Having watched this series a while, I can’t help but think it an appropriate episode for the halloween season.
And it totally figures that Evandra and the Necromancer are on such friendly terms. The only shocking part is the apology, lol.
Terry Poulin
From Pro to Mini
Based on progress thus far, it’s looking like the iPad Pro will be retiring after five years of use, most of them as my primary computing device for non-gaming tasks, and the past year as a secondary since I mainly find myself desk bound.
Adjusted for the years, the A17 Pro is exactly what I wanted versus the 6th generation Mini, and a much appreciated bump from the A12X. Not to mention the increased storage capacity out of the box.
This will be the first time that I’ve used a smaller tablet since my Galaxy Note 8.0 back in the Jelly Bean era. While the various 4:3/9.7” Galaxy Tab S’s were a pretty perfect size, the worst thing that I can say after 5 years with the 11” iPad Pro is that it’s not the device to reach for when compact or one handed operation is called for. But otherwise has been a superb tablet even if its SoC has been getting a bit out moded.
When I used Android tablets, I always favored the smaller ones or found them the best compromise between a phone and a laptop form factor. Phablets and large phones are just not large enough, and at least in Android land, typically fall short of the magic 7” crossing point that lead to tablet layouts being supported. Can’t say I’ve ever been impressed with the “Tablet” support of iOS, but the Mini 7 at least delivers the tablet layouts and is vastly superior to my phone.
Floppies still refuse to kick the bucket
Reading the Ars article, “San Francisco to pay $212 million to end reliance on 5.25-inch floppy disks“, I couldn’t help but think, “At least they’re not the 8-inch kind,” and ironically enough the article ends with a reference to just such a case.
Growing up in an the era I did, our computer relied on 5 1/4″ floppy diskettes and I didn’t really experience the stiff 3.5″ disks until after both the Pentium and the Internet came into vogue. But it’s actually pretty odd to encounter the even older 8″ variety, since those tend to land closer to the CP/M era than the DOS era of computing.
Actually, the two salvaged Weatherstar diskettes displayed in my study may be the only 8″ diskettes I’ve seen in the wild. Even then the format was ancient. Heck, when my family was buying still 5 1/4″ disks from the school supply store for our Tandy, 3.5″ were already long since the mainstream floppy media.
PowerBook 5300
One of those cases of “Yeah, I must be crazy, but ….” and it turns out that I am the proud owner of another PowerBook. Also a StyleWriter 1200 that came with it at auction.
The 5300 series is one that I’ve always been fascinated with, ever since I saw Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day. Less the uploading a virus to the an alien mothership (serious, do they run Java or something?), and more the scene outside the Whitehouse. I always thought the idea of the expansion bay was cool, and felt a bit disappointed that no one ever really created much in the way of that. But I guess, you’re not supposed to triangulate cellphone positions with a laptop even if that’s something “All cable repairmen can, Pops,” but I felt it would be cool if someone hooked them up to science equipment while exploring a jungle or working in an electronics lab. In reality of course, such use cases for laptops often had a more common answer: serial ports and PCMCIA to serial, and today it’s USB to serial. Special expansion bays pretty much died in the 1990s, and those that didn’t became quite plain in 2000s era business notebooks.
Amazingly the machine is in great shape. The port cover is missing one leg but clips on, which is still practically a unicorn in a field of four-leaf clovers. Seems the display housing is starting to split a bit, but unlike most that I’ve encountered isn’t broken to hell in a hand basket, and the frame is in great shape rather than looking like it was thrown out of a helicopter at hover. This machine feels more like a vintage princess.
Sadly the battery had begun to leak, resulting in having to clean out the battery bay. Fortunately it appears to have gone only as far as the terminals and lip area. Plus it’s a post recall NiMH, so I guess it’s a copper sulfate problem instead of oh-shit-lithium. Initial cleaning with baking soda/vinegar seems to have gone well, and we’ll go a deeper round once I’ve got time to take it apart. No sign of anything being harmed.
