My daughter has been a terrible sleeper since we brought her home from the hospital and the only thing that makes a difference is white noise. We learned this while I was riding the Copenhagen Metro late at night with her so that my wife could get some sleep. I realized she was almost immediately falling asleep when we got on the subway.
After that we experimented with a lot of "white noise" machines, which worked but ultimately all died. The machines themselves are expensive and only last about 6-8 months of daily use. I decided to rig up a simple Raspberry Pi MP3 player with a speaker and a battery which worked great. Once it's not a rats nest of cables I'll post the instructions on how I did that, but honestly there isn't much to it.
It took some experimentation to get the "layered brown noise" effect I wanted. There are obviously simpler ways to do it that are less computationally expensive but I like how this sounds.
import numpy as np
from scipy.io.wavfile import write
from scipy import signal
# Parameters for the brown noise generation
sample_rate = 44100 # Sample rate in Hz
duration_hours = 1 # Duration of the audio in hours
noise_length = duration_hours * sample_rate * 3600 # Total number of samples
# Generate white noise
white_noise = np.random.randn(noise_length)
# Define frequency bands and corresponding low-pass filter parameters
freq_bands = [5, 10, 20, 40, 80, 160, 320] # Frequency bands in Hz
filter_order = 4
low_pass_filters = []
for freq in freq_bands:
b, a = signal.butter(filter_order, freq / (sample_rate / 2), btype='low')
low_pass_filters.append((b, a))
# Generate multiple layers of brown noise with different frequencies
brown_noise_layers = []
for b, a in low_pass_filters:
filtered_noise = np.convolve(white_noise, np.ones(filter_order)/filter_order, mode='same')
filtered_noise = signal.lfilter(b, a, filtered_noise)
brown_noise_layers.append(filtered_noise)
# Mix all layers together
brown_noise_mixed = np.sum(np.vstack(brown_noise_layers), axis=0)
# Normalize the noise to be within the range [-1, 1]
brown_noise_mixed /= max(abs(brown_noise_mixed))
# Convert to int16 as required by .wav file format
audio_data = (brown_noise_mixed * 32768).astype(np.int16)
# Write the audio data to a .wav file
write('brown_noise.wav', sample_rate, audio_data)
Then to convert it from .wav to mp3 I just ran this: ffmpeg -i brown_noise.wav -ab 320k brown_noise.mp3
So in case you love brown noise and wanted to make a 12 hour or whatever long mp3, this should get you a nice premium multilayer sounding version.
It was 4 AM when I first heard the tapping on the glass. I had been working for 30 minutes trying desperately to get everything from the back store room onto the sales floor when I heard a light knocking. Peeking out from the back I saw an old woman wearing sweat pants and a Tweetie bird jacket, oxygen tank in tow, tapping a cane against one of the big front windows. "WE DON'T OPEN UNTIL 5" shouted my boss, who shook her head and resumed stacking boxes. "Black Friday is the worst" she said to nobody as we continued to pile the worthless garbage into neat piles on the store floor.
What people know now but didn't understand then was the items for sale on Black Friday weren't our normal inventory. These were TVs so poorly made they needed time to let their CRT tubes warm up before the image became recognizable. Radios with dials so brittle some came out of the box broken. Finally a mixer that when we tested it in the back let out such a stench of melted plastic we all screamed to turn it off before we burned down the building. I remember thinking as I unloaded it from the truck certainly nobody is gonna want this crap.
Well here they were and when we opened the doors they rushed in with a violence you wouldn't expect from a crowd of mostly senior citizens. One woman pushed me to get at the TVs, which was both unnecessary (I had already hidden one away for myself and put it behind the refrigerators in the back) and not helpful as she couldn't lift the thing on her own. I watched in silence as she tried to get her hands around the box with no holes cut out, presumably a cost savings on Sears part, grunting with effort as the box slowly slid while she held it. At the checkout desk a man told me he was buying the radio "as a Christmas gift for his son". "Alright but no returns ok?" I said keeping a smile on my face.
We had digital cameras the size of shoe-boxes, fire-hazard blenders and an automatic cat watering dish that I just knew was going to break a lot of hearts when Fluffy didn't survive the family trip to Florida. You knew it was quality when the dye from the box rubbed off on your hands when you picked it up. Despite my jokes about worthless junk, people couldn't purchase it fast enough. I saw arguments break out in the aisles and saw Robert, our marine veteran sales guy, whisper "forget this" and leave for a smoke by the loading dock. When I went over to ask if I could help, the man who had possession of the digital camera spun around and told me to "either find another one of these cameras or butt the fuck out". They resumed their argument and I resumed standing by the front telling newcomers that everything they wanted was already gone.
Hours later I was still doing that, informing everyone who walked in that the item they had circled in the newspaper was already sold out. "See, this is such a scam, why don't you stock more of it? It's just a trick to get us into the store". Customer after customer told me variations on the above, including one very kind looking grandfather type informing me I could "go fuck myself" when I wished him a nice holiday.
