jazz

I told you in July about  a small logo I built for my kids. It is still here.

We still use it -- more than I can say for some already forgotten Christmas toys. We use it a lot.

We use it for logo. We use it to generate G-code for our CNC machine. Now we use it to make music.

Shouts out all around for the community of hackers who brought us HTML5 web audio. The best thing about web audio is that it makes sense. There should be many moneyed interests that benefit from a programmable web.

Our logo now lets kids play musical notes with the 'play' command. Here's an example:

play [ list '4G4' '8F4' '4E4' '4D4' '4C4' '4D4' '4E4' '4C4' ]

'play', of course, is implemented with web audio. My six year old played with 'play' for just a few minutes before going to a cupboard and dragging out a USB MIDI keyboard controller. It was completely obvious to her that music should go into the computer just as easily as it comes out.

Thank heavens for six year olds.

I sat her down to have a little chat. I dread these chats. Granny's dead. Santa's not real. Democrats lost the Senate. The chat I dread most is also one of the most common in our household -- Computers aren't wonderful in the way you are now imagining. It breaks my heart every time.

I told my daughter that we could plug it in but nothing would happen. I said we could run GarageBand, but her expression turned to a scowl before I could even finish speaking. "That's
the confusing program!" she said. She's right. GarageBand has all kinds of problems. One is that
it often crashes for us -- on both iOS and MacOS -- when our four year old wails randomly on the MIDI keyboard.

This is where Chris Wilson, from Google, swoops in to the rescue.

Chris wrote Jazz, a browser plugin for MIDI. Chris is also an author of the more complicated W3C Web MIDI API specification.

It took me only about ten minutes to bang some basic MIDI into our logo using Jazz. I took a stab
at using the native MIDI apparently available in Chrome. More than an evening has already disappeared down that hole at this point.

If you load logo and have the plug-in installed, you can plug in a MIDI keyboard and hear notes
without doing anything -- even reloading the tab. It works as an automatic, trivial keyboard instrument. It tolerates a four year old banging on the keyboard.

Almost nothing else works properly at this point. You can't record MIDI from logo yet. You can't do MIDI output. You can't use the keyboard to control the turtle. I'm not worrried about any of that. That's the easy stuff. The fun stuff!

The hard part was building something that just works. Chris Wilson did that with Jazz and I'm grateful.

MIDI input is not like web audio. It doesn't make automatic sense for folks under 40. That's what makes me especially glad for Jazz. The various moneyed browser folks are still in the wilderness on this one.

The Chrome folks took a swing at MIDI in the browser but haven't quite gotten there yet. The Mozilla folks are still fooling around with game controller support in the browser. I suspect they were smoking some powerful 'set-top box' peyote when they came up with this one. They will
eventually get on board. Apple's still busy not supporting WebRTC. They will get their act together once they realize that MIDI keyboards don't have an escape key.

MIDI in the browser is solid gold. With MIDI and logo together in the browser, I feel like I'm getting the band back together from the '80s. It feels good, though we're having a bit of trouble coaxing the KoalaPad out of retirement to play bass.

echo

I've gotten a number of requests for an Amazon echo review. I've been meditating on it since. The answer is no. No echo review. I thought briefly about making a parody video for the 'Amazone Marco' -- a squat cylinder that listens to every peep in your house and stands ready to answer 'Polo' whenever it hears the call.

I actually have a use for a whole house listening device. I would pay for a box that listens all night long and uses sophisticated cloud analytics to pinpoint skittering sounds and figure out where the damn mice are living. That device would do me more good than a whole jar of peanut butter.

The reason for my no is that I have already lived the dream and I'm not going back to it. I ran a whole-apartment voice recognition system back in about 1995 on an AMD DX4 120 box. It really sucked.

How can I possibly compare some cruddy open source rig on a twenty year old computer to the marvel of Amazon's echo and the even more marvelous cloud behind it? Easy. I was young then. My powers of self-delusion were at their peak. I believed that the rig I built actually worked. It just failed to understand me _that once_. It failed to be exciting even when armed with the belief that it was working perfectly.

Fast forward twenty years and I'm sure the technology has caught up with my illusion. Has my position changed? It has.

I now have children. I have a hundred frustrating conversations a day with actual English-speaking sentient creatures. They listen to every word they can catch whether meant for them or not and interrupt thought to clarify some point not meant for them. My eldest will soon be able to look things up in Wikipedia for me. I don't think that will be more satisfying that looking it up myself. I love my children. I don't need a new one from Amazon in my living room.

I like the idea of reduced school tuition for Amazon Prime customers though. Maybe they'll work on that next.

malfunction

My BMW i3 spent most of last week at the dealer for warranty work. I picked it up on Halloween. Alas, the spirit of the season snuck into the car and revealed itself only after a 200 mile drive the next day. I got an ugly looking error message just a few miles from my destination.

