The coughy sore-throat lung butter illness that was sweeping through work hit me on Tuesday like a ton of bricks; what started out as a tickle in the back of my throat has progressed to a full-on cold and cough and ache. I’m guzzling off-brand Dayquil like it’s a can of La Croix. On the positive side, my voice has dropped three octaves, so I’m the bantamweight Barry White. I hopped on a work call the other day and several of my co-workers didn’t know who I was when I started talking. I should change my voicemail recording while I can.
We’re mostly prepared for Christmas here; what’s left to do is wrap presents and prepare for the big day. We’ve got a couple of cool Advent activities planned until then, and I’m working from home as many days as possible.
Well, this is great. Apparently the folks who bought Flickr sent out an appeal to Pro users (I didn’t see it; must have wound up in my spam folder) asking us for help finding new paying members, stating that the service isn’t paying for itself. I shudder at the thought of finding and replacing all of the photos I’ve embedded from there on this blog; the number is in the thousands, easily. And, I don’t know where I’d move them to.
Oh, this is fucking swell. ICANN, the people that have overseen the .ORG subdomain since it was founded, eliminated price caps for domain owners after asking for public comment on a proposed new contract. While most of the comments appeared to be in favor of keeping price caps, they eliminated them in the new contract and promptly sold the registry to a private equity firm. The new owners swear they’re going to only raise the price 10% a year. If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you.
Update: I’m moving this out into the main feed, because it directly affects the registry of this website. As it turns out, Ethos Capital is owned by three billionaire Republican families. The EFF has a page with information about what we can do, and there’s a petition to sign. What this might do to stop things, I have no idea.
I spend almost two hours getting to and from work every day, time subtracted from my life that I don’t care to total up, because that figure would make me seriously question my own mortality and then I’d probably want to jump off a bridge. Most of this time is spent sitting on a train, but there’s a lot of other time I spend by myself getting to or from somewhere. I generally choose to fill this time listening to podcasts or music, so having proper headphones is a must. Unfortunately I’ve been skimping on this for years. I’ve mostly been using Apple’s standard earbuds, in their various models, and I guess they work fine. I can hear what I’m listening to, unless I’m under a plane or next to a bus or mowing the lawn, and I can stop, start, and adjust the volume of whatever I’m listening to.
I’m also constantly yanking on the cord as I’m walking, pulling a messenger bag over my head, or working around the house. The dog likes to hook her paw on the cord and yank them out of my ears as I’m putting her leash on. The cord catches on desks, toolboxes, bannisters, and doorknobs. And because they get pulled on all the time, the wires are getting frayed; I’ve got two pairs where the mic/sound control pad doesn’t work anymore, and another where the plug connection is weakened so that it triggers my phone to randomly stop/start/skip whatever I’m playing.
I bought an older set of “wireless” headphones made by Anker several years ago, which were actually two earbuds wired together, and they work pretty good. My two beefs with them were that the cord that connected them was getting caught on my clothes almost as much as an earbud cord, and the fact that they didn’t have a microphone to take calls. They work, and the battery life is pretty good, but they spent a lot of time at the bottom of my bag getting tangled on other stuff.
I see people walking through Union Station wearing AirPods as a matter of course. They are, by all reports, fantastic, but I was wondering if I could find an alternative that wasn’t as spendy but just as reliable. What I settled on was Anker’s Soundcore Life P2, which I got on deep sale through Amazon for a quarter the price of AirPods. They’re a set of noise-cancelling true wireless earbuds that have most of the features AirPods do.
They fit my ears perfectly right out of the box, although they have five other pairs of rubber buds that can be fitted for people with dainty little ears or giant horse flaps. Each one has a small button on the side to turn the unit on or trigger several functions, which I haven’t mastered yet: on/off, start/stop, take a call, talk to Siri. The sound is fantastic. Bass is full, and the highs are crisp, but I also get a full range of midtones. It’s a wide range of sound that I’m not used to after years of tinny earbuds. It’s lovely to walk through the noisy platform area of Union Station next to idling diesel engines and not have to cover my ears to hear what’s playing, and they act as relatively decent noise protection when they’re off.