Beginnings
The store was in my small rural farming town in Ohio, nestled between the computer shop where I got my first job and a carpet store that was almost certainly a money laundering front since nobody ever went in or out. I was interviewed by the owner, a Vietnam veteran who spent probably half our interview talking about his two tours in Vietnam. "We used to throw oil drums in the water and shoot at them from our helicopter, god that was fun. Don't even get me started about all the beautiful local woman." I nodded, unsure what this had to do with me but sensing this was all part of his process. In the years to come I would learn to avoid sitting down in his office, since then you would be trapped listening to stories like these for an hour plus.
After these tales of what honestly sounded like a super fun war full of drugs and joyrides on helicopters, he asked me why I wanted to work at Sears. "It's an American institution and I've always had a lot of respect for it" I said, not sure if he would believe it. He nodded and went on to talk about how Sears build America. "Those kit houses around town, all ordered from Sears. Boy we were something back in the day. Anyway fill out your availability and we'll get you out there helping customers." I had assumed at some point I would get training on the actual products, which never happened in the years I worked there. In the back were dust covered training manuals which I was told I should look at "when I got some time". I obviously never did and still sometimes wonder about what mysteries they contained.
I was given my lanyard and put on the floor, which consisted of half appliances, one quarter electronics and then the rest being tools. Jane, one of the saleswomen told me to "direct all the leads for appliances to her" and not check one out myself, since I didn't get commission. Most of my job consisted of swapping broken Craftsmen tools since they had a lifetime warranty. You filled out a carbon paper form, dropped the broken tool into a giant metal barrel and then handed them a new one. I would also set up deliveries for rider lawnmowers and appliances, working on an ancient IBM POS terminal that required memorizing a series of strange keyboard shortcuts to navigate the calendar.
When there was downtime, I would go into the back and help Todd assemble the appliances and rider lawnmowers. Todd was a special needs student at my high school who was the entirety of our "expert assembly" service. He did a good job, carefully following the manual every time. Whatever sense of superiority as an honor role student I felt disappeared when he watched me try to assemble a rider mower myself. "You need to read the instructions and then do what they say" he would helpfully chime in as I struggled to figure out why the brakes did nothing. His mowers always started on the first try while mine were safety hazards that I felt certain was going to be on the news. "Tonight a Craftsman rider lawnmower killed a family of 4. It was assembled by this idiot." Then just my yearbook photo where I had decided to bleach my hair blonde like a chonky backstreet boy overlaid on top of live footage of blood splattered house siding.
Any feeling I had that people paying us $200 to assemble their rider mowers disappeared when I saw the first one where a customer tried to assemble it. If my mowers were death traps these were actual IEDs whose only conceivable purpose on Earth would be to trick innocent people into thinking they were rider lawnmowers until you turned the key and they blew you into the atmosphere. One guy brought his back with several ziplock bags full of screws bashfully explaining that he tried his best but "there's just no way that's right". That didn't stop me from holding my breath every time someone drove a mower I had worked on up the ramp into the back of the truck. "Please god just don't fall apart right now, wait until they get it home" was my prayer to whatever deity looked after idiots in jobs they shouldn't have.
Sometimes actual adults with real jobs would come in asking me questions about tools, conversations that both of us hated. "I'm looking for a oil filter wrench" they would say, as if this item was something I knew about and could find. "Uh sure, could you describe it?" "It's a wrench, used for changing oil filters, has a loop on it." I'd nod and then feebly offer them up random items until they finally grabbed it themselves. One mechanic when I offered a claw hammer up in response to his request for a cross-pein hammer said "you aren't exactly handy, are you?" I shook my head and went back behind the counter, attempting to establish what little authority I had left with the counter. I might not know anything about the products we sell, but only one of us is allowed back here sir.
Sears Expert
As the months dragged on I was moved from the heavier foot traffic shifts to the night shifts. This was because customers "didn't like talking to me", a piece of feedback I felt was true but still unfair. I had learned a lot, like every incorrect way to assemble a lawn mower and that refrigerators are all the same except for the external panels. Night shifts were mostly getting things ready for the delivery company, a father and son team who were always amusing.
The father was a chain-smoking tough guy who would regularly talk about his "fuck up" of a son. "That idiot dents another oven when we're bringing it in I swear to god I'm going to replace him with one of those Japanese robots I keep seeing on the news." The son was the nicest guy on Earth, really hard working, always on time for deliveries and we got like mountains of positive feedback about him. Old ladies would tear up as they told me about the son hauling their old appliances away in a blizzard on his back. He would just sit there, smile frozen on his face while his father went on and on about how much of a failure he was. "He's just like this sometimes" the son would tell me by the loading dock, even though I would never get involved. "He's actually a nice guy". This was often punctuated by the father running into a minor inconvenience and flying off the handle. "What kind of jackass would sort the paperwork alphabetically instead of by order of delivery?" he'd scream from the parking lot.