The car said 'Drivetrain malfunction: continued driving is possible'. This inspires not much confidence. The error went away in the morning and I began my return trip. I got the same ugly message a few miles from home.

continued driving _is_ possible
Photo courtesy your correspondent

The car went back to the dealer early Monday morning and spent the next three days under scrutiny. The verdict? No problem. It won't happen again.

The trip I took pushed the envelope a bit. I barrelled down I-95 until I ran out of battery and then ran another hundred miles down the road running on the 600cc range extending motor. The extender is good for about 70mph steady state on level ground. I pressed about 71 with four people in the car. Error messages aside, it seemed pleasant and unremarkable. I stopped at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond and charged for a couple hours on the way home. I'm getting about 4.1 miles per kilowatt hour. That works out to about 138 MPGe. The combined EPA rating for the car is 117 MPGe.

My borrowed ride last week was a 2014 BMW 328. This week I ran around in a MINI Clubman.
I admired the Clubman from the moment it was announced. I kept it on my short list of potential replacement cars for years. It felt almost like a Miata breadvan. I had all the standard complaints about the cheesy switchgear and cheap plastics but the astonishingly bad automatic transmission makes my other complaints seem petty. The small motor was noisy at any point but cruise. I got only 31 mpg on my standard routine.

I said last week that I would not trade the 328 for my i3. I am now sure that I wouldn't buy Clubman either. BMW has built a real goldilocks car in the i3.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the i3 is that I wasn't attracted to it originally for its propeller badge or environmental credentials. I just don't care for automatic transmissions. My wife doesn't care for manual. We have driven separate cars for years but the logistics of non-interchangeable cars were mounting with children. Single speed electrics and Prius-style CVTs represent the compromise space. It's a happy accident that this space includes some of the best cars you can buy today.

escape

I wrote recently about troubles offline blogging from my Nexus 7 in its default state. My Nexus 7 has only intermittent mobile connectivity, no personal accounts, and only one app -- a sideloaded Firefox.

That experience led me to put the Nexus back in a drawer. I upgraded my iPads to iOS 8 this week and set out on a now annual journey of discovery to see if any of the list of things that bug me about iOS have been put to bed.

Here are the top three items on the list:

* Ability to control the camera from Javascript: Nope
* Ability to see escape and control key 'keypress' events from Javascript in Mobile Safari: Nope
* Ability in input a square brace from the virtual keyboard without a sticky keyboard mode change: Nope

With these ongoing omissions, it may be time to put iOS in the drawer for a while. My original complaint with the Nexus had nothing to do with its hardware or even the mechanics of the Android operating system. My complaint was about the utility of the device out-of-the-box.

Out came the Nexus. I paired my Apple Wireless Keyboard with the Nexus to see if Firefox or Chrome on Android would give me the control keys I love. They do.

My next steps were to load Fabrice Bellard's awesome jslinux in Firefox on the Nexus, fire up vi, and write this post. I'm in escape heaven.

I'll get the post out by catting it to the special device /dev/clipboard. If this were 1998, I could use IrDA to beam the text directly to my laptop, then edit and publish. Instead, I'll probably have to push the text to some kind of browser-available shared drive on the network and fish it back out with my laptop.

---

In fact, that is exactly what I did. I could have published directly from the Nexus if I were willing to use my blogger credentials on the tablet. My next experiment may be to see if I can pass the text between the tablet and my laptop with bluetooth or NFC. beam.py looks interesting.

Why do I do this? I have a Newton keyboard, a Palm keyboard, a keyboard for my Nokia 770, and keyboards for iOS and Android devices. They were all disappointments. Best Buy has ASUS and Toshiba laptops available for $229. That's cheaper than all iOS devices except the very cheapest iPod touch. It's astonishingly cheap.

I think I keep trying to turn cheap and underpowered gadgets into computers because it still seems familiar. It reminds me of my own path through the 8-bit era. I would probably give it up if I had ever had a Coleco Adam or one of the other ersatz computers actually fashioned from game machines.

I worry that tablets give us a view on the future of the rest of consumer computing. Apple's indifference to my escape key today on iOS could become the Mac view in not too long. Fewer people would notice the difference than noticed the lack of a floppy on the original iMac.

The Macintosh itself didn't have an escape key and wouldn't get one until Apple unified keyboards across the Mac and Apple II product lines in about 1987. Escape wandered off some Mac keyboards in 1990 but found its way into the revered Apple Extended Keyboard.  Escape has stayed with Macs ever since.

