woolrich

It was chilly here today. I was out with the kids. I wore my favorite red Woolrich shirt. That shirt reminds me of the company every time I hang it up. You can't beat a heavy cotton flannel assembled in Sri Lanka when you want a reminder of a small Pennsylvania wool mill and America's lost textile economy.

I've had the shirt for many years. Still more years ago, I went to a Woolrich factory outlet in California and bought a brilliant windbreaker from them. Plastic fiber. The kind of jacket that can be folded, still damp, into its own pocket and left to mildew until you need it again.

My windbreaker never made it to that part of its life cycle, at least not in my care. I like to think it was sucked out a convertible somewhere on some twisty segment of the Pacific Coast Highway. It was probably left on the back of a diner chair instead.

I learned a lot about outlet shopping with that windbreaker. I had thought that the real trick was to inspect merchandise carefully before you bought to avoid visible manufacturing errors. I realized soon after that an outlet garment with no visible flaws must have either hidden flaws worse than a simple missed stitch or marketing flaws that left it unfit somehow for general consumption.

The jacket may have been just the wrong color of blue/green that year. I think it was consigned to the outlet for a deeper flaw. It had a velcro closure over the zipper. I soon found that the velcro was installed the wrong way around. The stiff, hooky part of the velcro faced in toward your body . If you happened to be wearing an actual wool sweater of the type formerly made by Woolrich, it would happily engage the jacket and serve as surrogate velcro loops. The sweater usually lost those encounters. I ruined a couple that way before I figured it out.

All of this came to mind today when the ACLU called.

I don't have a lot of outlets here where I live. I do have MicroCenter. They serve a similar purpose. They remainder lots of products with hidden flaws. The Philips DECT phones I bought from them a couple of years are a good example. Their chargers absolutely destroy the rechargeable batteries in the phone. I have to replace them every year. The last one died during the election season this year. There didn't seem to be any good reason to get the phones back on line until well after the robocalls subsided. Today was the day to bring them back. If I had thought more clearly, I would have waited till after the year-end giving people hung it up.

Not ten minutes after I got the phone reconnected, the ACLU called looking for more money from me. I've never given them my private, unlisted home telephone number. There are lots of reasons not to. The most compelling is that I don't even know it. Nobody does. My wife has it buried in a phonebook entry for me somewhere. She never dials the actual number manually. She probably only saw it once, a decade ago, when putting it into her cell phone.

The ACLU called looking for me by name.

Somewhere along the way, my local telco sold my unlisted number to some database types who thought that the cleverest thing since the gateleg table would be to fuse this info with their existing donor contact info so that they could reach out in new and unwelcome ways.

I only pay my telco $2.50 per month for not printing my name in their directory. They could hardly be expected to make ends meet on that alone. It must cost them at least $4 per month just to not print it!

The ACLU is not the only guilty party. Since this privacy breach, I have received lots of calls from organizations that I support that suddenly have that number. The call center drones all insist that I must have furnished the number. It is on their screen, is it not? They dialed, did they not? I have given generously in the past, have I not?

The Free Software Foundation, bless them, has not pulled this trick yet. I hope the fused dataset can only be read with non-free tools. They survive to get money from me for another year.

Thomas Wolfe says you can't go home again. Certainly not if you lived in most US mill towns. My local telco says you can still call.

blog by reference

I started reading The Register's archaeology piece on the British 'Liberator' laptop last night and I blew my entire time allowance for original reporting. Go read that piece instead. Their entire history series is uniformly readable. Better, it is surprisingly non-conspiratorial. That's a difficult trick to pull off when looking back on dead, incompatible machines.

If you are looking for a way to keep your houseguests civil over the long holiday weekend, I suggest the game 'Chronology'. Players maintain a timeline of cards. On each turn, they must place an event, like invention of the safety pin, correctly in their timeline. Gameplay stops when a player builds a timeline of some predetermined length. If you buy one of the more deluxe editions then you can remove all the sports and popular culture cards and still have enough decent technology cards left over for a game!