When the son went off to college he was replaced by a Hispanic man who took zero shit. His response to customer complaints was always that they were liars and I think the father was afraid of him. "Oh hey don't bother Leo with that, he's not in the mood, I'll call them and work it out" the father would tell me as Leo glared at us from the truck. Leo was incredibly handy though, able to fix almost any dent or scratch in minutes. He popped the dent out of my car door by punching the panel, which is still one of the cooler things I've seen someone do.
Other than the father and son duo, I was mostly alone with a woman named Ruth. She fascinated me because her life was unspeakably bleak. She had been born and raised in this town and had only left the county once in her life, to visit the Sears headquarters in Chicago. She'd talk about it like she had been permitted to visit heaven. "Oh it was something, just a beautiful shiny building full of the smartest people you ever met. Boy I'd love to see it again sometime." She had married her high school boyfriend, had children and now worked here in her 60s as her reward for a life of hard work. She had such bad pain in her knees she had to lean on the stocking cart as she pushed it down the aisles, often stopping to catch her breath. The store would be empty except for the sounds of a wheezing woman and squeaky wheels.
When I would mention Chicago was a 4 hour drive and she could see it again, she'd roll her eyes at me and continue stocking shelves. Ruth was a type of rural person I encountered a lot who seemed to get off on the idea that we were actually isolated from the outside world by a force field. Mention leaving the county to go perhaps to the next county and she would laugh or make a comment about how she wasn't "that kind of person". Every story she would tell had these depressing endings that left me pondering what kind of response she was looking for. "My brother, well he went off to war and when he came back was just a shell of a man. Never really came back if you ask me. Anyway let's clean the counters."
She'd talk endlessly about her grandson, a 12 year old who was "stupid but kind". His incredibly minor infractions were relayed to me like she was telling me about a dark family scandal. "Then I said, who ate all the chips? I knew he had, but he just sat there looking at me and I told him you better wipe those crumbs off your t-shirt smartass and get back to your homework". He finally visited and I was shocked to discover there was also a granddaughter who I had never heard about. He smirked when he met me and told me that Ruth had said I was "a lazy snob".
I'll admit, I was actually a little hurt. Was I a snob compared to Ruth? Absolutely. To be honest with you I'm not entirely sure she was literate. I'd sneak books under the counter to read during the long periods where nothing was happening and she'd often ask me what they were about even if the title sort of explained it. "What is Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era about? Um well the Civil War." I'd often get called over to "check" documents for her, which typically included anything more complicated than a few sentences. I still enjoyed working with her.
Our relationship never really recovered after I went to Japan when I was 16. I went by myself and wandered around Tokyo, having a great time. When I returned full of stories and pictures of the trip, I could tell she was immediately sick of me. "Who wants to see a place like Japan? Horrible people" she'd tell me as I tried to tell her that things had changed a tiny bit since WWII. "No it's really nice and clean, the food was amazing, let me tell you about these cool trains they have". She wasn't interested and it was clear my getting a passport and leaving the US had changed her opinion of me.
So when her grandson confided that she had called me lazy AND a snob my immediate reaction was to lean over and tell him that she had called him "a stupid idiot". Now she had never actually said "stupid idiot", but in the heat of the moment I went with my gut. Moments after I did that the reality of a 16 year old basically bullying a 12 year old sunk in and I decided it was time for me to go take out some garbage. Ruth of course found out what I said and mentioned it every shift after that. "Saying I called my grandson a stupid idiot, who does that, a rude person that's who, a rude snob" she'd say loud enough for me to hear as the cart very slowly inched down the aisles. I deserved it.
Trouble In Paradise
At a certain point I was allowed back in front of customers and realized with a shock that I had worked there for a few years. The job paid very little, which was fine as I had nothing in the town to actually buy, but enough to keep my lime green Ford Probe full of gas. It shook violently if you exceeded 70 MPH, which I should have asked someone about but never did. I was paired with Jane, the saleswoman who was a devout Republican and liked to make fun of me for being a Democrat. This was during the George W Bush vs Kerry election and she liked to point out how Kerry was a "flipflopper" on things. "He just flips and flops, changes his mind all the time". I'd point out we had vaporized the country of Iraq for no reason and she'd roll her eyes and tell me I'd get it when I was older.
My favorite was when we were working together during Reagan's funeral, an event which elicited no emotion from me but drove her to tears multiple times. "Now that was a man and a president" she'd exclaim to the store while the funeral procession was playing on the 30 TVs. "He won the Cold War you know?" she'd shout at a woman looking for replacement vacuum cleaner bags. Afterwards she asked me what my favorite Reagan memory was. All I could remember was that he had invaded the small nation of Grenada for some reason, so I said that. "Really showed those people not to mess with the US" she responded. I don't think either one of us knew that Grenada is a tiny island nation with a population less than 200,000.
