Apple TV 4th Generation – Impressions

I was eager, when Apple announced the fourth generation Apple TV, to get it and check it out. I was especially excited by the concept of a real app store for the TV and by the ability to game on the device.

Then reality hit. For years, I had been using an Apple TV in our family room, and it’s been invaluable for entertainment. Mostly kids’ entertainment—movie rentals through the iTunes Store, complete seasons of “Scooby-Doo”—but I’ve used it to play music and watch movies too. But the hookup I was using to connect it to the rest of my gear was no longer supported. In particular, Apple used to have an optical out on the back of the older generation Apple TV devices in addition to HDMI. That allowed me to connect the device to my faithful Onkyo TX-DS494 so that I could put the sound out through my Bowers & Wilkins DM 602s.

But the new generation has no optical out! And the Onkyo, alas, has no HDMI inputs. So I had a choice. I could get the Apple TV and run the sound through the comparatively unsatisfactory speakers on our television. Or I could wait until I could afford to replace the Onkyo.

That time has come. I have a Marantz SR6010 (last year’s model new in box at a substantial discount from list!) on its way, and I hooked up the Apple TV last weekend so we could get used to the new interface.

First impressions: the new UI is considerably easier to navigate. And I really love the App Store. I was able to find something like 29 applications—a mix of video apps like the PBS Kids app, YouTube, and others, plus some games—that I had already purchased for the family phones that were available to download to the TV. Score! There were even a few fun games for free, like the Lego Batman game. I’d love to see more games in the store, though, especially games that support the controllers. And more retro games. Why can’t I play Lode Runner on the Apple TV? I can on my iPhone.

Gaming is probably the biggest let down right now. The controller I bought, the SteelSeries Nimbus, is a little too big for my six year old’s hands so he’ll have to use the Siri remote. That works pretty well for him, though he got tired of driving his race car off the track in the first game we played pretty quickly.

But the simple handoff of text input from the onscreen remote to the iPhone is brilliant, and makes up for some of the other disappointments with the device. I can’t wait to hook up the new receiver when it gets here and really take the thing through its paces.

The Chieftains, March 1, 2017, Chevalier Theatre, Medford, MA

Lisa and I went to see the Chieftains tonight in Medford. It was an amazing show, not so much due to the displays of individual artistry (though those were plentiful), but due to the astonishing generosity on display.

The Chieftains are one of those musical groups that it’s possible to take for granted, owing not least to their incredible longevity (55 years and counting) and their recordings with seemingly every possible type of guest star. But when you see them live, you get the essence of what Paddy Moloney, a founding member and still going strong 55 years later, and his compeers Matt Molloy and Kevin Conneff (Seán Keane was not there tonight) have been doing all these years.

Put simply, they’ve been pulling on threads.

Tonight’s threads included a diversion into country music, led by Jeff White (who helped out the Chieftains on Down the Old Plank Road), reminding one that it was the Irish and Scots who settled the Appalachians, then fanned out west, carrying Gaelic touched musical traditions with them. They included a gospel sextet singing “Shenandoah,” as part of a medley from their album Long Journey Home, as a reminder of how the music of that group touched on the core of American traditions. They included “The Foggy Dew,” a sobering reminder that not all Irish music is light hearted, and that some is paid for in blood. And they included a bagpipe group from the North Shore, and the house band from the Burren, reminding us that the music that the group brings has deep roots here in Massachusetts.

A wonderful night and a great show.

Thirteen years ago…

I was looking at an article on the history of interactive fiction, including the Infocom games (Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and its ilk).

The link in the original article was to a Java version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide game. There’s been a subsequent revision that doesn’t require Java and has some slight graphical blandishments to boot (which kind of spoils the fun).

Also ironically, the link to the original article is broken and was not preserved by the Internet Archive (and the hosts of the site were kind enough to claim that “Internet Archive generates us no value” in their robots.txt! Well, who’s laughing now?)

New music and bootleg roundup for February 23

I seem to be doing nothing but accumulating tabs in my browser recently. Here’s a roundup of new and old music that I’m looking forward to exploring.