Ironically, the hard drive still works. I can’t tell if it’s an original or not until I take it apart, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The 8+16=24 MB memory configuration is one that Apple sold for the 5300cs, and I’ve yet to see any signs that the machine was ever taken apart or abused. The only signs of abuse I’ve been able to see are copies of Microsoft Office and Netscape Communicator, but I suppose that Word 6 on a 100 MHz “P6” chip would be less of a bear than it is on my Duo’s Motorola 68030.
One thing that I especially love is the keyboard. It’s beautiful to type on, and still perfectly smooth and limber. I can type so fast that the hard drive eventually spins down, parks the head, and then has a lag spike as it spins back up to page the file to disk. By contrast my 1992 Duo has a keyboard where the keys often stick, or need to be pressed multiple times to register.
Yeah this is a good machine. But I may be out of my mind 🤪
While I can’t say that I never noticed the ABCs joke at the time, I will admit to laughing in retrospect. Reboot was a series that I enjoyed a lot as a kid, one that I always lamented its exit. Just about any chance as a kid, I caught the reruns when I could.
Can’t say that I ever imagined it would face such insanity. Kids shows kind of cleaned up by the 90s, I guess. But when you get to the point that you can’t even say the word hockey, I have to wonder what the hell the censors were thinking. I always assumed that Dot was designed that way, but this video made me glad that they never touched Hex, because Hex was cool (and perhaps a mixture of sweet and psychotic wrapped up in a multiple personality disorder).
While the game cubes that occasionally loaded lead to references to films targeted at adult audiences, such as Mad Max and Evil Dead, the show really wasn’t that bad. Heck, far worse than Reboot certainly aired. Having played the PlayStation game they reference, I would say that it wasn’t very violent or dark compared to many games on the platform at the time but I digress.
Which also makes me remember eons ago when G.I. Joe had a brief rerun on Cartoon Network, allowing me to revisit the series when I was a teenager. It’s a series that I tend to think of as a good hallmark for the era that I grew up in. Episodes of G.I. Joe often involved considerable violence, like I never thought about it as a little boy but at a teenager it was more like wow, how can no one die or be seriously hurt with this much action!? Another aspect that I often look back upon is that cartoons of that era often ended with some kind of moral story or positive advice woven into the plot or as ancillary matter, or as Flint and company used to say, “And knowing is half the battle!”
By contrast, kids shows that came out later in my childhood or afterwards tended to gravitate towards either pumping you full of facts and figures like a text book, or may have intentionally be aimed at rotting your brain. Reboot on the other hand was a show that entertained me a lot as a kid, and that I always found a fascinating concept–it was a fairly good choice of McGuffin having games “Drop” on city blocks, and surprisingly original. While the notion of being “Good” may have been woven into it, often times it focused more on the adventure.
Victoria of Many Faces, Vol. 1 (light novel)
I read Victoria of Many Faces largely because I enjoyed one of the author’s other books, Soup Forest, and decided to pre-order the moment that Amazon notified me about the coming title. It turned out to be an excellent choice, and I almost binge read the book in about two or three sittings. In fact, the only reason it took three days is because I decided on the second, that I really did need to sleep 😅.
Victoria is perhaps one of the more interesting light novel characters that I’ve encountered. Fleeing the organization, she ends up settling in another country and becomes embroiled in various antics–which eventually lead to her efforts to lie low becoming more complicated as time goes on. But we see a character who’s done some not-so-great things choosing to deviate from what they were trained to do because they choose to follow their heart. Even from the very beginning, Victoria recognizes that her course of action would be ill-advised and if she were still an operative would have to avoid the risks that it incurs. Faced with that, Victoria makes her own choice about what is right and that moral compass sets her on a beautiful course.
I love that the actions Victoria takes are her choice, and often bring about the major shifts in the plot. As a light novel, Victoria of Many Faces is often amusing and intriguing, and honestly I laughed so hard during the pub scene with the cat….I love so much that it’s even captured by one of the illustrations. The follow up in the bakery was superb, with there “Don’t you want to ask me something? / Do you want me to ask? / No” moment ending with the two laughing like loons. It’s very much like a shared story over cake, and plays off the incident with such comedic beauty.
Throughout the story, Victoria’s interactions with other people define what becomes the new “Normal” for her. By making it a slice of life tale, I think the story captures well why such shifts in Victoria’s life lead her towards finding happiness in such unlikely actions.