Jane liked to dispense country wisdom, witty one-liners that only sometimes were relevant to the situation at hand. When confronted with an angry customer she would often say afterwards that you "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" which still means nothing to me. Whatever rural knowledge I was supposed to obtain through osmosis my brain clearly rejected. Jane would send me over to sell televisions since I understood what an HDMI cord was and the difference between SD and HD television.
Selling TVs was perhaps the only thing I did well, that and the fun vacuum demonstration where we would dump a bunch of dirt on a carpet tile and suck it up. Some poor customer would tell me she didn't have the budget for the Dyson and I'd put my hand up to silence her. "You don't have to buy it, just watch it suck up a bunch of pebbles. I don't make commission anyway so who cares." Then we'd both watch as the Dyson would make a horrible screeching noise and suck in a cups worth of small rocks. "That's pretty cool huh?" and the customer would nod, probably terrified of what I would do if she said no.
Graduation
When I graduated high school and prepared to go off to college, I had the chance to say goodbye to everyone before I left. They had obviously already replaced me with another high school student, one that knew things about tools and was better looking. You like to imagine that people will miss you when you leave a job, but everyone knew that wasn't true here. I had been a normal employee who didn't steal and mostly showed up on time.
My last parting piece of wisdom from Ruth was not to let college "make me forget where I came from". Sadly for her I was desperate to do just that, entirely willing to adopt whatever new personality that was presented to me. I'd hated rural life and still do, the spooky dark roads surrounded by corn. Yelling at Amish teens to stop shoplifting during their Rumspringa where they would get dropped off in the middle of town and left to their own devices.
Still I'm grateful that I at least know how to assemble a rider lawnmower, even if it did take a lot of practice runs on customers mowers.
I'm a big user of email, preferring long chains to messaging apps for a lot of my friends and contacts. It's nice that it isn't tied to a single device or platform and since I own my domain, I can move it from service to service whenever I want and the sender doesn't have to learn some new address. However in the last two months I suddenly stopped getting emails from a percentage of my friends and even my mom.
What I was getting instead was PGP encrypted emails with blank bodies that looked like the following:
If I inspected the message, it was clearly an encrypted email which Fastmail doesn't support. They have a whole blog post on why they don't here: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/ but up to this point I haven't really cared one way or the other since nobody sends me encrypted emails.
Now I knew that Proton would send encrypted emails to other Proton email addresses, but obviously this isn't a Proton hosted email address which it would be able to tell pretty easily with DNS. Then it got even stranger when I tried my work email and got the same error.
Checking the raw message and there it is, Proton has encrypted this email. Now this address is hosted on Google Workspaces, so at this point I'm just baffled. Can Proton email users not send emails to people on Google Workspaces email addresses? That can't possibly be right? My friends and mom using Proton would have noticed that their emails seem to always disappear into the ether for the majority of the people they email.
I open a ticket with Fastmail hoping they've seen this problem before, but no luck. Then I opened a ticket with Proton but didn't hear back as of the time of me writing this.
How Proton Seems To Work
So the reason why so many people I know are moving to Proton is they seem to be the only game in town that has cracked sending encrypted emails in the least annoying way possible. Their encryption uses asymmetric PGP key pairs with lookup for other users public keys happening on their key server. This in conjunction with their Key Transparency technology that compares lookup requests by the client with requests on the server-side allows for easy encrypted message exchanges with a high degree of safety, at least according to them.
There seems to be three classes of keys at Proton.
User keys: encrypt account-specific stuff like contacts. Not shared.
Address keys: for encrypting messages and data.
Other keys: part of a key tree that leads back to the address key as the primary external key for people to use.
So that makes sense that Proton can lookup address keys for users on their system. But where are my keys coming from? So in their Proton Key Transparency whitepaper they have this little snippet on page 10:
For External Addresses, the server may return email encryption keys that it found in the Web Key Directory (WKD) [6] (since email is hosted elsewhere). The server may also return data encryption keys, used e.g. for Proton Drive. The former should have an absence proof in KT, and the latter should have an inclusion proof. For Non-Proton Addresses, the server may also return keys that it found in the WKD. This way clients can automatically encrypt emails to it. These keys won’t be in ProtonKT, thus KT should return an absence proof.
What The Hell Is WKD?
WKD, or OpenPGP Web Key Directory is an IETF draft by Werner Koch. It describes a service where you can lookup OpenPGP keys by mail addresses using a service. It also allows the key owner and the mail provider to publish and revoke keys. The whole thing is very clever, an interesting way to get around the annoying parts of PGP encryption of email. You can read it here: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-koch-openpgp-webkey-service-16.txt
It outlines an enrollment process by which I would signal to a WKD service that I have a key that I want to enroll into the process. The only problem is I never did that, or at least certainly can't remember doing that. I'm certainly not hosting a page with any key verification stuff.