Dust to Digital: Where Will You Be Christmas Day? is a little late for this past Christmas but I’m looking forward to exploring it next year. Sacred harp, blues, and folk Christmas songs is pretty much right up my alley.

Doom and Gloom from the Tomb: Mythic and Political Jazz. Not too late to check this out.

Doom and Gloom: Lou Reed, Paramount Theatre, Seattle, December 9, 1976. I saw Lou in Seattle in 2004 at the Wilbur, but I expect this to be a completely different experience—pre-sobriety, with saxophone and freshly recorded cuts from Coney Island Baby and Rock and Roll Heart.

Directions in Mid-Atlantic Music, Live 2-5-2017. New band adding saxophone and cracklebox and cello to the core of Tyler Magill’s Grand Banks.

Doom and Gloom: Television’s Marquee Moon. Pointer to both a Pitchfork article about the origins of the amazing album and bootlegs of live performances.

NYCTaper: Lee Ranaldo, January 22, 2017 Park Church Co-Op. Featuring guest appearance by Steve Gunn and members of Yo La Tengo, plus Neil Young and Velvet Underground covers. I’ve missed Sonic Youth and Lee, and looking forward to checking this one out.

Cocktails roundup

A few cocktail related things that have persisted in my open tabs for a while:

A Drink With My Brother: A great blog about exploring cocktails complete with cocktail origin stories, tasting notes, personal history and more.

Aviation Gin: The Aviation Cocktail. Since the proper recipe for this isn’t found in my various apps, I’ve been keeping this tab open for a while. (I make it with Plymouth or Old Tom gin, though—shhhh.)

12 Bottle Bar: Saratoga Cocktail. Enjoy one and prepare to go horse racing. Just don’t place any bets.

Learning from learning

In the spirit of owning my own words publicly, here are some thoughts I shared on a friend’s Facebook page about the value of my higher education degrees. My friend’s question: “Has anyone ever studied the attitudes of persons with bachelor’s degrees toward the value of a postsecondary education as it correlates with field of undergraduate study after 20 or 30 years? Are hard sciences graduates more likely than most to describe their undergraduate years as well-spent, or less? Liberal arts? Business administration?”

I am, in fact, a hard-sciences major with a liberal arts minor undergrad, and an MBA, so I am either supremely qualified or un-, depending on how you value the respondent’s ability to make up one’s mind in evaluating whether you want to listen to the answer.

Regarding physics, I have felt for the past twenty-five years or so a deep gratitude for what it taught me about approaching deep problems, learning by hypothesis and disproof, and the necessity of striking out beyond one’s comfort zone when it becomes clear that one has spent four years getting a degree whose value depends on one’s willingness to spend another twelve years in and post-school and embrace a life of poverty in government funded labs of uncertain stability. They don’t ask me to talk about the last one to modern SPS students.

Regarding my English minor, I believe it gave me a lifelong appreciation for the well-chosen word and for our bloody-minded language, as well as appreciation for history, philology, semiotics, and half a dozen other things I never studied but which were hinted at darkly among the edges of my curriculum.

And business? Little poetry in it, but considered as a sociological study for the alien tribes with whom I’ve spent my latter career, it’s been invaluable preparation.

So, no, none a waste of my time. But I’d argue that choosing any undergraduate major for preparation into a lifelong vocation is not only wrong-headed but shows a dangerous lack of imagination or a distressing naïveté, or both. (I really thought my father’s 30+ career at NASA was the norm when it came to the longevity of employment in the sciences.) But choosing majors that arm the mind with intrinsic skills for future battles—that’s different.

