Jim Willis

  • HomePod with iTunes Match

    I’m running stereo HomePods in our living room. Boy what a difference a second HomePod makes!

    Doesn’t sound as good as my beloved Vandersteens which got relocated during a recent furniture rearrangement and frankly the Homepods don’t make for great “active listening” because the imaging is way to fuzzy and nebulous but for just hanging out and getting things done, the sound of stereo HomePods is really excellent.

    So naturally I wanted to have access to music to be able to yell at the HomePods and ask Siri “play the album Babylon by Bus.” But I am cheap and already subscribe to Spotify so didn’t want to have to subscribe to Apple Music on top of Spotify. So I dug around a bit and ended up springing for the $25/year iTunes Match service which allows me to take my 30k songs from my iTunes library and upload them to iCloud so they’re available on all my devices (iPhone and HomePods in this case).

    It took a lot of BS and fiddling to get this solution to work but ultimately it did and now I can ask Siri to play anything that is in my music library without having to airplay it from my Mac or iPhone.

    First I had the difficulty of just getting my 30k songs into the cloud. That took about 3 days and 3 attempts at telling iTunes to “update iCloud Music Library.” But after about 3 days all of the tracks had either “matched” or “uploaded” next them. I presume the latter is when iTunes Store doesn’t have access to the track.

    NewImage

    After that, I was able to see all of my music on my iPhone which was pretty cool (tons of live dead shows now!). But still the HomePods would say, “sorry I can’t find that” when I asked them to play something from my library. So I removed them from the “Home” app on my phone and then restarted them. At which point they now seem to be aware of all of the music in my library.

    Very cool to be able to say “hey Siri, shuffle some Antonio Carlos Jobim” and have it just work.

    Now to make some playlists!

  • Bose warranty = awesome/great customer service

    A big part of the sound of Kül d’Sack (one of the bands I play in) is our Bose L1 paired with the Bose Tonematch mixer.

    Maine 1 2

    The prebaked digital modeling settings for Shure microphones is just great on these Bose devices. The sound quality is uncannily good.

    Unfortunately a few gigs back one of the channels on the mixer started exhibiting some static noise. I thought it might have been one of the guitar rigs but over a few weeks the channel noise made it clear that the issue was inside the mixer.

    I called Bose, explained the problem and within 90 seconds the customer service rep said he wanted to send me a new unit. I was worried about having to pack mine up and have it repaired. A new unit is much better.

    Super-pleased about this whole process and it’s a joy that something that works and sounds so good also has a good company standing behind their product.

  • WTF? Why does iMessage search suck so bad.

    Can’t find a message that I JUST FRICKIN’ SENT a few days ago! Let’s try Googling:

    Redditimessage

    Well, I’m not the only one!

    The inability to use the Messages app on the Mac to search message history is really a nuisance. That, and I’m noticing Spotlight search in general seems to really be crappy lately. I wrote this a while back which seemed to kickstart Spotlight back to life:

    sudo mdutil -a -i off
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
sudo mdutil -a -i on

    But it doesn’t work under Mojave. Bummer.

  • Grove Collaborative

    Grove

    We use Amazon’s Subscribe and Save for monthly deliveries of household stuff like garbage bags, cleaners, etc. This month though I did some Googling while reviewing our deliveries and found that Grove Collaborative was cheaper on a few products. Just placed an order, we’ll see.

    They are a B Corp which makes me feel a little better about supporting them (though, natch, shopping locally/independently would be even better if I had the time). From their about page:

    We offer products that are gentler on the earth, prioritize post-consumer materials for packaging, and carbon offset every shipment that goes out our door.

    Will try to revisit this next month with an update.

  • Things + GTD

    Thingsapp

    Incredible to think that I’ve been using Things for 10 years now. Amazing application and I can not imagine living without it. That said, I’ve only half-heartedly been maintaining/cleaning/pruning my lists in there and it is totally out of control and probably still contains “Someday/Maybe” items from 10 years ago.

    Listening to Tim Ferris interview Getting Things Done author, David Allen the other day got me thinking about being a bit more disciplined about my Things lists.

    I haven’t actually made any progress. Yet. But I did find a terrific writeup by Johnny Chadda on how he uses Things for GTD. Really excellent writeup with super-useful screenshots. When I do actually make progress on using Things for GTD is will be because of his how to guide.

  • Electric Vanagon!!!

    Ekaefer 1163x654

    I’ve got a lot of folks who know that I like VW campers and they’ll send me links from facebook from time to time about VW’s forthcoming electic vans and these are almost always prototypes and may or may not see the light of day but this new announcement from Volkswagen where they’re working with another German company to retrofit Beetles with electric engines represents some real hope that someday I might be able to plug in my Vanagon.

  • Relax with MGB wrenching vids.