There seems to be a way to set a CNAME record to point towards keys.openpgp.org where I do have a key set, but that isn't set up on my domain.
I can't seem to find why Proton thinks they can use this key BUT I can confirm this is the key they're encrypting the emails with.
What?
So it seems if your email address returns a key from keys.openpgp.org then Proton will encrypt the message with your public key from there, even though (as far as I can tell) I haven't opted into them using this service. I also can't seem to figure out a way to signal to them they shouldn't do it.
Alright so what happens if I just remove my key from keys.openpgp.org. The process is pretty simple, just go to: https://keys.openpgp.org/manage and follow the instructions in the email. It seems to work more or less instantly.
Alright looks like we figured it out!
Proton Seriously What The Hell?
I'm at a little bit of a loss here. I totally understand sending me encrypted emails if I've gone through the steps to set the CNAME that indicates that I want to do that, but it doesn't seem like that's how the service works. As far as I can tell, the act of uploading a OpenPGP-compatible key seems to trigger their service to send it as an end-to-end encrypted message.
I'll update this with whatever I hear back from Proton but in the meantime if you stumble across this post after getting blank emails from people for months, you'll at least be able to fix it.
Is there some flag I've accidentally set somewhere that tells Proton to send me encrypted emails? Let me know at: https://c.im/@matdevdug
The first and greatest trick of all technology is to make words appear. I will remember forever the feeling of writing my first paper on a typewriter as a kid. The tactile clunk and slight depression of the letters on the page made me feel like I was making something. It transformed my trivial thoughts to something more serious and weighty. I beamed with pride when I would be the only person who would hand in typed documents instead of the cursive of my classmates.
I learned how to type on the schools Brother Charger 11 typewriter, which by the time I got there were one step away from being thrown away. It was one of the last of its kind, being a manual portable typewriter before electric typewriters took over the entire market. Our typing teacher was a nun who had learned how to type on them and insisted they be what we tried first. Typewriters were heavy things, with a thunk and a clang going along with almost anything you did.
Despite being used to teach kids to type for years, they were effectively the same as the day they had been purchased. The typewriters sat against the wall in their little attached cases with colors that seemed to exist from the 1950s until the end of the 70s and then we stopped remembering how to mix them. The other kids in my class hated the typewriters since it was easier to just write on loose leaf paper and hand that in, plus the typing tests involved your hands being covered with a cardboard shell to prevent you from looking.
I, like all tech people, decided that instead of fixing my terrible handwriting, I would put in 10x as much work to skip the effort. So I typed everything I could, trying to get out of as many cursive class requirements as possible. As I was doing that, my father was bringing me along to various courthouses and law offices in Ohio when I had snow days or days off school and he didn't want to leave me alone in the house.
These trips were great, mostly because people forgot I was there. I'd watch violent criminal trials, sit in the secretary areas of courthouses eating cookies that were snuck over to me, the whole thing was great. Multiple times I would be sitting on the bench outside of holding cell for prisoners before they would appear in court (often for some procedural thing) and they'd give me advice. I remember one guy who was just covered in tattoos advising me that "stealing cars may look fun and it is fun, but don't crash because the police WILL COME and ask for registration information". 10 year old me would nod sagely and store this information for the future.
It was at one of these courthouses that I was introduced to something mind-blowing. It was a computer running WordPerfect.
WordPerfect?
For a long time the word processor of choice by professionals was WordPerfect. I got to watch the transformation from machine-gun sounding electric typewriters to the glow of CRT monitors. While the business world had switched over pretty quickly, it took a bit longer for government organizations to drop the typewriters and switch. I started learning how to use a word processor with WordPerfect 5.1, which came with an instruction manual big enough to stop a bullet.
For those unaware, WordPerfect introduced some patterns that have persisted throughout time as the best way to do things. It was very reliable software that came with 2 killer features that put the bullet in the head of typewriters: Move and Cancel. Ctrl-F4 let you grab a sentence and then hit enter to move it anywhere else. In an era of dangerous menus, F1 would reliably back you out of any setting in WordPerfect and get you back to where you started without causing damage. Add in some basic file navigation with F5 and you had the beginnings of every text processing tool that came after.
I fell in love with it, eventually getting one of the old courthouse computers in my house to do papers on. We set it up on a giant table next to the front door and I would happily bang away at the thing, churning out papers with the correct date in there (without having to look it up with Shift-F5). In many ways this was the most formative concept of how software worked that I would encounter.