Random Five: trade show edition

It’s been a while since I’ve spun the wheel. Here are the five tracks that came up this time:

  1. The Kingston Trio, “The Patriot Game” (Kingston Trio: Collector’s Series). From late in the original trio’s run, after Dave Guard had been replaced by John Stewart (the songwriter of “Daydream Believer,” not the comedian), comes this cover of Dominic Behan’s ballad protesting the murder of an IRA volunteer by another IRA member. It’s the same tune (“The Merry Month of May”) that Bob Dylan borrowed for “With God On Our Side.”
  2. Joan Baez, “Away in a Manger (French Version)” (Noel). Boy, we’re really mining the 60s folk vein here this morning. My mom had (and occasionally played) this Christmas album, but for me it’s best remembered for the instrumental arrangements by Peter (P.D.Q. Bach) Schickele. 
  3. Polyphony, “II. In te, Domine, speravi” (Morten Lauridsen: Lux Aeterna). The most exquisitely dissonant movement of Lauridsen’s soaring setting of the Lux text. 
  4. Bob Dylan, “I Shall Be Free” (The Bootleg Series Vol.9: the Witmark Demos). Dylan goofs on an old Lead Belly song. 
  5. The Beach Boys, “Little Deuce Coupe” (Surfer Girl). Did you know that a “deuce coupe” was a 1932 Ford Model 18? Now you do. 

Like shooting dragons in a barrel

Boing Boing: Anonymous infiltrated the KKK by friending Blue Lives Matter supporters on Facebook. So yes, the echo chamber thing works by reinforcing the connections you already have with more connections like them. But what happens if you choose a different starting point? You can end up unmasking a whole grand council of cyclopses.

‘Do what thou wilt’ not, in fact, the whole of the law

The New Yorker: The Ninth Circuit Rejects Trumpism. The enumeration in the article of the constitutional principles challenged by Trump’s executive order on immigration, aka the “Muslim ban,” is long. The scarier bit is the repeated note that the administration was given every chance to argue in a serious way for its side and offered no more than “because I said so.”

Vinyl resurgence

I added eleven new albums to my iTunes library last month. Nine of those were vinyl rips.

Partly this was ongoing work from my ten-year-old, still not yet completed project to digitize all my vinyl. (Pro tip: don’t inherit over fifty records when you’re in the middle of a project like that. Or have two children.) But a big chunk of it stemmed from two record store trips, one to Harvest Records in Asheville, and one to Barnes & Noble, of all places.

Digital has gotten increasingly more prevalent and convenient. I can buy and download my friend Tyler’s band’s live shows within a few weeks of their performance, and you can pry my Bandcamp subscription out of my cold, dead hands. But I had forgotten how desperately I missed the physical act of browsing.

Which is why I love this development, the launch of a new state of the art vinyl record manufacturing machine, so much. Bring it on!

Václav Havel and the path forward

New Yorker: Václav Havel’s lessons on how to create a “parallel polis.” A perspective of hope drawn from Havel’s response to both Communism and Cold War capitalism:

The spontaneous and vigorous opposition to Trump, whether at the women’s marches the day after his Inauguration or at the protests at U.S. airports in support of a viciously demonized people, has already manifested many of the qualities that Havel wished to see in civil society: trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, and love. Many more people realize, as Havel did, that arbitrary and inhuman power cannot deprive them of the inner freedom to make moral choices, and to make human community meaningful. They are shaping a redemptive politics of dissidence in the free world, nearly three decades after the fall of Communism. To measure the American dissidents’ success in electoral or any other quantifiable terms would be beside the point. For they are creating a “parallel polis”: the vital space where many, over the next four years, will find refuge from our age of anger, and learn to live in truth.

I like this perspective very much. Here dissidence isn’t just opposition to the actions of an “enemy,” it’s assertion of moral values and enacting positivity. Definitely a lesson here.

Wait, what?

New York Times from yesterday: Trump and staff rethink tactics after stumbles. 

Key quote:

Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban.

Read that again. 

Trump demoted the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the US Director of National Intelligence to give Steve Bannon, a white nationalist, a seat on the NSC, then complains he didn’t know what was in the order he signed?

Jesus. 

What I’ve been up to

I keep missing blogging days, but not because things aren’t busy. Here’s a roundup of places where I’ve been talking in the press and other stuff for the past few months:

On the Veracode blog:  Regulations like FS-ISAC and PCI are now looking at the security of open source components, are you ready?. Plus a three part series on the ransomware attack against the San Francisco MUNI and software composition analysis (one, two, three).

In the press:

And it looks like this year’s RSA will be pretty busy in a few weeks. It’s unfortunate that I haven’t wanted to write much about other things recently, but work is definitely making up for it.