Macintosh Plus Extended Keyboard
Photo Courtesy MagicTom

Escape's ongoing place in the celestial firmament is less clear. The Newton never had it. iOS has never supported it. I suspect that Android passes it along only thoughtlessly because it comes along for free from some lower level software. Escape began shrinking on laptop keyboards years ago. On my MacBook Air, escape is about a fifth of the size of Caps Lock.

The cosmos is telling me something. It's telling me to ditch vi or it's telling me to build my own keyboards. I just can't tell which.

(a javascript keyboard tester is here)

anonymous

Reograph is a gadget philosophy blog. In the doing of it, I have learned something known to the philosophers of antiquity -- that philosophy is at least 5% fiction.

I blog anonymously as a conceit. The fiction here at reograph is mostly at the margin to let me preserve my private dream that anonymity is possible. Many readers already know me personally but here is the big reveal for the rest of you. I'm the one person on Earth who has owned a Fiat X1/9, a BMW 318ti, and a BMW i3. That's me. That's my unique first world identifier.

The information above is practically equivalent to my Social Security number and so this next disclosure is probably redundant: I moved back to Washington, DC not too long ago. I have a bunch of posts on deck that either reveal this indirectly or simply don't make sense without this tidbit.

In fact, the BMW i3 itself makes sense for me only because I now have a lot of city driving.

I bought my i3 from BMW of Annapolis. It was fine. Go buy yours there. I popped into the dealer yesterday to pick up a refund check for sales tax paid, but not owed (to DC). While I was there, I mentioned some minor complaint about some small detail and I was vectored instantly to service to get it sorted. Awesome. Once my car was 'booked' -- like a perp on a random procedural crime drama -- the small matter of outstanding recalls came up.

My car had two minor sounding recalls outstanding. One had no description available in English. In German, the recall was named by a single VIN-sized word. How important could a single word recall really be?

Here's a thing about new car models. They're all a little bit broken. This is OK. The fine folks at your dealer, like the fine folks at your manufacturer, are all a little concerned that this reality will influence your perception of the car, the dealer, and the brand.

That's part of why the dealer will call you and invite you back for a free reception, or a free detailing, or offer to place a fresher flower in your on-dash bud vase some time during your ownership experience. This is one of the reasons that oil service is included with many new cars. Silent recalls and TSBs get addressed without you ever being aware.

I recall ignoring these calls (from a different dealer) fifteen years ago with my first BMW. I didn't understand that what the service department really needed was fifteen minutes alone with the car. The battery died not long after a spurned call from the dealer inviting me to an emergency detailing session. When I complained that a battery failure was certainly a warranty failure on a year old car, they told me that the warranty was void because the necessary service hadn't been performed on the battery.

If you're under fifty, you might not recall that batteries used to require a periodic top-up with water. By 1998, BMW had somehow not adopted the maintenance free batteries in widespread use everywhere else. Little BMW elves had been topping up my battery with water and taking care of a dozen other little details whenever I turned up at the dealer for complimentary tire valve cap rotation.

When the dealer calls you to suggest that their service department might be the ideal viewing location for an upcoming solar eclipse, just go.

My i3 is still in the service department today. At last report, the car is getting a complimentary wash, detail, charge, and almost complete disassembly of the front end to replace a fuel tank pressure sensor. I hope to be reunited with it sometime tomorrow. The good news is that the entire i3 front end contains only a handful of parts.

While I wait for the safe return of my electro-chariot, I'm getting my rounds done with a new 328 loaner from the dealer. The 328 stickers for just about what I paid for the i3. It's meant to seem much more luxurious. It's meant to seem much faster. It is definitely much larger. I love the i3. I would not buy this 328.

The 328 has 'Efficient Dynamics' written on the window and as a bitmap graphic on the instrument cluster. Efficient Dynamics, as realized here, means that the engine stops and starts disconcertingly. This impression should worry BMW -- because I have also been driving a Prius for ten years that starts and stops automatically in a completely happy and concerting way.

The 328 has no sense of power steering with the engine shut off. If the engine shuts off in the middle of parallel parking -- as happened to me today -- the wheel is dead until the car figures out that you are trying to turn the wheel. The gas motor eventually spools up and power assisted steering is again available. The automatic start-up seems barely faster and less intrusive than cranking a car manually by turning the key. By this definition, almost all of my old cars developed an EfficientDynamics stalling disorder at some point in their life. My X1/9 would sometimes EfficientDynamic right in the middle of left hand turns across traffic. Dynamic!

Prius automatic engine start works in a totally different way. In the Prius, a large electric motor gets the car going immediately and _also_ spins the crank on the gas motor. The gas motor can pitch in by adding fuel and spark whenever it gets around to it.