Many of the best cards are dated from patent applications. I can imagine a free, online version of this game that just draws patents from USPTO. You would probably want to exclude any patent filed in the last thirty years.

I'm sure that The Register merchandising team is already hard at work on a special edition 'ROM expansion pack' for this game. I hope it available in time for Christmas. I think it should come in either a collectable colorburst crystal tin or a reproduction of the Liberator's pleather case.

Colorburst Crystal
Photo credit: allelectronics.com

brace

Text entry remains a challenge on mobile devices.

Apple's iPad provides an on-screen keyboard that is better in many ways than real keyboards on real computers I've owned. It is not good at punctuation.

The keyboard supports multi-touch. This means that a user can hold 'shift' plus a letter or '#+=' plus a symbol and get a shifted version of the key. This is certainly more natural than the modal on-screen keyboards on several earlier systems.

Unfortunately, the 'ABC'/'.?123' button remains quasi modal. You cannot hold it down with one finger while selecting punctuation another.

Fortunately, Apple provides a completely unnatural alternative. You can press 'ABC'/'.?123' and slide your finger across to the (shifted) key you want. On release, the keyboard returns to its original state. If you never need a piece of punctuation more adventurous than '@' then you shall never want.

If you should ever need any of the Holy Punctuation reserved for Programmers then you will certainly want. The 'ABC'/'.?123' is not properly multi-touch aware. You can press '.?123','#+=',and '{' together and get a curly brace. Your keyboard will not return to its original state on release. Worse, you cannot use the funky 'electric slide' gesture from the alpha keyboard to get a curly brace at all.

The C language was developed not that long before the famous 1972 break-in at DNC headquarters in the Watergate. Little evidence exists to support a link between these events aside from persistent rumors that 'C' is, in fact, a programmer's pun for 'Water'.

Well connected C programmers in 1972 might have used a VT05 video display terminal from DEC. They had access to the glorious range of ASCII punctuation right at the keyboard though some shifting was required.

Years later, affluent home hackers at their Apple ][ machines were early victims of Steve Jobs' War on Punctuation. That keyboard supported enough punctuation to enter C trigraphs and not much more. No curly braces, no square braces.

Apple II+ keyboard
Photo credit: Bilby

Even the Commodre PET's crude calculator keyboard and the Atari 400's appalling membrane keyboard supported square braces. Modern scholars see that Jobs didn't invent keyboards without punctuation. He merely perfected them.

Quick 'C' punctuation can be brought to the iPad in just about the same way it has been brought to the masses for forty years -- with multigraphs.

In 'C', users with censored keyboards could use '??(' for '[', '??<' for '{', and so on. The idea, at least, still makes some sense in the iPad era and many shortcuts can be entered as quickly as with the iPad's own keyboard.

Go to 'Settings'->'General'->'Keyboard'->'Add New Shortcut...' and you can build modern di-,tri-, and n-graphs for your favorite missing marks. I frequently use the four following shortcuts:

lcb -> {
rcb -> }
lsb -> [
rsb -> ]

Apple could fix this situation easily by making the '.?123' key a multi-touch peer of 'shift'. They could do it without introducing any of the virtual silkscreen frenzy of contemporary Android keyboards. Not a single pixel on-screen need change.

eager reader

Tuesday's 'VHS' column resonated with some readers. In our review of 'Super 8', I summoned the ghosts of 'The Goonies' and 'Blow Out'. Both are great films. Until today, I could think of nothing at all that they had in common.

Today's Gizmodo ad for a nasty 3M pico projector brought my review back to my mind. It, too, summons ghosts of cinema past to lorem ipsum up however many words 3M paid for. The first two were 'The Goonies' and 'Blow Out'.

I think the odds of that specific evocation are probably not as long those of Pirate Willie's treasure being real. I do think they are pretty long.

I like cosmic balance. I'll keep it going by reposting my own thoughts on pico projectors  from my September piece 'ewaste: big picture':

> As far as I can tell, most of the recent
> innovation in the projector market
> is in 'pico-projectors'. These take
> some of the very same DLPs used in
> more expensive projectors and pair
> them with 50 lumen LEDs. This seems
> like an attempt to move down-market
> without first having a market. These
> projectors still cost hundreds of
> dollars and typically can't produce an image
> larger than a cheap laptop in a room
> with any ambient light.

