Category: Technology

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The price of fear

What is the price we pay for our irrational fear? If I had a dollar for everytime someone that came over immediately locks my front door, I’d be a rich man. Most of my life I hear “Safety First!” everywhere; how can that be a bad thing? Well, last night it cost me $5 for a tip and about an hour of my time. Let me explain.

One of the things that drive me nuts about modern cars ( and I rent one almost every weekend) is that they lock their doors automatically every chance they get.  I understand that it can be advantageous, a locked door won’t swing open as easily in a big crash and if you walk away and forget to press that button on the remote the car is “smart enough” to know you’re not coming back and might prevent coming back to a ransacked automobile. At the same time, I move fast, faster than the car, resulting in endless trying to open the door and having to unlock it again, and again, and again. Last night it got much worse.

It was going to be a rainy night here in Los Angeles and when we got done with our weekly gig at Pip’s I wanted to load up the car with all my gear as quickly as possible. It wasn’t as cold as I had expected so after doing the first two loads I took off my coat with the key fob in it and put it in the car. Normally any car with remote unlock will have tiny little buttons on the door handle that allow you to activate the mechanism if the fob is close by without having to touch it. I put stuff in the trunk, close it and walk back to get the last two thing. Mind you, at this point the car is unlocked! When I return 2 minutes later with the final load, the door is locked again; “no problem” I think to myself, but guess what: the little button on the passenger door does nothing. Wow, is it really gonna make me do this on the driver’s side? Nope, nothing there either!

At this point, I still believe this can’t be true! You mean, the car knows the fob is close, but inside the car? Why in the world won’t it let me unlock? I ask the valet guys and they explain that this does happen once in a while and that there is no other way than to get someone to break into the car! AAA to the rescue; in literally less than a minute the guy that came opened the car, and not with some kind of master remote which is what I expected. Instead he had a kind of inflatable airbag that he wedged in the door jam, and then inflated until the gap was big enough to get the end of a long flexible stick with a ‘finger’ at the end inside to press the unlock button! That goes to show you how silly we are in thinking we can keep out anyone with the intention to get into your car by locking it, although I guess it might have some deterrent effect on someone looking for only the easiest targets.

One big question remains though: why in the world  would it be a good idea to automatically lock the car with the key INSIDE? This is not a rhetorical question. The only answer I can come up with is fear of the outside world. The only scenario I can imagine is if YOU are inside the vehicle and someone is trying to get to you, perhaps to rob you or do a car jack, and you don’t want him to be able to unlock it by the normal method of touching the little button. What other reason could there be? It’s absolutely throwing out the baby with the bathwater isn’t it?

So there it is: defeated by a damn Chevy Cruze and a Western world of snowflakes!

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Rocket League

2600! The Atari 2600! My, or I should say our (my brother was co-owner!) very first gaming system! I’m talking 1979 or so, and those games were literally 4 kilobytes of code! As a matter of fact “Combat” was only 2kB! An entire game with music, graphics and gameplay in a thousandth of the space a 2 minute MP3 would take up. Joust was my favorite…. two player! Oh my God we had lots of fun…..

Now fast forward to 2018 and my neighbor and I have been getting really deep into Rocket League. The premise is simple: 3 on 3 soccer, with rocket powered cars! You can ‘ride the walls’, you can fly… that is, once you learn how to control yourself. The depth of this game is mind-blowing. The level attained by the top guys is nothing short of amazing, and now that I’m 450 hours (?@?!?2!?2) in and Alberto has about half of that, we are getting our asses handed to us, STILL, on a pretty regular basis! Then again, we have learned a lot of technique and tricks: lunging by a well timed double tap, saving rocket boost for just the right time. It’s ALL about timing, flying, positioning…. a lot like chess: easy to learn, exceedingly hard to master, but always fun along the journey. Just let the term ‘air dribbling’ sink in for a second……

Unique and amazing: you can play cross-platform mulitplayer online! That means someone with an XBOX can play another with a Playstation and another with Steam on Windows. Equally cool is that on Windows you can connect controllers from both systems simultaneously! My neighbor has a PS4, I use an XBox One S model, in the same game split-screen.

For $19.99, and often on sale for half of that, this is simply one of the greatest games of all time. The physics engine is awesome, there are endless training sequences available, plenty of totally free multiplayer servers that work fast and smoothly, with plenty of players looking for games, competitive or not. There are even experimental modes, with weird tweaks like fists and lightning, and a bizarre “hoops” mode where getting the ball in the air is crucial; you catch my drift. Simply AWESOME!

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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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x64 to ARM, come in ARM

It’s been rumored for a while, but today even Bloomberg is reporting on a possible platform change coming in 2020 to macOS; supposedly Apple is seriously considering making its own chips for Macs, just like it has been doing for phones and tablets for a while now. While in the iOS the transition from Samsung to self-designed SOCs didn’t mean breaking compatibility because just about anyone can use the ARM architecture and build on it, laptops and desktops are a different story.

