficient in something is to limit your diet to a few sources. We live in times where we have access to more different foods than ever before; for goodness’ sake, ENJOY IT! Because not only is a varied diet the healthiest, it’s the most exciting and interesting, isn’t it? It pains me when I see so many around hereconsuming nothing but salads and chicken breast, while under the impression that they’re being ‘healthy’. And yes, even McDonald’s can be part of a healthy diet.

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Dell XPS 18 review

Two days ago I received my 500GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD and did the upgrade to my beloved Dell XPS 18: let me tell you, it’s better than I could’ve ever imagined! My machine came with the i5-4210U, 8GB of RAM and a 1TB spinning hard drive which I now replaced. Even in its original configuration it was pretty sweet, but now it’s the snappiest machine I’ve ever owned. It’ll boot from being off in 2 seconds after the BIOS screen, browsers (IE or Firefox) open up instantly, searching is blazing fast! One 4GB DIMM is soldered on the motherboard, but the second one I replaced with an 8GB stick for a total of 12GB, the maximum this machine can handle and plenty for what I do.

My primary purpose for it was to read music on gigs; the typical iPad or other 10″ tablet is just so damn small, really barely big enough to display one page at a time, and although it’s mighty handy to be able to carry so much music in such a small form factor, I had always longed for something more. The Dell delivers in spades: it shows two pages BEAUTIFULLY, with room to spare on both sides. I recommend Sumatra PDF for a reader on a touch screen computer because you can open multiple charts at the same time, and do a two-finger tap on the one you need to go full screen. Try it! The Real Book PDFs fly on this thing, and when you properly index any collection of PDFs, standard Windows search (hit the Windows key and just start typing the name!) works instantly. The battery lasts 6 hours, long enough for just about any gig, and it sits on a music stand just fine. Added bonus: it runs Sibelius or Finale perfectly so if you need to make adjustments to a piece of music at rehearsal you can do it. I use the former, and it’s not exactly optimized for touch, but does work. Better is to just bring a mouse….

Speaking of input devices: the bundled ones are not bad actually. They’re made by Logitech and even though lots of reviewers think they are Bluetooth devices, they are not. Inside there is an extra hidden USB port with a Unifying Receiver plugged in, so any modern Logitech device can pair! Opening the unit is quite easy actually, just requiring a T8 torx bit, and one could put a Microsoft receiver in there instead if desired. There are two more USB 3 ports on the side and of course Bluetooth as well, so connectivity is excellent.

The screen is a 1080P IPS panel with an excellent picture, and full 10-point touch, which works well. At first it’s a little overwhelming, but you get used to using it as a tablet quite quickly actually! The built-in feet allow it to stand in two different ways: upright in landscape mode, and also at a much slighter incline, almost like an audio mixer. I use Cakewalk Sonar X3 for my audio recording and it fully supports touch. I haven’t used it that much yet, but this setup enables a hands-on mixing workflow that is very intriguing……..

That brings me to the second thing I was hoping to do with the Dell: running Ableton Live 9. So far I had always brought a laptop to gigs for this purpose, but I always needed another stand or table to put it on. The XPS 18 sits perfectly on my music stand which I bring anyway, allowing me to easily put it wherever I need it. One USB cable to my Kronos and I have a full-fledged rig, because it uses the Korg as an audio interface! I can’t tell you how amazingly well this combo runs, it’s truly a joy. No cut down iOS nonsense, the real deal! I’ve thrown the biggest Ableton projects at it, and even with the original spinning HD it worked fine, now with the SSD it’s smoking.

In addition to the 2.5″ drive bay, there’s a spot for an M.2 SSD as well, and I’ve ordered a 250GB one to put in there. For now I’ve been running the Ableton projects off a 32GB microSD card believe it or not, but this will complete the system with some of the highest performing storage out there. It’s still hard to believe that you can get this kind of machine in such a form factor. It’s easy to work on, really well built (by Foxconn I believe, who build iPads too), and comes with excellent, “Next Business Day” in-home warranty. Truly spectacular………

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Unbundle

As none other than Neil Young, who I just watched on Colbert this morning, sits tables behind me at Starbucks, I want to talk about some good news of the day, a show of progress if you will: HBO has announced it will start an online streaming service of some kind that does NOT require a cable subscription of any kind! Hallelujah! It certainly took long enough, but this is just excellent and I will be one of the first to put his money where his mouth is! It’ll probably be more than the $15 add-on it is now, but hopefully not much; I’m saving $25 by not patronizing Time Warner anymore, and would gladly pay that for perhaps Showtime and HBO on my computers. Now let’s hope that other talented content providers get on-board and we can shake this thing up a little….

BTW, Neil Young was promoting some music player device that gives you “100%” where an MP3 player gives you “5%”. He is of course strictly speaking correct, simply because the bitrate of the latter is normally a tenth of hat a CD has, and the former probably uses 96Khz, 24Bit audio. Of course our brains are so easily fooled, and I bet you 99% of all people would not be able to distinguish between the two formats, especially with the sonically limited material we listen to today.

Well, I decided to look it up: the device is called the PonoPlayer and costs $400. The corresponding Ponomusic service promises to always provide the highest resolution file-formats available for any particular content, with 44 Khz 16-bit as the lowest. The player does many formats up to 192Khz 24-bit….there you have it!

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X-Ray Christmas

Got a check from X-Ray Dog today: this is a music library company I did some music for with my friend Jono Brown years ago. I have 50% writer credit on  2 tunes called “Into The Abyss” and “Pinche Rey”, and 33% on a third, “Jono Cubano” which we did with Chris Smith. The amazing thing is, on this statement alone, there use reported from: France, Germany, Russia, the UK, Ukraine, South Africa, and Mexico! Maybe even more amazing: my total share of the royalties for all of 2012 plus half of 2013 comes to $40. Mind you, these are not single uses per country, we’re talking a 4 page legal size statement. I’m not complaining, it’s free money, but it still seems a little silly, doesn’t it?

On a conceptual level, it’s very interesting, wild to think that evidence of my existence is found all over the world. When I put out my first solo CD, I got orders from as far as Thailand and Japan, and there are now copies in Turkey, Brazil, all over Europe, Mexico. Between my two solos CDs I’ve probably just about made back my investment, but I’ve created something that will outlast me and that’s exciting! I’ve always been more interested in the art of music, than the commerce, so to me this is great success. I still believe in the compositions, they are not burdened by stylistic restrictions which limit their lifespan, at least I hope they’re not.

The beautiful thing is that the systems for residual payments will only get more and more automated so with proper labeling, royalties should continue to come in. With the continuing homogenization of music increasing, the call for truly original content is getting louder, and not just around here, the most unoriginal big city in the world. I think we will witness a resurgence of art of great proportions soon….