Kül d’Sack put together a little Christmas present for our listeners. Usually at this time of year we’d be doing our Christmas show at a local bar and cajoling the crowd to join us in the caroling. This year COVID kept that from happening.

Instead we each recorded our parts for Joni Mitchell’s River at home and John, our bass player, did a super pro job editing a video together of us playing at home. I did a write up a while back on my home recording gear, you can read here.

Here’s the thing, at the same time we were all recording our parts at home, I was reading Spencer Tweedy’s book, Mirror Sound. I can’t recommend this book enough. I ultimately ended up buying copies for all the guys in Kül d’Sack and if i had the money, I’d buy it for every one of my musician friends.

Tweedy’s book is useful and inspiring for a few reasons: it dispells the imposter syndrome fallacy that so many home-recorded musicians can suffer from by showing that it doesn’t matter where you make your music, so long as you make it.

It also dispells the falacy that music recorded at home will always sound less-than-pro. Reading these interviews with musicians about their home-recording setups and process makes it clear you can make music at home that sounds just as good as music recorded in an expensive studio. Moreover, so many of these musicians extol the benefits of recording at home over a fancy studio: luxury of time, getting into the zone more easily, being more comfortable, etc.

This book comes at just the right time for me. I know musicians who record at home, a lot. For a bunch of reasons though, I never thought that I could do it. But after reading Mirror Sound cover to cover a few times (it’s that kinds of book) I am seeing that the real limitations presented by recording at home are my inertia and the time constraints of working and having a family. But those are small potatoes compared to the imaginary barriers that Tweedy’s book help me dismantle.

My new gig at work is keeping me insanely busy and so it’s been a while since I’ve gotten around to updating here. Here’s a few of the links I’ve saved this week. Linking ≠ endorsement. 

• Free Speech Prevails at Princeton | Robert P. George – This is a time of testing for our nation. We were already in the midst of dealing with a pandemic—trying to protect public health while respecting basic…
• How to Plan Your Week Like a Boss – If you feel that your productivity has been hitting a slump, I highly recommend planning out your week ahead of time. Getting clear about what you’ll be doing…
• The American Death Cult – A significant percentage of conservative culture in America defines “freedom” as death. This is causing a lot more problems right now than even its usual…
• ‘White Fragility’ Is Everywhere. But Does Antiracism Training Work? – Race and America Three Words, 70 Cases George Floyd Transcripts Debate Over Officers’ Protection Lessons from Camden, N.J. Robin DiAngelo at home in Seattle.…
• Save Them All, Let the Algorithms Sort Em Out – Smartly serving up content amidst information overload M.G. Siegler Follow Jul 16 · 4 min read Every day is exactly the same. Even before the COVID lockdowns,…
• What Makes Us Happy? – For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage…

I implemented this great python script from @micahflee to automatically get rid of my tweets after a specified period of time. Similar to the Chrome extension I use to get rid of my Facebook posts but automated/scheduled so much more convenient.

Man, I wish I had thought of this earlier!

I love my Philips Hue setup. If you’re a parent of a kid who gets up every day at, say, 4:50am, there’s nothing better than being able to come downstairs on an early December morning to some very dim orange-hued lights and Windam Hill playing low on the stereo HomePods (thanks iOS automation!)

Keeps everyone chill, right?

But now that it’s winter and dark I’m thinking my hue bulbs are not quite bright enough in the late afternoon. Leave it to reddit to come up with a solution:

https://smile.amazon.com/Leviton-128-Light-Socket-Adapter/dp/B000RN19V4

Now I can put two Hue bulbs in some of the larger lamps. The dingus is on its way, will try it out tomorrow.

Follow up: awesome! Highly recommended. If you want a brighter setup with your hue bulbs, definitely pick up a couple of these socket adapters, well worth it to help brighten up the long, long nights of winter.

It feels a bit like watching Hendrix play his Strat upside down, but I have really settled into enjoying using my iPad Pro in portrait mode with an external keyboard. There is something about the dimension of the screen being closer to that of a piece of paper that I’m filling with text that is more visually appealing to me than typing with the screen in landscape mode.

The problem here is of course is that it really limits my external keyboard options. Right now I’m using the Apple Magic keyboard in a Canopy case from Studio Neat.

I have a love/hate relationship with this case:

Cons:
– Whenever i forget to turn off the keyboard and fold up the case, inevitably the F8 key gets depressed and my iPad starts playing music.
– It is only so-so stable when typing on my lap. Not impossible but not like a laptop.
– It doesn’t protect the iPad Pro, just the keyboard so i always feel a little weird just putting the iPad in my briefcase.

Pros:
– it is well-designed and looks nice
– because the iPad is just sort of balanced in a little slot between the case and the keyboard it is super-easy to just grab the ipad and walk around with it. I don’t have to disconnect anything.
– I can type in portrait mode or landscape mode, the canopy doesn’t care!