The ending in particular was rather beautiful, and after having seen several of the character’s aliases and efforts at concealing her true identity, Victoria’s exchange with the captain is especially poignant at the end. I’m glad that when all is said and done, she is able to reveal both her true self and the name hidden behind it all.
Overall, I would say that the protagonist is more realistic than most LN characters tend to be while remaining a vehicle for the story, and that makes her a wonderful counter-point to the various antics she gets wrapped up in. Victoria of Many Faces becomes a fairly warm slice of life / action comedy with a bit of romance here and there as the volume progresses, and it works really well IMHO.
I’m rather looking forward to the second volume, and hope that it proves as entertaining as the first was.
The Cleric’s Spiritual Weapon
Random things that amuse me
Ahh, it looks like a channel full of cackle worthy nods to Dungeons & Dragons….
Death and the Winemaker
Superb little horror film. It kind of makes you wonder, was the wine worth it?
Ramblings of an insane nerd
The concept™️
Mp3Tag (Mac rather than Win in my case) for managing metadata. Cover art is a weak point for something like Quod Libet that I would otherwise choose, and the Mac version is broken on modern systems, meaning I would have to break out my 17 year old ThinkPad to run the FlatPak, or suffer X Forwarding or similar grumbles with restoring my 12 year old Latitude to its Debian glory days. Thus indie software wins this scenario because MacBook Air.
Good ol’ ffmpeg for audio conversions. I’m really not a fan of hand-wrangling ffmpeg, and don’t want to mess with it for cover art purposes. It’s like a grizzly bear wielding a Swiss army knife when it comes to esoteric video muxing and complex encodes, which are a pain. But I’m content to use it for transcoding audio. The open question is whether I want to load ffmpeg on one of my Linux server’s virtual machines, or just brew install ffmpeg while drinking a root beer.
These both solve the problems that exist between my existing music collection, and what Apple Music can offer in the ways of managing a personal music library like it’s still two thousand ‘ought something.
Apple Music is still combat effective for ripping CDs, since I actually like the iTunes+ format of MP4 + AAC 256K and it does a passable job of fetching metadata. It’s just after the disc is ripped, we’re done.
The file server for warehousing data. I’ve mostly followed the pattern of collecting content in its various forms under Music, while backups exist imaginatively under Backups. Things will probably become divided either by format or purpose, such as FLAC, M4A or Library, Player directories in place of the existing “Artist – Album” structure. I might debate between the old media depot under Backups getting reorganized or moving to a dedicated “Originals” structure organized by source (CD, Steam, iTunes, Amazon, Google, yada, yada) on my Music share. One of the advancements over the past decade is its no longer just “Backups” and individual hosts that gets backed up regularly, but the entire file server’s shares where LAN data lives.
This path of insanity makes a good excuse to start normalizing my approach to dealing with cover art, lyrics, and readme files pertaining to music–but are a smaller problem than ensuring sane song metadata and library structure. Enforcing a tag editor centric data flow is also a good reason to make for easily saving/loading metadata from disk.
I’m also thinking that for a general approach to normalization, making MP4/AAC the standard lossy format with FLAC as the lossless where applicable. One of those things that has changed over the past decade and a half, is I’ve no real reason to prefer MP3/320K over AAC/256 or WAV over FLAC. Software compatibility for decoders (unless perhaps, you’re a damn iPod or the like) just isn’t a problem like it was in the early days of AAC, and there’s no real reason to treat the hax that ID3 evolved from and WAV is basically the software equal of a 3.5mm analog jack this side of FLAC.
Yup, let’s just say the iPod experiment finally drove me over the hill ^(o_o)^
Continuing iPod Experiments
Augmenting the iPod, I’ve ended up with a trio of different players. Okay, so yeah, I finally went crazy 🤪.
Digital Media Players
There’s the iPod in the middle that I’ve posted about a few times, which is effectively a 5th generation late 2006 model with a new front plate, battery, and a 64G SD card replacing the 30G hard drive. Not to mention some blood, sweat, and tears invested. Well, thankfully not blood since I used an iFixIt toolkit instead of an Elite Old Electronics opening tool, but I can now understand while opening the metal models that followed is such a pain 😂.