WordPerfect was the first software I saw that understood the idea of WYSIWYG. If you changed the margins in the program, the view reflected that change. You weren't limited to one page of text at a time but could quickly wheel through all the text. It didn't have "modes", similar to Vim today, where you needed to pick Create, Edit or Insert. WordPerfect if you started typing it would insert text. It would then push the other text out of the way instead of overwriting it. It clicks as a natural way for text to work on a screen.
Thanks to the magic of emulation, I'm still able to run this software (and in fact am typing this on it right now). It turns out it is just as good as I remember, if not better. If you are interested in how there is a great write-up here. However as good as the software is, it turns out there is an amazing history of WordPerfect available for free online.
Almost Perfect is the story of WordPerfect's rise and fall from the perspective of someone who was there. I loved reading this and am so grateful that the entire text exists online. It contains some absolute gems like:
One other serious problem was our growing reputation for buggy software. Any complex software program has a number of bugs which evade the testing process. We had ours, and as quickly as we found them, we fixed them. Every couple of months we issued improved software with new release numbers. By the spring of 1983, we had already sent out versions 2.20, 2.21, and 2.23 (2.22 was not good enough to make it out the door). Unfortunately, shipping these new versions with new numbers was taken as evidence by the press and by our dealers that we were shipping bad software. Ironically, our reputation was being destroyed because we were efficient at fixing our bugs.
Our profits were penalized as well. Every time we changed a version number on the outside of the box, dealers wanted to exchange their old software for new. We did not like exchanging their stock, because the costs of remanufacturing the software and shipping it back and forth were steep. This seemed like a waste of money, since the bug fixes were minor and did not affect most users.
Our solution was not to stop releasing the fixes, but to stop changing the version numbers. We changed the date of the software on the diskettes inside the box, but we left the outside of the box the same, a practice known in the industry as slipstreaming. This was a controversial solution, but our bad reputation disappeared. We learned that perception was more important than reality. Our software was no better or worse than it had been before, but in the absence of the new version numbers, it was perceived as being much better.
I adore classic arcade machines. They're interested to look at, fun to play and designed for a different era of hardware and software design. While I've certainly spent some time poking around some of the FPGA code for classic arcade cores, I'm still pretty novice when it comes to the low level technical specifications for these machines. The brand that I have the most fond memories of is the old Capcom machines.
Fabian Sanglard has written just this amazing book on the internals of those early Capcom classics like Street Fighter 2. Going into extreme detail on the legendary CPS-1 board, you get more information than I've ever seen before on how it worked, how arcades at the time overall worked and every gritty detail in-between. It's a joy to read with amazing art and diagrams.
Come on, you are curious about how this all works.
The book is available for a pay what you want at his website. His system for generating the book is also pretty clever with the source code available here.
There's also a great post about the PS2. Both were a lot of fun to read. It's always a blast to learn more about these machines that I spent hundreds of hours with as a kid. Link to Playstation 2 Architecture
Private Relay is an attempt by Apple to change the way traffic is routed from user to internet service and back. This is designed to break the relationship between user IP address and information about that user, reducing the digital footprint of that user and eliminating certain venues of advertising information.
It is a new feature in the latest version of iOS and MacOS that will be launching in "beta mode". It is available to all users who pay Apple for iCloud storage and I became interested in it after watching the WWDC session about preparing for it.
TL;DR
Private Relay provides real value to users, but also fundamentally changes the way network traffic flows across the internet for those users. Network administrators, programmers and owners of businesses which rely on IP addresses from clients for things like whitelisting, advertising and traffic analysis should be aware of this massive change. It is my belief that this change is not getting enough attention in the light of the CSAM scanning.
What happens when you turn on Private Relay?
The following traffic is impacted by Private Relay
All Safari web browsing
All DNS queries
All insecure HTTP traffic
Traffic from those sources will no longer take the normal route to their destination, instead being run through servers controlled by either Apple or its partners. They will ingress at a location close to you and then egress somewhere else, with an IP address known to be from your "region". In theory websites will still know roughly where you are coming from, but won't be able to easily combine that with other information they know about your IP address to enrich targeted advertisements. Access logs and other raw sources of data will also be less detailed, with the personally identifiable information that is your IP address no longer listed on logs for every website you visit.
Why is Apple doing this?
When you go to a website, you are identified in one of a thousand ways, from cookies to device fingerprinting. However one of the easiest ways is through your IP address. Normal consumers don't have "one" IP address, they are either given one by their ISP when their modem comes online and asks for one, or their ISP has them behind "carrier-grade NAT". So normally what happens is that you get your modem, plug it in, it receives an IP address from the ISP and that IP addresses identifies you to the world.
Normally how the process works is something like this:
Your modems MAC address appears on the ISPs network and requests an IP address
The ISP does a lookup for the MAC address, makes sure it is in the table and then assigns an IP, ideally the same IP over and over again so whatever cached routes from the ISPs side exist are still used.
All requests from your home are mapped to a specific IP addresses and, over time, given the combination of other information about the browsing history and advertising data, it is possible to combine the data together to know where you live and who you are within a specific range.
