Apropos of nothing … the MVP Baseball Soundtracks

(When I've got some time, I'm going to write about my very exciting trip to Tuscany and Paris, with lost baggage and steak tartare. Until then …)

Back in the mid-aughts, EA Sports put out a series of baseball games called MVP Baseball. The games were pretty awesome, and introduced some really novel concepts to video game baseball: the pitching and throwing meters where you lost control the harder you threw; the hot/cold batting zones; a home run derby (which was awesomely fun).

The game was pretty great.

But what really sticks out in my mind are the soundtracks for the game. EA, at the time, had this thing called "EA Trax", which was basically product placement from music labels to get music out in front of a very lucrative demographic.

Looking through the soundtracks (the full listing can be found on Wikipedia), it's clear to me why they stick in my brain …

• The Donnas - Who Invited You
• OK Go - Don't Ask Me
• Snow Patrol - Spitting Games
• stellastarr - My Coco
• The Von Bondies - C'mon C'mon
• Dropkick Murphys - Tessie
• Hot Hot Heat - You Owe Me An IOU
• Louis XIV - Finding Out True Love Is Blind
• The Bravery - An Honest Mistake

That's a murderer's row of mid-2k indie and alternative rock.

I think I've still got the Gamecube version around here somewhere. I might have to break it out and play it one of these days.

The Hardy Boys in The Mystery of the Disappearing Hard Drive

About a year and a half ago, I added a Crucial M4 SSD to my MacBook Pro. It was a major upgrade, as going from a spinning disk to a solid state one was a massive, massive performance upgrade.

Everything was going swimmingly until Wednesday evening. I was doing some work when, out of nowhere, the whole machine beachballed. I could still do some things that were running, but I couldn't load anything new. Bizarre, but I was able to restart the machine and everything worked happily after that.

Thursday morning rolls around and after a while of using the laptop, the whole thing happens again. Restart, work for a little while, happens again.

This was bizarre.

When it happened the 3rd time Thursday morning, I happened to be in a terminal window. I was able to type commands into the command line, so I thought "Well, let's see what I can see for the underlying device".

I knew my drive was disk0s2, so I tried a very simple command:

ls -al /dev/disk0s2
ls: /dev/disk0s2: No such file or directory

Yikes. Where did my hard drive go?

I rebooted again and decided to look for some tools that might do hard drive diagnosis. I ran Apple's Disk Utility; it found nothing. I installed smartmontools via Homebrew and ran a few tests. The tests didn't find anything wrong, but they did mention something odd about the firmware …

This drive may hang after 5184 hours of power-on time:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Crucial-m4-Firmware-BSOD,14544.html
See the following web pages for firmware updates:
http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx
http://www.micron.com/products/solid-state-storage/client-ssd#software

Well, that's curious.

Checking out the Tom's Hardware link:

Corrects a condition where an incorrect response to a SMART counter will cause the m4 drive to become unresponsive after 5184 hours of Power-on time. The drive will recover after a power cycle, however, this failure will repeat once per hour after reaching this point. The condition will allow the end user to successfully update firmware, and poses no risk to user or system data stored on the drive

My first thought was "Ha! That's probably it."
My second thought was "Jebus, how the hell do you ship a drive that flakes out after 5000 hours of use?"

I double-checked my instincts and ran the smartmontools again:

/usr/local/sbin/smartctl -a disk0s2
…….
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 001 Old_age Always - 5673

My drive had been running for well over the 5184 hours and must have eventually tripped that condition.

After a few minutes to burn a CD, reboot (hold option when you're rebooting your Mac to get the screen to choose to boot off the CD), and run a firmware upgrade to the drive, I was back up and running.

An hour later, my hard drive had not disappeared. It was right where it was supposed to be.

ls -al /dev/disk0s2
brw-r----- 1 root operator 1, 2 Jul 11 10:18 /dev/disk0s2

Thanks, Frank and Joe. Great job as always.

A Public Service Announcement for the Ladies

Sorry, ladies, I'm off the market.

After waiting too long (no idea why she's still with me), I decided to make an honest woman out of Katie. I proposed before we left for our trip (surprise!). We celebrated accordingly.

European Vacation

Not of the National Lampoon's variety, but instead a trip to Tuscany for a wedding, followed up by nearly a week in Paris. Aside from a couple of challenges (ahem, Air France not delivering our delayed luggage), it was a pretty remarkable 10 days or so.