Flanking this is to the right is HIFI WALKER’s H2, which has turned up so often in YouTube and Amazon suggestions, that we may as well call this a crosspoint between being advertised to death and being pissed at the iPod that much.
On the Left is Innioasis’s Y1, which is a device that I had came across researching the cost between old iPods and the question, “Surely someone makes a modern thing with a clickwheel,” and it is also the cheapest of the group. The wallpaper set is one I used to use on my Xbox One, not the standard one.
iPod 5th Gen
The iPod actually works pretty good when it works. Issues stemming from the memory card size and the cable aside, the primary beef I have with it is the PC/Mac software. It’s pretty cool that Apple Music and Finder/Apple Devices supports recovering and syncing to iPods in this day in age, but frankly the software sucks.
Syncing services on Mac are pretty crappy but do remain effective. It’s been so many years since the Apple sold iPods, a product that originally began in the PowerPC era, that I can forgive the CPU load and occasional bottlenecking, because it does in fact work. Enough so, that I kind of suspect at least one or two quality assurance engineers at Apple must still have an actual iPod. But I suspect that hooking it up to something on my Linux machine using libgpod would be far, far more resource efficient.
The only thing that was hacky was recovering on Mac, since its kind of a pull plug and restart trick; it’s better to just use Apple Devices on Windows unless you specifically want a Mac APM/HFS+ formatted iPod instead of a PC MBR/FAT32 formatted iPod. Otherwise, the software is just like grossly inefficient and twitchy. Like, the sync services may be one of the more CPU intensive things I’ve ever run on my MacBook Air–a machine that can find itself doing x265 video encodes in 1080p, lol.
Hardware wise, I think the iPod is pretty great. Discounting the cable hoopla and surgical procedures, the worst I can really say there is that it uses the old 30-pin connector and that I don’t want to desolder that for a USB-C mod.
Something that remains questionable is the decoder. Certain audio tracks lead to artifacts in playback, which do not seem to affect other devices.
Attempts at running Rockbox have been spotty enough that I returned to booting into the iPod’s native OS. Stability seems to be better in recent development versions than 3.15 stable, but the combo of an iFlash Solo and Rockbox on the iPod means having to boot into the iPod’s disk mode to sync. Using Rockbox’s USB mass storage mode leads to corruption and slow I/O, the kind where the memory card in the iFlash Solo seems to both get files jumbled up (parts of another song running together) and shitting data across the disk in a way that makes fsck wonder just what the fuck was done to it, lol.
In a nutshell, running the iPod firmware gives crap syncing and running Rockbox firmware is a bit twitchy in my hardware configuration. I think if Rockbox was stable or I had less grief with the iTunes front, I would spring for a 30-pin Bluetooth connector like one from Kokkia; it’s less effort than modding but too expensive to splurge on during the experimental phase.
HIFI Walker H2
The H2 is perhaps the real winner in the experiment, or at least the lead horse. Hardware wise, I can’t say that the style really does it for me, but it is very well made. It feels like a brilliant hardware engineer went craftsmen on the ODM front, and then let his cousin Bob write the firmware as a college project so that they could sell it as an white label product.
The H2’s hardware reminds me a lot of the old school Walkmans. So much so that it makes me wish for a belt clip, lol. The zinc alloy frame seems to be pretty durable, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it would hit the pavement like a Chuck Norris joke and come out unscratched next to a broken side walk. Looking online for tear downs, suggest that it likely has a pretty hefty battery filling most of its thickness. While our tastes may differ, I have a lot of respect for whoever designed the H2 hardware, they did an awesome job. Coincidentally, the earbuds that come bundled are pretty darn nice!
Software works as advertised, but is the worst user experience of these three players. I think that the vendor would have been better off hiring some Rockbox developers to improve the port, and someone else to graft on Bluetooth support. The awesome thing is the Rockbox build is even more stable than the original firmware, and sounds like it will be promoted to stable whenever Rockbox 4.0 happens. The main negative to hosted Rockbox, is it places the firmware on the memory card at .rockbox, where the native firmware is on the player’s tiny, tiny internal flash; which makes it easier to go oopsie with an rsync. The Rockbox wiki page has plenty of info on the hardware which is quite helpful.