I stand corrected. Gizmodo's  3M projector is (up to) 60 lumens, not the 50 I so disparaged. $299 from Amazon. They do make a big deal out of the DLP.

Unfortunately, the 3M is actually kind of interesting. They market it as a 'streaming projector' but the stream is courtesy a Roku stick that sits in a pocket in the back. I think the stick is the Roku 3400R Streaming Stick ($99 from Amazon). The projector contains its own battery and powers the stick. 

That's almost interesting. These new sticks look a bit like beefy USB thumb drives or 3g modems but they are actually a new thing -- HDMI sticks. They hang off a male HDMI plug, draw power from an attached display, consume content over wifi and excrete video. This is as close a device as has yet been constructed to Douglas Adams' 'Babel Fish'. I don't care to consider the theological implications.

Here's the actual interesting bit. Roku's not the only fish in the HDMI stick waste lagoon. There is probably an entire Chinese factory that does nothing but make new factories to build Android HDMI sticks like this. $55! Yow! 3M actually built a cheap, projecting life support system for Android sticks and they just haven't figured it out yet.

3M? Are you (or your Gizmodo lackeys) reading? I'll take two and I'll call you in the morning. Contact me in the comments below and I'll stuff some Android in there and give you a spiffy review. Just don't expect me to claim a viewing distance of up to 120 inches.

Once you guys finish that, build your (up to) 60 lumen projector into a recessed retrofit ceiling fixture (like this) with a short-throw lens and I'll buy several to use as digital wall washes. That would show those sissies over at Philips just where they could stuff their ZigBee lightbulb.

Sorry for the insane consumer electronic product planning spasm. Bunnie is busy hacking DNA and someone has to pick up the slack.

prewaste

Ewaste is not a destination. It is a process. The process is most visible for me during staging, the phase where the broken and the useless take up enough valuable space that a trip to a recycler is in order.

Woot helped me bring some new ewaste into the house recently. They ran a special on Audyssey Lower East Side Media Speakers. I bit. I forgot that good things do not need special sale prices. These speakers now inhabit an ewaste phase that I don't really have nailed down in my evolving taxonomy. I own them. They don't do what I wanted them to do. I am now condemned to have them wander the house in absurd alternate use cases until they ultimately betray me by confusing or electrocuting some other family member.

I have been using Apple's AirPlay for home audio since the feature turned up in their original Airport Express base stations. I have several small zones and I don't ask much of my speakers. I have tried several times to find a decent pair of powered speakers that can be configured once, set high on top of a  bookshelf or cabinet together with the Express, and forgotten.

I think Apple missed a decent bet by not supporting USB speakers on the Express. They have always included a full size powered USB port that supports a narrow range of printers and one esoteric, obsolete USB remote control dongle Keyspan.

I tried for years to just use the Express as a USB power supply for cheap USB speakers that supported an aux. input. I then just patched the analog output of the Express into the aux. input of the speakers. This always worked for a while. The Express power supplies were never up to the task, though, and
several died after a few months of this treatment. Irritatingly, the first one lived long enough for me to taste success and hook speakers up to all the rest. They all died before I figured the speakers as culprits.

I want USB speakers because I want a single-outlet solution. I have several sets of the discontinued Logitech Z-5 and I'm quite happy with them though I can no longer find them new. I want the Express over other third-party AirPlay boxes because I know that I can put them out of reach and not worry about them for years at a time.

I eventually solved the power problem and kept a single socket with the PlugBug from Twelve South. The PlugBug sits against an Apple powerbrick-shaped object and interposes between the wall and the hidden female power receptacle inside an Apple brick. It effectively adds a USB charge port to your brick. The original Express units used the same replaceable power tip that Apple has supplied with laptop bricks for more than a decade. Apple's new Express units use a new design that eliminates the removable tip and makes the PlugBug unsuitable.