You can see how close the geographic data is by checking out the map available here. For me it got me within a few blocks of my house, which is spooky.
CGNAT
Because of IPv4 address exhaustion, it's not always possible to assign every customer their own IP address. You know you have a setup like this because the IP address your router gets is in the "private range" of IP addresses, but when you go to IP Chicken you'll have a non-private IP address.
For those interested you can get more information about how CGNAT works here.
Doesn't my home router do that?
Yeah so your home router kind of does something similar with its own IP address ranges. So next time a device warns you about "double-NAT" this might be what it is talking about, basically nested NAT. (Most often double-NAT is caused by your modem also doing NAT though.) Your home router runs something called PAT or PAT in overload. I think more often it is called NAPT in modern texts.
This process is not that different from what we see above. One public IP address is shared and the different internal targets are identified with ports. Your machine makes an outbound connection, your router receives the request and rewrites the packet with a random high port. Every outbound connection gets its own entry in this table.
So during the normal course of using the internet, your IP address is exposed to the following groups
Every website or web service you are connecting to
Your DNS server also can have a record of every website you looked up.
Your ISP can obviously see where every request to and from your home went to
This means there are three groups of people able to turn your request into extremely targeted advertising. The most common one I see using IP address is hyper-local advertising. If you have ever gotten an online ad for a local business or service and wondered "how did they know it was me", there is a good chance it was through your IP.
DNS is one I think is often forgotten in the conversation about leaking IPs, but since it is a reasonable assumption that if you make a DNS lookup for a destination you will go to that destination, it is as valuable as the more invasive systems without requiring nearly as much work. Let's look at one popular example, Google DNS.
Google DNS
Turkish protests relies on twitter and used Google DNS once it was blocked
The famous 8.8.8.8. Google DNS has become famous because of the use of DNS around the world as a cheap and fast way to block network access for whole countries or regions. A DNS lookup is just what turns domain names into IP address. So for this site:
➜ ~ host matduggan.com
matduggan.com has address 67.205.139.103
Since DNS servers are normally controlled by ISPs and subject to local law, it is trivial if your countries leadership wants to block access for users to get to Twitter by simply blocking lookups to twitter.com. DNS is a powerful service that is normally treated as an afterthought. Alternatives came up, the most popular being Google DNS. But is it actually more secure?
Google asserts that they only store your IP address for 24-48 hours in their temporary logs. When they migrate your data to their permanent DNS logs, they remove IP address and replace with region data. So instead of being able to drill down to your specific house, they will only be able to tell your city. You can find more information here. I consider their explanation logical though and think they are certainly more secure when compared to a normal ISP DNS server.
Most ISPs don't offer that luxury, simply prefilling their DNS servers when you get your equipment from them and add it to the network. There is very little information about what they are doing with it that I was able to find, but they are allowed now to sell that information if they so choose. This means the default setting for US users is to provide an easy to query copy of every website their household visits to their ISP.
So most users will not take the proactive step to switch their DNS servers to one provided by Google or other parties. However since most folks won't do that, the information is just being openly shared with whoever has access to that DNS server.
NOTE: If you are looking to switch your DNS servers off your ISP, I recommend dns.watch. I've been using them for years and feel strongly they provide an excellent service with a minimum amount of fuss.
How does Private Relay address these concerns?
DNS
This is how a normal DNS lookup works.
Apple and Cloudflare engineers have proposed a new standard, which they discuss in their blog post here. ODNS or "oblivious DNS" is a system which allows clients to mask the originator of the request from the server making the lookup, breaking the IP chain.
This is why all DNS queries are getting funneled through Private Relay, removing the possibility of ISP DNS servers getting this valuable information. It is unclear to me in my testing if I am using Apple's servers or Cloudflares 1.1.1.1 DNS service. With this system it shouldn't matter in terms of privacy.
2. Website IP Tracking
When on Private Relay, all traffic is funneled first through an Apple ingress service and then out through a CDN partner. Your client makes a lookup to one of these two DNS entries using our new fancy ODNS:
mask.icloud.com
mask-h2.icloud.com
This returns a long list of IP addresses for you to choose from:
mask.icloud.com is an alias for mask.apple-dns.net.