We stayed in a town called Bibbiano in the Tuscany region of Italy for a wedding, on a little vineyard. It was simply a beautiful location for a wedding (and a vacation). The only downside was a lack of working wifi—it existed, but you head to stand in exactly the right spot to use it.

(Yeah, yeah. I know I shouldn't be on the web while I'm on vacation, but given that my Celtics had the NBA Draft and announced a trade of the remaining members of the Big Three, I'm pretty sure I had every reason to be slurping down those handful of bytes that would get through the slow wireless connection.)

After a train ride from Bibbiano to Florence, we caught a flight (via Amsterdam) to Paris. Our tight connection in Amsterdam meant that our luggage did not make the flight to Paris with us. At some point, when I've had some time to process my anger, I'll relay that story.

We stayed in north eastern Paris, in an apartment we got off of Airbnb. It was very near the Metro and in a sort of hipstery neighborhood. Our first couple of days were spent just walking around a bit, relaxing, and waiting for our luggage. We were able to see Sacré-Cœur and eat lots of good food on our first two days. On Wednesday, we were finally able to really explore the city, and we did our best to hit up every touristy place you might want to see—I've never been to Paris before, so it was an opportunity to see all the big stuff.

On the trip, we ate way too much meat and cheese (well, if there were such a thing as too much cheese), but balanced that off with walking miles each day. Thankfully, Katie knows enough French to help us get around without too much trouble, though Paris is very very easy for an English-speaker to get around (and most folks speak at least a little English).

One of our last dinners in Paris was a great dinner with some friends who'd also attended the wedding in Italy. After dinner at Le Relais de l'Entrecôte (so good), we ventured over to a Canadian bar to have a nightcap. There we met a couple of great people which lead to a few too many beers being downed. (Getting good beer in Paris is hard to do, and I was pretty wined out after spending four days at a vineyard.)

Preserving My Childhood Memories Digitally

Last Christmas, I took a crate of old photos and photo albums out of my mom's basement, thinking that I would scan them. Having a digital copy (and being able to backup those digital copies) would be a great thing, especially as my brothers and I are getting older. It'd be nice to be able to show my nieces and nephew these pictures, or show them to Katie so she can see what I looked like growing up.

Well, that was a good goal, at least.

It's been a bit more challenging than I anticipated, for a few reasons. First, it was pretty time-consuming just going through the photos: trying to figure out what year the photo was from, sometimes figuring out who it was (my brothers look similar at 1 and 2), and filtering out the duplicates. It took me a few weeks, off and on, to get through all the photos. (And, of course, it took me a few months to get started on that effort, at all.)

I've got a flatbed scanner, which is probably the preferred scanner for scanning photos, but doesn't exactly make for expeditious scanning. Well, not when combined with using Preview or Image Capture. You load a few images on the scanner, choose "Detect Separate Items" so that—ideally—you can easily scan more than one photo at at a time, pick your settings (color, 300 dpi, PNG), and scan away.

Most of the time, it goes fine. But, frequently enough to be annoying, the software doesn't do a great job to detect the photos, so you have to fiddle with bounding box to crop the image right. Then make sure to name the images so you'll recognize what they are (if you plan to put them into categories in some fashion).

It's just not as fast as I'd hoped, but I'm working on scanning a handful of photos every weekend (and when I've got free time), and I expect that I'll be done in a couple of months.

One handy tool I'd recommend that you use is ImageOptim. If you're scanning to PNG (and you should be), it'll do some really smart stuff to the image to remove about 20% of the overall size without impacting the image quality. If you're going to be scanning hundreds (or thousands) of photos, that'll come in handy.

I'm sure someone's got a better workflow. If you do, I'd love to hear it. There are companies out there that'll do this for you, but it seems to be a bit expensive. I figure free with some effort is better than paying a big chunk of money for someone to do it for me. But, I'm betting there's some smart software or tips that will make the process go faster. (Maybe you have one?)

Post-WWDC 2013

A quick recap of some of what I found interesting from the WWDC 2013 keynote. This isn't an exhaustive list, just the bits and pieces I found particularly interesting.

iOS

• Obviously, the UI overhaul is pretty huge. I'm not sold on every element of it (many of the icons are hideous, it looks like some of the transparency makes using some apps challenging), but overall, it's much needed and I many of the issues will be resolved by the final release.
• Background processes are huge, and if Apple can really get that working without killing the battery, it's a massive win.
• Control Center (the quick settings panel) is about 3 years overdue, but still, I'm enthused.
• Gestures, gestures, gestures. Loads of new gestures to make getting around the UI easier, and moving out of a world where everything in iOS is spoon fed to the user. It's still easy to get around, but power users should be able to flip around the interface rarely using a button.