The Audyssey speakers seemed appealing. They are not too big, not too ugly, not too expensive (at Woot's price), and they include an optical SPDIF port that shoud accept digital tunes directly from the Express. They are also available. That's a big advantage over the Z-5.

The Audyssey speakers are not USB powered. I give up. The PlugBug is really no different than an outlet splitter anyway. The speakers have a volume knob that the Z-5s lack. I usually place speakers out of reach or out of sight and the volume knob doesn't get much use. I actually added inline attenuators (headphone volume controls) to the Z-5s so that I could statically balance my zones. The Audyssey knob could eliminate that hassle and small expense. In any case, the attenuator wouldn't work with SPDIF.

The crippling flaw is that Audyssey put a small microswitch behind the volume knob. You have to punch that switch to hear sound. The speakers turn themselves off half an hour after they decide the music is over. You have to punch the button again to hear music. There is no auto on. There is no remote. These speakers are useless as hidden AirPort speakers.

Audyssey does not acknowledge this as a product planning failure. They may actually think it was a good idea. With one cheap microswitch they were able to segment their product family into a cheap media speaker line for computer dorks who put up with flaws like this all the time and a more expensive line for proper AV types. They may have even missed a trick. They could have left the auto-off in their more expensive products and added an even more expensive Crestron add-in that could automatically poke the button and rotate the knob for you.

I surfed review sites and forums briefly in search of relief. It was typical forum fare. I was either right but out of luck, or I was wrong and symptomatic of obese Americans because I would not get up to press a button, or wrong and symptomatic of coal-burning Americans because I hate energy saving modes, or wrong because I was trying to do whole house audio without fully funding some audio peddler's new spinnaker.

Perhaps Google will place an Audyssey ad next to this post and pay me a dollar if you click it. If I get ten ad clicks from this post, I'll take the speakers apart and defeat this auto-off or kill them trying. I'll post the result here.

VHS

I have never had much luck with VCR repair. If you are stuck with a dead Betamax deck then I can't do anything for you but send you over to the Lancia forums. They have been keeping betas alive despite the odds for decades. Mostly coupes though. If you have a dead VHS that you wanted to revive for the sole purpose of screening 'The Goonies' then I may have a suggestion. Get Netflix for a month. Watch 'Super8'. Steven Spielberg, executive producer to both, probably gets paid more through Netflix than through your unheralded cassette march. Be kind to the man. Don't rewind.

I have small children. I don't get out much. I only saw 'Super8' two days ago. Worse, I didn't immediately recognize the 1979-era scene as vintage. J. J. Abrams may have been content to merely direct franchise reboots back in the (most recent) Star Trek era. He has since rebooted himself as a producer of that signature line of modern cinema. Sinofsky may now be deep into a stealth-mode startup. He should be comforted in his dotage by the now positive connotations of  'reboot'.

A reboot in a tricky thing. The 'omnishambles' (total sop to my UK readers) Star Trek approach to this is to alter the timeline and advance a new story. Pirate Willie was above all that and his Goonie followers are as well. Better to just rename the whole thing and backdate it by six years as well. In the present political climate, pirates are probably best described as (illegal) aliens anyway. Storyline transformation complete!

Actually, there is 5% more storyline unique to the modern retelling. The entire gimmick of Goonies The Younger is that our intrepid kids capture something on film they were never supposed to see. I must admit that I'm a sucker for that gimmick. I loved it in 'Blow Out'. It works less well when the footage is of an alien that is about to make his destructive presence known to the entire town, film or no film.

'Super8' sets the '79 vibe not just with a headstone for the slower viewers but also with subtle AM radio references to TMI. Apple plays along in their subtle way by autocorrecting 'or no' above into ORNL. Awesome.

Ditch the deck. Have one last Goonies weekend. Screen 'Super8'. It even has a fat kid.

UPDATE: I didn't mean to so completely reboot Mike Ryan's interview-style shtick so completely so soon. The entire extended Ryan clan has had a tough week. First Paul with last Tuesday's election, then Jack and his beloved CIA with the recent Petraeus flap. Now Mike with my failure to adequately google before blogging.