You see, there are only three entities allowed to build x86 and x64 CPUs, and the Big Fruit is not one of them. What that means is that Apple will almost certainly transition macOS to ARM if it starts making its own CPUs. Now, most discussions I have read on the interwebs focus almost entirely on performance and whether the “mobile” chips will be able to keep up with “laptop” and “desktop” chips. In my opinion, there would not be a problem in that department; especially with higher TDPs Apple’s chips should be just fine. Also, all frequently updated software (think browsers, Netflix, MS Office) should be operational pretty quickly, although there will be some hell to pay in the bug department as there always is with such a major operation.

The real problems will be affecting a small subset of users, among which are a LOT of people I know. This is because there is a whole subset of software that does NOT get updated frequently or at all; I’m talking about Audio Production software. If I had a dollar for every Mac user I’ve heard complain about what happened when Apple went from the G5 to Intel chips…. great plugins, like the Native Instruments B4, were never updated, Spectrasonics stuff was the same. Mind you, on Windows I can and still DO use them (there hasn’t been released anything better!). Now look at Pro Tools: the list of which versions work on which OS is a mind-bender! It’s such a mess that I occasionally get calls from Mac users to see if I can help them, and now the musical director at my church told me he’s fed up with Apple and asked me to help him transition to Windows. There’s simply nothing worse than a company forcing you to give up the tools you already know and love, because of arbitrary reasons. Windows has shown the way for years now; I can still run software from the 1990’s for goodness’ sake.

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Death by machine: part deux

Amazingly, two videos of the first fatal autonomous Uber crash have been released to the public. I’m sure we’ll have quite the extended debate over them, and the human ‘safety’ driver, who is supposed to make sure the machine doesn’t make mistakes, or at least take over when it does; this woman failed spectacularly, that’s for sure. She was simply not even looking out the window, instead looking down at something in her lap until a split second before the crash occurred. The most interesting legal question is how much liability she has in this disaster.

When watching the dashcam of the car, one thing becomes clear: the victim made a move that just begged for a correction in the population that only natural selection can provide. There’s most likely no way the car could have been controlled to NOT hit her, certainly not by a person, but probably not even by a machine with infinitely faster response. She just came out of the dark in THE most stupid place to cross, in addition hampered in her mobility by the bike she was dragging along. It seems hard to believe she didn’t jump in front of the car on purpose but let’s assume she didn’t. In my opinion it would be unreasonable to put the blame for her death on anyone or anything other than her.

At the same time, there’s something very very interesting about the video and the little info about what happened that we do have. Apparently, the brakes were not applied at all! That the knucklehead behind the wheel didn’t is perhaps somewhat understandable, she had literally a fraction of a second, but for a machine that’s an eternity. Once she came out of the shadows, in those 2 frames, she’s clearly visible, and clearly in the path of the car. Did its sensors not notice her at all? Did it decide it was too late to start braking? Amazingly what the car was ‘thinking’ will be known, at least to the engineers with access to it. At the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that Google’s cars would have done better. In either case, it’s yet another data set, another set of circumstances that future Uber cars have in their experience.

Finally, to all the doubters of autonomous vehicles: just look at how utterly relaxed and trusting the safety driver was. Amazingly, it has to be prove of how well this tech already works, and Google is significantly ahead in its capabilities. Dead lady or not, this tech is coming quickly; you can improve computers, but you can’t fix stupid!

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Death by machine

So, it happened. A self-driving car struck and killed a pedestrian. If I had a dollar for every person I ever discussed this tech with that said “one death, lawsuits will shut it down…..”, I’d be able to pay the families legal fees. Except that’s not what’s gonna happen. You see, these machines record every single detail all the time; if that’s not admissible evidence,  I don’t know what is.

Already police have said it seems the woman jumped out of the shadows onto a dark road,  away from a legal crosswalk, and that a human driver likely could not have prevented hitting her. These cars have 360 degree vision, radar, lidar and who knows what else. Their reaction time is a fraction of the fastest human’s; they don’t get tired, or distracted. I’m not saying they’re flawless, of course not, but every machine of a particular brand has all the knowledge of all the ones that came before it! Every human that has to learn how to drive has to start over. Just think about that for a second..

 

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Cardboard

Cardboard? Really? A post about packing material? No, this is about Google Carboard, the most inexpensive way to experience VR! Really, I paid $10 at Best Buy for its Insignia version and it is AWESOME! I’d been reading about it for a while, but when my neighbor let me try the one his wife got at work, I knew I had to get my own.