    Johntwist

    Some folks get into ASMR (Autonomous sensory meridian response) to chill out. Cool if that’s your thing but I’ve found the most relaxing thing on the internet: watching John Twist from University Motors work on MGs. This 15 minute video on jacking up an MGB will teach you more than you ever thought there was to know about jacking up a car.

  • Best Apple Watch App for Running

    Part of the problem with Strava’s ubiquity on the workout/app front is that once you start using it you don’t often look around to see what else might be available. That said, I’ve never loved the way strava worked on my Apple Watch so did a little digging and found this amazing gem of an application called WorkOutDoors.

    So good. Such a better alternative to Strava.

    Especially if you run. Even more so if you adhere to the MAF running method (low heart rate, high cadence).

    I’ve been using WorkOutDoors consistently for a few weeks now and it is a joy. It required a bit of tweaking/settings modifications that might be a bit complex for a non-tech savvy person but once I got the settings dialed in, it does exactly what I want it to do, reliably and WAY better than Strava.

    WatchStripOverview

    The app allows you to configure multiple watch screens for each activity (Running, Cycling, etc.). And you can do those configurations from your phone, so no futzing around with the tiny watch interface.

    I only use it for running and created a single screen that shows me:
    – cadence
    – heart rate
    – distance
    – pace
    – time.

    So much density of readable data on that screen!!!! Amazing.

    I also set up a couple of alarms so that if my cadence falls below 170 or my heart rate exceed 145 I get some haptic feedback on my wrist. I love it. This app is great. If you run, totally worth trying it out.

    Oh, and after you get done with your run you can also very easily press a button and upload the activity to strava. So you’re not cut off from the social part of strava, either.

  • Journaling and Journalism and Personal Photography

    This past weekend we went out with a couple of other New Jersey families to Cranks Around the Campfire.

    I’ve wanted to go to this mountain biking/camping/family-friendly event for a few years now but each year it has coincided with our annual pilgrimage up to New England in the VW to go swimming in various lakes. This year though, we didn’t do our annual summer trip so we were in NJ and were available. So a few months ago we organized with a few other families to attend.

    So glad we did. It was a blast. Not quite as fun as wandering around in Vermont or Maine in the Vanagon for a couple of weeks but a great way to sleep outdoors and ride bikes and hang together as a family unit and bid the summer goodbye.

    As I was going through my pictures from the weekend though I was a bit disappointed with the photos that I shot. Even though I brought my Fuji with me instead of relying on my iPhone, I still wasn’t very happy with my photos. Some were technically good but I didn’t really capture the context.

    Which gets me thinking about the food writing I did and the advice the editor gave me about photos I took to accompany my articles: capture as much information as possible. That is great advice, even for taking pictures of family trips. Maybe even especially when taking pictures of family trips.

    I am so grateful for the stint I did writing over at PieHole. For one thing, it made me soooo much better at being comfortable asking people questions. Interviewing a couple of people a week for a year or so can really get you out of your head/shell and more comfortable just approaching anyone and asking them about themselves.

    And the thing is that people really like to talk about themselves. Until I did the food writing gig I was always uncomfortable asking people questions because I didn’t want to intrude. So that’s one thing.

    But then there was the whole photography end of the food writing gig. I wanted to take technically correct photos of food. But that didn’t serve the journalism. Instead what I learned was taking pictures of people doing things they loved, interacting with tools or places they knew well–that’s a much better way to take a photo.

    Unfortunately I have gotten rusty on both of these fronts:

    • I’m not asking strangers enough questions and
    • I’m not approaching my personal photography with the same need-for-context that I did back when I was writing food stories.

    Just a note to self to try a bit harder here!

  • Bikepacking Gear

    Bikepacking gear 10

    If you’re into gear lists, I finally got around to detailing the gear I used for my Erie Canal bikepacking trip earlier this summer over at AllTogetherOutThere.

Current Spins

Top Albums

Check out my album Set It All Down on your favorite streaming service.

Posts Worth Reading:

Free Internet vs Internet of Free Stuff

Letterboxd

Reading Notes

  • Read: Manufactured Anxiety: How Self-Improvement Became a Self Destruct Sequence
    Who profits from our constant state of dissatisfaction? The answer, of course, is painfully obvious. Every industry that sells a solution to a problem you […]
  • Read: My Friends Aren’t Reading
    the shifts have been in place for awhile. A certain kind of book—say those reviewed in the NYRB—will become like opera, or theater, or ballet, […]
  • Read: Pema Chödrön’s Three Methods for Working with Chaos
    • No more struggle: “Whatever arises, train again and again in seeing it for what it is. The innermost essence of mind is without bias. […]
  • Read: Why Not Bluesky
    The real problem, in my mind, isn’t in the nature of this particular Venture-Capital operation. Because the whole raison-d’etre of Venture Capital is to make […]
  • Read: The Tech Coup
    . The EU invokes a mechanism called the precautionary principle in cases where an innovation, such as GMOs, has not yet been sufficiently researched for […]

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