Overall, it's just a massive upgrade and I really can't wait for next couple of betas, as they start to zero in on the final release. I think this is going to be a big win for iOS (and hopefully will be out with a new iPhone in the next few months, because my existing iPhone is on its last legs).

Mac OS X

• Mavericks. Horrible name. Just awful.
• Multiple monitor setup, full screen apps and desktops on dual monitors, putting the dashboard on your secondary display, having the menu bar/dock available on both displays; these all sound minor, but will have a major impact on my workflow. Huge, huge win. Oh, and that doesn't even mention the ability to use an Apple TV-hooked up display as an external display.
• Tags as a first-party element in the OS is a ballsy move. Chances are, most folks won't use it. But if Apple can get your average user to understand tags, it's a big move towards breaking the file/folder paradigm that has held users hostage for years. And will help make the Finder not completely useless. Speaking of making Finder not useless…
• Tabbed Finder. Simple, useful.
• iCloud Keychain, if implemented properly, could be the sort of seamless "everything just works across your Mac and iOS-devices" experience that Apple has needed for a while. But, then again, there's been little that Apple's been able to do on the iCloud side that's been seamless.
• Battery life and performance. Memory compression. "AppNap". All clever ideas to eek performance out of the OS in ways that the user will notice, but won't impact your experience. If they work, these little tweaks (I shouldn't call them little, as I imagine there's a huge amount of work that went into them) will be the things that Windows adopts soon.

I think I'm more excited about Mavericks, except for the name. Both of these upgrades seem like they are meaningful and make me feel like Apple's got their sea legs again, after a tumultuous few months. I'd actually advise, if you have a couple of hours to kill, checking out the keynote and seeing some of the features in motion.

WWDC 2013

Tomorrow, Apple opens WWDC with the normal keynote, and for the first time in a while, I don't think anyone really has a clue what to expect.

Everyone out there is making their predictions, so I thought I'd make mine. Of course, hours before I finished typing this, I listened to the most recent Accidental Tech Podcast and they pretty much hit on my expectations. But I figured I'd shared them anyway.

In iOS 7 (which I think we're all pretty sure will be announced), I'm betting on two major changes: the ability for apps to share and edit the same data, and some sort of background processing API.

For the former, I'm guessing that there will be some changes to iCloud to support data sharing—letting apps see data from other apps, where maybe you'll have to approve that the app can edit the data, which would (behind the scenes) drop a symlink into its data store, so that both apps can see an edit the data. You could remove access for an app to see data, but different apps could all see and edit files if allowed.

(Another thought would be iCloud doing away with the per-app storage and moving to some sort of file-type based store.)

I would also guess that apps will be able to expose that they can handle certain file types and you'll see that in the share widget. There's going to have to be some way to edit those share widgets; if I install a few different apps that say they can handle text files, it might get unwieldy to see a list of 30 apps that I have to scroll through to pick out the one I want. But hold and tap to remove from the widget would seem to work.

Newsstand can trigger a background update of content for the apps that live in it. It would be nice to expand that ability to all apps. Either triggered on a schedule (wake up and run this code—not the full app—every four hours) or maybe started by a push notification, the ability for an app (let's say an RSS reader or Instapaper or Omnifocus or the like) to grab some data and update themeselves in the background, without destroying the phone's battery.

On the Mac front, I don't have a lot of predictions, but if Apple could update iPhoto to do wireless sync, it'd be nice. And maybe having a second display not be useless when your using a full-screen app. Small wishes.

The WWDC Keynote is always an interesting beast. It's dork heaven, but maybe not the most interesting thing to not developers/technologists. It starts at 1pm ET and will likely distract half of our engineering and ops teams and ruin our productivity.

On Harvey Danger's "King James Version" →

With the release of Sean Nelson's Make Good Choices, there's been a good bit of retrospective Harvey Danger press. And rightfully, so, as HD put out three remarkably good albums (four, if you count the b-side/greatest hits album). I covered heading to a Harvey Danger concert about 7 years ago. Forgive the writing. It's painful to read.