So I’ve been thinking about getting a Brydge keyboard which would:
– provide some protection of the iPad when it’s in my briefcase
– Provide a more stable typing environment when using on my lap

However it would not allow me to type in portrait mode. Also, I’m not so sure how easy the iPad is to connect/remove from the Brydge keyboard’s connector slots.

That said, i haven’t ordered the Brydge yet and may still find some kind of solution that allows me to protect the iPad when it’s in travel. And typing in portrait mode (especially in ia Writer and Day One where i do about 80% of my writing) is really so nice, maybe i just stick with what I’ve got here.

This weekend’s Sunday New York Times magazine featured an article about buying your way into a “cleaner” Internet experience by Kevin Roose. The article’s message that the internet is just furthering the divide between the haves and have-nots is untrue and based entirely on Roose’s limited view of the Internet that completely ignores what is perhaps the most useful piece of the internet: the personal website.

Roose writes as if the personal website—which arguably is the wellspring of the Internet’s promise of informational equality—either never existed or no longer exists.

For those too young to remember, in the very early days of the web it felt like HTML was this easy-to-use tool that allowed a whole bunch of people to share their knowledge with the world. Personal websites could be goldmines of really arcane knowledge that, fueled by HTML and web hosting allowed people to make websites and share their knowledge.

If you wanted to know how to fix a guitar effects pedal, there was probably a guy who was writing up some HTML with instructions on how he fixed his own pedal complete with lousy digital photos from his cell phone. But that free sharing of knowledge was what filled me with such hope about the internet.

Roose refers to . . . the ad-based model that powers the free internet . . .

I think we need some kind of distinction here between the Free Internet and the internet of free stuff. The former is that virtual space where there is a balance of making and taking and it is populated by internet citizens who care deeply about maintaining the personal and individual side of the web.

The internet of free stuff is what happened when tools like Napster were unleashed on the world. When Roose writes about the Free Internet he’s really talking about the internet of free stuff. They’re two very different things.

We moved from the Free Internet to the internet of free stuff when sharing by makers got sort of twisted and distorted and the circumference of the circle around what was given away for free kept getting wider and wider.

Soon it wasn’t just instructions on how to fix guitar effects pedals or replace the speedo in your Volkswagen but it was albums and tv shows and movies.

And that’s when things got weird.

Today’s internet is full of premium subscriptions, walled gardens and virtual V.I.P. rooms, all of which promise a cleaner, more pleasant experience than their free counterparts. The pay walls have been rebuilt, and the artists no longer work for tips. Hundreds of millions of people shell out for Netflix accounts, Patreon podcasts, Twitch streams, Spotify and news subscriptions. The average American spent more than $1,300 on digital media last year.

But like a superhighway that gets built up through an old neighborhood, these two internets live side by side now. These subscription services are not going away, but it doesn’t mean that the old neighborhood of personal webpages is going to go away anytime soon. And just because Roose doesn’t see them from his vantage point along the superhighway doesn’t mean there isn’t real value in them.

Roose is correct when he writes:

Billions of people still use the free internet every day, of course. But it feels increasingly like wading into a sludge pit of algorithmically promoted misinformation, privacy-invading apps and subpar user experiences.

The article’s primary point is that if you want to escape the sludge pit, you need to buy your way out of it. His view from the commercial web’s superhighway is such that buying your way out of the sludge pit is the only solution he can imagine.

But there’s an alternative. Instead of buying your way out of the sludge you can learn how to build a bridge over it or go around it.

I and many others have learned how to use the Free Internet every day while minimizing our exposure to “algorithmically promoted misinformation, privacy-invading apps and subpar user experiences.” My primary tool for this, of course, is an RSS reader but that’s not the only way.

My point is that there still exists a Free Internet that is a wealth of knowledge and community and you don’t need to buy your way —in fact you can not buy your way—into it. It requires mining for personal homepages that exist outside of the algorithms. Wandering through the old neighborhoods of the Internet and learning the locals’ language.

Shawn Blanc shows that he knows those neighborhoods and speaks the locals’ language when he writes about searching the web for information about cameras:

You see, I wanted to get some real life, normal-person, story-based reviews of the camera — as opposed to the sterile, press-release regurgitation articles that are on so many of the high-ranking websites that appear on page 1 of Google results.
And so, in order to get to the good stuff — the articles that were written by normal folks with normal blogs who had been using the camera for a while before they wrote their review — I had to skip past the first page.

It seems to me that what the web needs now more than ever to guarantee the equal access to information is a search engine for personal websites. A magic tool that somehow ignores all corporate/big-tech content and drills down directly to those sites written mostly for free by people who love a subject so much that they are happy just to write about it in the hopes of helping and connecting with other people who share their interests.