For the most part, I find myself using the H2 most often in the past few weeks–but booted to Rockbox rather than the OEM firmware. The worst thing that I can say about RB on the H2 is that it doesn’t support Bluetooth, which is pretty much true of everything that runs Rockbox. The native firmware seems to be better about handling cover art, but the only real reason to use the HiBy Player firmware that’s on the H2’s flash is to use Bluetooth.
My preference for BT, and the support for aptX being one of my reasons for coughing up the dough aside. I think that one would be better off using Rockbox and tag editing software on a PC to handle their music collection. From the sounds of the manual, future software updates are likely to include a version of HiBy player that doesn’t support as many features, so Rockbox is probably a net win.
While I’ve experienced no problems with the USB mass storage mode in the H2’s native HiBy Player or the development builds of Rockbox, it’s just more convenient to eject the memory card and use it directly IMHO.
Innioassis Y1
I kind of have the most mixed feelings about the Y1, but would recommend it if someone wants an “iPod Like” device but not an iPod.
Hardware wise, just imagine what an iPod classic would look like today. Looking online for tear downs suggests that it’s a hardware design that is reminiscent but with a MicroSD card in place of where I would have expected eMMC soldered. Opening the iPod was enough of a pain, I don’t really want to find out, so I will just be thankful for the 128G capacity.
Software wise is interesting but also kind of “Meh” IMHO. Connecting the device to USB, it is obviously running some form of Android because of the folder structure. That it identifies itself with an HTC vendor id and 1 as the device id make some wonder if it was simply a device SDK with a few custom APKs baked in. Looking online, it sounds like the vendor is willing to support customers on the hardware front, but has zero access to the firmware, so it’s basically orphan ware.
The upside however is the software doesn’t suck, it’s just pretty bare. The trick of holding the back/menu key to control sorting based on file name or song name is perhaps the make or break between “Good enough” and “Missed it by that much,” and I think it would be neat if there was a way to jailbreak and replace it–I kind of want to see what happens on a machine with adb available. As it is, I would say that the firmware is just a little worse than an actual iPod. In that, I think it could be called a success, but like the H2–don’t ask a lot of it. Being able to load custom APKs and replace the launcher would be a major win, but I’m not likely to pursue that beyond the most obvious experiments to try.
I’ve only encountered one real problem and a few minor quibbles. Some of my music causes the album view to crash due to the album art, but that was easily rectified by bisecting a lot of music to find which albums caused woe. It’s amazing how many times you can forget to press the button to enable USB storage mode 😆. Aside from that, I would say it handles album art pretty swell–better than my iPod’s stock firmware, more reliably than Rockbox has so far, and less ‘ahh, my eyes’ the H2’s translucency approach.
On the minor quibbles front, the 3.5mm analog jack puts out a bit of hiss whenever headphones are connected. I’m not sure if this comes from interference or whatever state the DAC’s line in pins might be left in, or if it is just the quality of the amplifier circuit. It’s not too noticeable while playing music, and for $45 I’m fine with that. Not really an analog audio guy anymore, and the Bluetooth output to my Echo Dot was fine. In the near future, I need to try BT earbuds or headphones.
Interesting to me, my experiment with the higher sample rate FLAC plays out as a middle ground on the Y1. It cannot play the original FLAC the way the H2 can, but unlike the iPod it can play my AAC resampling just fine. And pretty much everything except for the iPod does play that AAC version just fine, lol.
Where to from here
Given the issues with the iPod, I’m tempted to relegate this to a secondary machine or shelf it as a vintage project. The H2, it remains to be scene whether or not my preference for BT will win out over RB, and the Y1 is a device that would fill the gap if only the software was more featured.
I think in the long run however, that neither syncing my “Originals” from the file server nor my Apple Music library will be a viable solution. Rather, some library where the metadata is more aggressively managed will be necessary. Because when using the former there is too much variation for the iPod/Y1 to take it as is, and in the latter too many issues between the iPod/H2/Y1 to call it good enough.
The question of course is what form that will take.