Unsurprisingly it uses your cellphone to do the rendering and not all are supported, but his iPhone 5S worked great, my Nexus 5X even better, but my Huawei Honor 5X did not because it lacks a Gyroscope. You download the Cardboard app from the Play Store and off to the races with a built-in demo. There are a lot more apps available and the Titans Of Space one is my favorite so far; it’s an exploration of our Solar System, free of charge, with a $3 narration pack available. On my 1080P screen there’s definitely a “screen door effect” but it’s wonderfully enjoyable nonetheless. The head tracking works great, the effect is quite amazing. There’s a limited version of Google Street View too, which allowed me to stand in the middle of the town square in Alphen aan den Rijn through a 360 degree panorama someone took, but for the full experience one needs a proper headset like the Vive or Rift. Can’t wait to see what’s next!

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When old becomes new

Another win for Windows 10!  My good friend Brad Rabuchin’s machine we put together in 2010 stopped booting up properly; he hadn’t done a proper backup in a while (?!?#@?#@?) so the first thing to do was to save the data. Because it’s a desktop, it was easy to remove the drives, hook them up to my machine, and then pick and choose what to move over to an external 2.5″ USB disk. We were able to get everything, so the pressure was off. Now how do we move forward? Windows repair wasn’t working and neither was doing a system restore to an older point in time. At this point a fresh reinstall on a new drive (thus keeping the old OS install intact just in case) is what I like to do.

Seven years ago SSDs were first becoming ‘affordable’, but at $200 for a 64GB drive we chose to use a spinner, a 750GB Hitachi, hooked up to a 1st generation i3-530, 4GB of DDR3 and an Echo Gina 3G PCI audio card with Windows 7. You know what? Those specs are more than enough to run Windows 10, so we just bought a 500GB Samsung 850 EVO and installed the OS fresh, everything worked perfectly and just incredibly smoothly, booting from off to usable in mere seconds, just like a modern machine. Even that old Gina was purring along, with rock solid performance at 64 samples by the way for running Sonar at full real-time input monitoring.

After making sure all the data was there in under Windows 10, and having seen that the BIOS was set to IDE instead of AHCI for the SATA ports, I figured that perhaps that was keeping Windows 7 from booting. Sure enough, it now booted just fine from the old OS drive. But, what a difference in performance! All because of the SSD, it’s now a whole new computer! Microsoft was kind enough to let us install 10 with the old serial from 7 and Brad is ready for another at least 5 years with this thing. If needed, he can pop in an i5 or i7 and double the CPU performance, there’s room for another 2 DIMMS to go to 8GB of RAM for $50 or so, but even as it is, it’s a totally modern feeling machine…… seven years later!

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Dell Inspiron 13 7000

Helped a good friend and his wife find a laptop today at Best Buy! He’s only really accustomed to Mac and she’s really used to Windows, which is what she uses at work. The time had come to get a laptop for the house and there were no preconceived notions, but budget was of course an issue. A Macbook starts at $1000, has a crappy screen with an i5, 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD; MacBook Pro 13 with 256GB, 16GB and a beautiful screen is $1500, and only USB-C ports BTW! The store had a giant sale going on, almost every Windows laptop on sale.

First item of interest was a Samsung ultra-thin. Everything is soldered on the motherboard thus can’t be replaced or upgraded, the keyboard had uncomfortably little travel, gorgeous display and under 3 pounds, for $1100 with 256GB SSD, 16GB of RAM for $1100. I talked them out of it, not in the least because such an irreparable machine should only be bought from a company with good warranty service; Samsung is not such a company! Besides, for a machine that’s gonna live in the house all the time, not be lugged from airport to airport, saving a pound is inconsequential. There was the Dell Inspiron 13 7000 2-in-1. Screen quality in between the Mac Air and Pro, 1920×1080, full 10 point touch(!), 360 degree hinges, pretty damn great keyboard, not as nice as the XPS 13 but way better than that $1100 Sammy. One with i5 12GB of Ram and 256GB SSD is $749, with an i3, 8GB, 128GB $649! We’re talking USB-C port AND two regular USB3 ports! It has SD card reader, HDMI out, metal body. I tell them “Let’s see if there’s an open box one….” and there it is! The i5 model, Geek Squad recertified, with full manufacturer warrant, for $550.

Let me tell you, this thing is GREAT! It’s under 4 pounds, well built, touch screen works great and all the different modes are awesome; Tent mode is just perfect for on the kitchen counter, where a wet finger won’t drip onto the guts of the machine, or for watching Netflix in bed. It might not have everything an XPS has, like a PCIe SSD, but guess what: this little computer FLIES, just a joy to use. In a couple of years when the 256GB is full, you pop in a 1TB! An extra 8GB costs $65 right now! The final bonus is a Windows Hello compatible camera; no really, it has an infrared camera, which means a face-unlock feature that’s actually secure, can’t be fooled by a picture. I had never seen it in action and it is mighty freaky to look at the damn thing and it acknowledging you by name……

As I sip on a nice French Roast on the Clover and write this post, I’m reading some reviews online, scratching my head. How in the world are you going to put a $750 machine up against something costing double and then complaining about the screen? The rating of 3.5 stars out of 5 is completely wrong in my opinion. This is as close to a five star machine as possible for that price. At $550 it’s a gift from the Gods!