It took just about over a week of back-and-forth emails with support the support folks from Hyper Drive but we finally found a solution to my iPad not charging while using their 11 port hub with my iPad Pro.

The first few emails were the “unplug it/replug it, restart your iPad” type. Then the support tech suggested downloading a firmware upgrade for the hub which can only be done from a PC/Mac andnot from an iPad.

Then, she came back with this:

We have concluded that the 18W power supply is not sufficient enough to charge your iPad Pro with the HyperDrive plugged in. This is due to the fact that the HyperDrive draws almost half of the wattage of the 18W power supply at 7.5w to be able to output power to the ports it provides such as the HDMI, USB-A, USB-C, and SD cards. We do recommend using Apple’s 30w power adapter as it will provide a normal charge. We are currently working on an FAQ page for our HyperDrive, but once again I do apologize for the issues.

That sounded about right. So I ordered a refurbished 30W power supply off of Amazon for $25 and, tada, now all of the ports work on the device AND my iPad is charging.

I’m feeling love/hate towards the whole Amazon/PrimeNow/Whole Foods delivery thing. I’ve used it probably 10 times now and it is super-convenient. And I think it makes me a better shopper from a food-planning perspective.

That said, when I was getting Whole Foods deliveries this summer the amount of insulated packaging that was being included was insane. Like a whole insulated bag for one yogurt. They definitely use too many bags and moreover too many insulated bags. The latter are not recyclable, by the way.

For my last few deliveries I’ve added in the “Special Notes” section “Please use as few bags as possible.” The request seemed to fall on deaf ears.

Until yesterday. Perhaps because it is now cooler outside, there were no more of the insulated bags in my order. This, despite ordering a bunch of cold/perishable items. So, that’s a win right there.

They didn’t minimize the number of paper bags in any meaningful way. If I’d been bagging at the checkout I probably would have used 3 instead of the 8 they sent. But we reuse/recycle the paper ones so that’s another step towards reducing the amount of waste generate by Prime Now.

What really needs to happen is a rotating/loaner shopping bag type system where Prime Now delivers the groceries in reusable plastic shopping bags (and maybe even charges you for them) and then when you drop them back off again at the local Whole Foods you get a credit for them.

Hulu recently announced they would be raising their prices come December. We had the Live TV option with Ads and it would be jumping from $45/mo to $55/mo. I was just about to upgrade to the “no ads” plan before they made this announcement.

But this has been a busy week for streaming services so I did some back of the envelope calculations and here’s what we’ve landed on:

Yes, we are giving up live tv. But I think in all the time we had hulu Live TV since this summer, I’ve watched a live show exactly 1 time. So not really getting our money’s worth there. (That said, we have an antenna hooked up to our basement TV if we want to watch football on network television).

Note that by default the Disney/Hulu/ESPN bundle for $12.99 doesn’t give you ad free Hulu, but if you subscribe to ad-free Hulu using the same email you use for your Disney account, Disney refunds $4.99/month to your account. One of the upsides of synergy, yay!

But…Disney?

I’ve been talking to a friend of mine about Disney and what they’ve done to entertainment. I agree that it is a bit dystopian. Not just that a single massive corporation owns Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars but that they also own both Disney streaming AND Hulu streaming. That is an insane amount of media assets under one umbrella.

The quick downside is that I’m sure we will very soon see some kind of price gouging from Disney. It is inevitable. How long before I’m paying $55 a month for the same bundle with Hulu and ESPN?

But the larger, long term problem with opening the door to the Disney universe is my implicit support of their dilution of entertainment down to a lowest-common-denominator formula.

A lot of Disney’s offerings (everything they touch, from Disney cartoons to the Marvel and Star Wars universes) seem to have some sort of diversity punch list that needs to be completed before the picture is released. I’m not arguing against the need for inclusion or diversity in entertainment, but when inclusion becomes predictably formulaic, it makes it more and more difficult to enter that bewitched state of being absorbed into something you know is not real—the very reason we turn to entertainment.

When creators need to hit some kind of punch list of inclusion metrics, the contrived inclusion pierces the illusion of the entertainment and breaks the spell.

And I think Disney is just going to get worse and worse with this and contaminate everything they touch with their inclusivity punch lists.

The Independent Web is the answer.

But there is a huge upside to this consolidation and watering down of entertainment: there will always be some creators who will rebel against overly-homogenized entertainment.

The more powerful Disney gets, the more fuel and energy there will be around creating alternatives to that entertainment. And so long as the internet remains free and open (and that’s never guaranteed), this is perhaps the best time in history for creators who want to put something out there and find an audience that is sick of homogenized pablum.

So, I’ll keep paying my $30 a month, watch some letterboxed Simpson’s but make sure to keep my RSS reader pointed in the direction of the independent web creators who, just like they have for the past 20 years, will help me find the really great stuff on the internet that would never pass through Disney’s homogenizing filters.