Someone said "England and America are two countries divided by a common language". It might have been George Bernard Shaw. Some say it was Winston Churchill channelling Oscar Wilde in a seance. I'm pretty sure it was Blaise Descartes (known popularly as Mark Twain).
I jumped the divide in a Boeing jet with Rolls-Royce engines.
My Mac and the Nexus 7 tablet next to it are similarly divided. These devices have essentially everything in common. They speak the same wireless networking standards. They run the same browsers. Their kernels share a common spiritual ancestry. They are nonetheless a world apart.
I have it on good authority that Neville Chamberlain said "Audiophiles don't use their equipment to listen to your music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment.". I'm taking this to a completely new level. I'm using equipment playing music to listen to my software.
The music is "Music Has the Right to Children" by Boards of Canada. Boards of Canada is, naturally, a Scottish duo.
My software is phonoh. Phonoh is a stupidly simple HTML5 music player built hastily to let me listen to tunes on my new Mac without iTunes. I have been in meta-audiophile heaven for a month.
As I sat in the departure lounge waiting for my flight, I realized that my laptop had the battery life to play me tunes across the Atlantic but that my tray table would be sized for a phone. The charge in the phone battery was far to valuable to blow on music. I pawed around in my bag looking for a battery that I could use to recharge the phone after. I found a Nexus 7 tablet.
When I saw the tablet, I wondered if I could use it to charge my phone with some kind of USB OTG lashup. Only after that did I remember that the Nexus was actually supposed to be a computer in its own right and that it might be able to handle something as simple as playing some music.
I spent a few minutes trying to get the Mac and the Nexus to exchange music wirelessly somehow. My first stop was 'Send File to Device' in the Mac bluetooth menu. The Mac promptly started sending tunes to the tablet at a maximum of about a hundred kilobytes a second. Here's some perspective on a hundred kilobytes a second. Uncompressed CD audio, in stores for Christmas 1982, is a hundred and fifty kilobytes a second. These two devices could not sling a CD between themselves with bluetooth in real time. Sending compressed audio over bluetooth is barely faster than a 'high-speed dub' on a dual cassette deck.
Perhaps the right answer was to negotiate a connection over bluetooth and do the actual transfer over WiFi. Super. I took my phonoh URL on the Mac and clicked share. Oops. The Mac can share files over bluetooth but not URLs.
I'll AirDrop it to the Nexus. Oops. Android can't do AirDrop. (I tried this again later between my Mac and my iPhone. localhost URL sharing doesn't work there either, though for different reasons)
I gave up and typed my phonoh URL into Firefox on my tablet. The URL used the ZeroConf name for my laptop. Oops. The browser on the Nexus doesn't recognize ZeroConf.
I looked up the IP address assigned by the airport WiFi and typed that into Firefox on the Nexus. Oops. The airport WiFi blocks device to device traffic.
I got my phone out and turned on personal hot spot. I joined the Mac and the Nexus to the phone, looked up the address assigned by the phone, and typed that in.
That worked, but didn't accomplish anything. I needed a way to cache or store the tunes on the Nexus, not stream them from my laptop.
I fished a USB cable out of my bag. I used adb to trasfer some tunes to the 'Music' directory on the Nexus. I would just let whatever native music player existed on the Nexus just play me the music. Alas, the Google Play music app could not see any of the tunes I had just transferred. The tablet couldn't be bothered to look around for what were the only files I had ever transferred to the thing. Files dumped in a folder called 'Music'. The tablet offered to sell me some music instead.
My technology odyssey didn't end here, but this installment in the story does.
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