I love cars. I love technology. I love the environment. I love the smell of gas at a racetrack. If you love even two of these, then don't bother with feeble start/stop technologies that are not also coupled with electric power steering, electric air conditioning, and at least a modest electric traction motor and battery. A hybrid with all of these things will still have less added complexity than the complexity of the 328's start/stop rig plus its turbocharger. For all its E.D., the 328 is turning in combined mileage in the low twenties on a circuit where the i3 manages almost a hundred and twenty (MPGe), my 2004 Prius whips out 45, and my astonishingly inefficient BMW 325 wagon turned in 24.

If you love those things but you simply must have a rear wheel drive BMW with a gas engine, get an i3 with range extender, a new i8, a three series hybrid, or the forthcoming X5 plug in. If you're in DC, the folks at BMW of Annapolis seemed to me much more well versed in the new electric models. On a pre-purchase trip to a different area dealer, a salesman incorrectly identified which end of the car held the range extending gas motor.

data on sale

I wrote about cord cutting two months ago. I ditched my DSL in favor of a tethered LTE iPad for my entire domestic connectivity. I got 30 GB of data from Verizon for $225 -- a marginal increase of $155 over my previous cell phone bill.

I  found soon after that 30GB wasn't quite enough. I went to 40 GB for $300, and even then a bit past. This was starting to look like real money. My gamble was that data prices would tumble in just the way that my DSL price never did. The gamble paid off yesterday when I took advantage of a data sale at Verizon. My plan is now for 60 GB for $225. I could have kept 40 GB for $150.

At that price, LTE would have matched my previous DSL price point with better speed and a modest constraint on my usage. At 60 GB, I live unconstrained. Dropping data prices are a reality. The new question is whether they will fall faster than my usage grows. I wager they will.

charged

I'm on a train in England. My bags are packed for home. My gadgets are charged. I have been fed. Reograph time.

At home, a charged gadget is a content and happy gadget. On a travel day, a charged gadget is a gadget that has taken up a defensive position. I picture some as soldiers, pacing in trenches near the front lines. I picture others recycling tires and rationing meat on the home front. Maybe the rest are like children. We try to shelter them but they see more than we realize. Camera? Home front. iPhone? Trench. Nexus tablet? Child.

I can't spare the phone for reography this morning. I need it for train updates and electronic boarding passes and even a phone call if everything else goes wrong. I can't use the camera for reography. This tablet doesn't really have a role in my day to day life. I didn't even realize it was in my bag until last night.

I bought the tablet to play with HTML5 media APIs in Chrome and Firefox. I leave it stock and use only those apps. I load nothing else and I use no personal accounts. On this trip, the tablet is essentially disconnected. My phone's hotspot feature disappeared when I bought the wrong local SIM.

Reographing this morning meant finding a text editor on the tablet and working offline. I have little experience with Android. I expected disappointment. I thought I would have to write this article in the 'notes' area of a calendar. What I found is Quickoffice. It is a disappointment of a different kind.

Quickoffice appears capable enough for me to use it to write a book about how bad it is. I do see how awkward and ungrateful my criticism may appear.

I knew I wasn't going to like it from the word go. Actually, I didn't like it from the phrase 'Not yet saved'. Just flashing back to saving work is its own trauma. It feels as archaic as ducking and covering, as judgmental as a commandment. Lost work becomes a righteous punishment for the wicked and immoral.

In the plus column, Quickoffice does rotate from portrait to landscape. Moses' tablets didn't. In the minus column, the landscape interface is apalling. The keyboard takes up a lot of space. Fine. 

Quickoffice trashes an astonishing fraction of the balance with a pointless and unwelcome interface ribbon. Above my editing slit now is a giant blue 'W' to remind me that I'm editing a document and not a spreadsheet. The name of the document is up there. It probably takes up as much space as the letter 'Q' on the keyboard and isn't quite as useful. Below the name are 25 characters telling me that my document is not saved. Next comes an enormous swath of empty space. Then a picture of a 3.5" floppy diskette. I'm old enough to read that rune but I don't know who else is. Then come mystery buttons. Those runes elude me. I suspect at least one to be a booby trap.

quick office use of space in landscape on a Nexus 7
Photo courtesy your correspondent

In England, I visited The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. They had one of just about every interesting computing gadget. I saw several nearly forgotten friends on their shelves hidden among a hundred other gems I never knew.

I never had a Tandy 100 portable. I didn't see one on the museum shelves but I saw a number of similarly elegant portables from the era. I have nothing but respect for the nexus tablet hardware, but I wonder if it would be put to a better use emulating the model 100 than running Quickoffice. The nexus tablet is simply not ready for battle as it comes out of the box.

It is always difficult for me to do any computing in England without thinking of the hardware of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That machine functioned not only as imagined Wikipedia but also as Ford Prefect's reporter's notebook for 15 disconnected years on Earth. Even today, the model 100 might be more fit for that purpose than a stock tablet.