I used them to call my Mom on Sunday night, and while it worked, I found the experience strange. Because the earbuds had closed off my ear canals, I felt like I was talking inside my own head, as if I’d been talking to her with my fingers in my ears. I found it so distracting, I switched over to a set of wired earbuds to finish the call. Apple announced the AirPod Pro three days after I ordered my Ankers, which are built similarly. I read with interest about the Transparency Mode feature, where you can set them to listen to the surrounding noise, and I wondered what that added to the experience, but I get it now that I’ve been on a call: Transparency Mode opens the outside world back up so that you don’t sound like you’re talking inside a SCUBA mask.
Overall, I’m happy with these, and though I won’t be taking calls with them often (I’ll have to keep my earbuds wound up in my bag for those occasions) I’m cord-free and noise cancelled.
Huh. Good thing I bought a second-hand Apple Watch, I guess: Alphabet is in talks to buy FitBit. Sounds a lot like Nest a few years ago. Time to download all my data and delete my account.
LEGO has just announced their new Imperial Star Destroyer set, clocking in at 4,784 pieces and measuring almost 4 feet long. It’s amazing. It’s also $700 and won’t fit over our fireplace.
Sometime last week, when I wrote about iPhone battery drain or our new family addition, I passed the 5,000 post milestone here on Idiotking. When I average out the numbers, that’s about 22 posts a month since March of 2001, including syndicated posts from the Scout blog. In the grand scheme of blogging, that’s probably peanuts; there are bloggers who have averaged two or three posts a day since before I started. But this site is still here, and I don’t intend on going anywhere. I look around at a wasteland of dead links and abandoned URLs and still feel a sense of perverse pride for keeping this thing going as long as I have.
This gets convoluted. Verizon bought a bunch of shit a couple of years ago from Yahoo, including Tumblr, the hosted microblogging platform. They paid $1.1 billion for it. They owned it for a couple of years, did nothing to it other than to ban porn, and are now selling it to Automattic, the company behind WordPress, for somewhere north of $3 million and south of $20 million. For some reason this reminds me of the last years of 6 Apart, when they (for some reason) bought LiveJournal and then sold it to a Russian company before imploding and moving to Japan.
The internet is a strange place, my friends.
My iPhone 6’s battery has been draining faster and faster over the last couple of months, to the point where it was down to 50% by noon. I did some looking into the usage stats (Settings -> Battery -> Battery Usage By App) and saw that the Calendar app was gobbling up 54% of the available power. I read up and realized Exchange (my work email account) was at fault and followed some directions to turn off Push notifications—even though I don’t allow them to show up on my home screen—and set everything in my mail settings to Manual updates.
Huh. How have I missed Locast all these years? It’s a way to watch local broadcast TV over broadband networks. Apparently the major networks are trying to sue them out of existence, which makes little sense to me in the long run, but for right now it’s a nice way to watch local news (such as it is) in bed on my laptop.
On a related note, our 7-year-old TV doesn’t support Audio Return Channel, which as I understand things means we can’t watch broadcast digital TV on our existing A/V setup. But I have to do some more digging.
And on another related note, looking at that 7-year old TV post, I’d forgotten to revisit Serviio as a media player for all the content on the server in the basement after I switched from the old G5 tower to an Intel box. iTunes can be slow and laggy; apparently there’s a way to get Roku to talk to Serviio. This too requires some more research.
I recently re-enabled Jetpack, WordPress’ do-it-all plugin for their publishing platform, here on idiotking, after a year or two without it. I had it working for a year or two and I liked the additional features it provided, but one day it brought my whole site down with no warning. Strangely, the Scout blog, which uses a forked version of the same homemade WordPress template, remained operational. I didn’t feel like chasing the problem down until recently, when I got a notice that the hosting provider for idiotking wanted me to update the version of PHP it was running. I did that without much fuss, and then let it sit for a while. Today in a meeting I downloaded the plugin and re-activated it, and it seems to be working smoothly. I’m going to fool around with some of the new features they’ve added, and hope it doesn’t break the whole thing again.