Their second album, King James Version is probably the best. It's musically all over the place (in a good way), lyrically phenomenal, and has three or four standout fantastic tracks. It's also one that almost no one has heard. I finally found it used, probably four years after it had come out.

Turns out, that's how most people find it.

There's a really well written look at the album on PopMatters by Even Sawdey. It's worth a read, if only to convince yourself that you too should become a fan of Harvey Danger and King James Version.

"I’d met lots of people over the years who told me they knew of the album, had bought it for a penny on eBay, had found it one evening out someone’s coffee table, had discovered an entire landfill made out of it, and it always made me grateful. But really going out into the world and seeing the way people had internalized the songs, knew every word, leaped for joy when the opening chords rang out—it simply alleviated several years’ worth of compounded anxiety and allowed me to move on. And away from music in a certain regard. Not entirely, but certainly further away than I thought I ever would go." Nearly a decade after its initial release, it’s amazing how potent and powerful King James Version remains, getting better with each passing year like a fine wine.

Here's a song from King James Version, called "Pike St./Park Slope".

I Should Have Been Born a Scot

A couple of summers back, we went to Edinburgh for vacation. It was my second trip to Edinburgh (I first went back in 2002 for EuroHaptics). We loved Scotland and loved the city and have talked about going back.

It's there that I also really started drinking Scotch, which has now become a passion, which you can read about. I've probably reviewed 15 Scotches, and I've tasted at least three that are 20 years or older.

I've been to Edinburgh and Dublin (and seen parts of Scotland and Ireland), and loved the Scottish land more. I've drank Scotch whisky and Irish whiskey, and loved the Scotch more.

I'm close to being kicked out of my Irish heritage.

Then, over the past few weeks, it's dawned on me that some of my favorite music and bands of the past few years are also from that same small part of the globe.

We Were Promised Jetpacks. Camera Obscura. Belle and Sebastian. Franz Ferdinand.

Lately, it's Frightened Rabbit and Admiral Fallow.

Frightened Rabbit has been around for a while, but it's only recently that I've really been listening to them. It's odd—I've seen them live, knew I liked them, but still didn't really dig in and listen to all their stuff. It's quite good.

More exciting to me is Admiral Fallow. I'm not sure there's a band that's hit my sweet spot more, as of late. Orchestral folk rock, like early Fanfarlo or maybe a bit like Ra Ra Riot (pre-Beta Love).

The history, culture, cities, drink, and music. All amongst my favorites. Like I said, should have been born a Scot.

A Fix for No Sound Coming from an iPhone

Let's just preface this with the statement: I am an idiot.

A few weeks back, I was in the bathroom, brushing my teeth, and I moved in such a way that my iPhone 4S fell out of my pocket straight into the toilet. I did the old "quickly throw it into a bowl of rice and let it dry out" trick, and the phone really seemed no worse for the wear.

Except now the battery only lasts about 14-16 hours, tops. I don't make it through a full day. Not a huge deal, though. I can charge it if I need to, and I'm planning on upgrading to the next version of the iPhone when it comes out this fall (maybe?).

However, I started noticing some weird behavior with the headphones/speakers. I'd be listening to something and all of a sudden it would go silent. It took me three or four times before I noticed (by double-clicking the home button and flicking left to see the volume slider) that the phone thought it was connected to a dock connector.

It definitely was not connected to a dock connector.

Still, this was mostly an inconvenience. I would just unplug the headphones and then plug the headphones back in, and everything would work.

Until the last couple of days.

When the phone decided it was always connected to a dock connector.

That sucked.

I googled and googled and eventually stumbled upon this post on the Apple forums. Using Assistive Touch? Worth a try, I suppose.

So:

1. Go to Settings
2. General
3. Accessibility
4. Assistive Touch
5. Turn it to "On"
6. Now you see a little white dot in the upper left, click it
7. Click Device
8. The bell will likely say "Unmute", click it
9. Now your sound works

Well, holy crap. First, I'd never played with the Assistive Touch stuff. That's a really wonderfully implemented feature for folks who are maybe less adept (or not physically capable) at navigating the iPhone's gestures. Seriously good stuff by Apple. Secondly, why in the world does Assistive Touch know that my phone's speaker is "muted" but not the rest of the Apple OS. Apple giveth and Apple taketh away.

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