mask.apple-dns.net has address 172.224.41.7
mask.apple-dns.net has address 172.224.41.4
mask.apple-dns.net has address 172.224.42.5
mask.apple-dns.net has address 172.224.42.4
mask.apple-dns.net has address 172.224.42.9
mask.apple-dns.net has address 172.224.41.9
mask.apple-dns.net has address 172.224.42.7
mask.apple-dns.net has address 172.224.41.6
mask.apple-dns.net has IPv6 address 2a02:26f7:34:0:ace0:2909::
mask.apple-dns.net has IPv6 address 2a02:26f7:36:0:ace0:2a05::
mask.apple-dns.net has IPv6 address 2a02:26f7:36:0:ace0:2a07::
mask.apple-dns.net has IPv6 address 2a02:26f7:34:0:ace0:2904::
mask.apple-dns.net has IPv6 address 2a02:26f7:34:0:ace0:2905::
mask.apple-dns.net has IPv6 address 2a02:26f7:36:0:ace0:2a04::
mask.apple-dns.net has IPv6 address 2a02:26f7:36:0:ace0:2a08::
mask.apple-dns.net has IPv6 address 2a02:26f7:34:0:ace0:2907::
These IP addresses are owned by Akamai and are here in Denmark, meaning all Private Relay traffic first goes to a CDN endpoint. These are globally situated datacenters which allow companies to cache content close to users to improve response time and decrease load on their own servers. So then my client opens a connection to one of these endpoints using a new protocol, QUIC. Quick, get it? Aren't network engineers fun.
QUIC integrates TLS to encrypt all payload data and most control information. Its based on UDP for speed but is designed to replace TCP, the venerable protocol that requires a lot of overhead in terms of connections. By baking in encryption, Apple is ensuring a very high level of security for this traffic with a minimum amount of trust required between the partners. It also removes the loss recovery elements of TCP, instead shifting that responsibility to each QUIC stream. There are other advantages such as better shifting between different network providers as well.
So each user makes an insecure DNS lookup to mask.apple-dns.net, establishes a QUIC connection to the local ingress node and then that traffic is passed through to the egress CDN node. Apple maintains a list of those egress CDN nodes you can see here. However users can choose whether they want to reveal even city-level information to websites through the Private Relay settings panel.
If I choose to leave "Maintain General Location" checked, websites will know I'm coming from Copenhagen. If I select the "Country and Time Zone" you just know I'm coming fron Denmark. The traffic will appear to be coming from a variety of CDN IP addresses. You can tell Apple very delibertly did not want to offer any sort of "region hopping" functionality like users require from VPNs, letting you access things like streaming content in other countries. You will always appear to be coming from your country.
3. ISP Network Information
Similar to how the TOR protocol (link) works, this will allow you to effectively hide most of what you are doing. To the ISP your traffic will simply be going to the CDN endpoint closest to you, with no DNS queries flowing to them. Those partner CDN nodes lack the complete information to connect your IP address to the request to the site. In short, it should make the information flowing across their wires much less valuable from an advertising perspective.
In terms of performance hit it should be minimal, unlike TOR. Since we are using a faster protocol with only one hop (CDN 1 -> CDN 2 -> Destination) as opposed to TOR, in my testing its pretty hard to tell the difference. While there are costs for Apple to offer the service, by limiting the traffic to just Safari, DNS and http traffic they are greatly limiting how much raw bandwidth will pass through these servers. Most traffic (like Zoom, Slack, Software Updates, etc) will all be coming from HTTPS servers.
Conclusion
Network operators, especially with large numbers of Apple devices, should take the time to read through the QUIC management document. Since the only way Apple is allowing people to "opt out" of Private Relay at a network level is by blocking DNS lookups to mask.icloud.com and mask-h2.icloud.com, many smaller shops or organizations that choose to not host their own DNS will see a large change in how traffic flows.
For those that do host their own DNS, users receive an alert that you have blocked Private Relay on the network. This is to caution you in case you think that turning it off will result in no user complaints. I won't presume to know your requirements, but nothing I've seen on the spec document for managing QUIC suggests there is anything worth blocking from a network safety perspective. If anything, it should be a maginal reduction in the amount of packets flowing across the wire.
Apple is making some deliberate choices here with Private Relay and for the most part I support them. I think it will hurt the value of some advertising and I suspect that for the months following its release the list of Apple egress nodes will confuse network operators on why they are seeing so much traffic from the same IP addresses. I am also concerned that eventually Apple will want all traffic to flow through Private Relay, adding another level of complexity for teams attempting to debug user error reports of networking problems.
From a privacy standpoint I'm still unclear on how secure this process is from Apple. Since they are controlling the encryption and key exchange, along with authenticating with the service, it seems obvious that they can work backwards and determine the IP address. I would love for them to publish more whitepapers or additional clarification on the specifics of how they handle logging around the establishment of connections.
Any additional information people have been able to find out would be much appreciated. Feel free to ping me on twitter at: @duggan_mathew.
Looks like a Nintendo Switch and a Game Gear had a baby
When the Steam Deck preorders went live, I went nuts. I was standing in my living room with an iPad, laptop and phone ready to go. Thankfully I got my order in quickly and I'm one of the lucky ones that gets to enjoy the Steam Deck in December of 2021. As someone who doesn't play a ton of PC games, mostly indie titles, I was asked by a few friends "why bother with a new console".
It's a good question, especially coming from a company like Valve. While I love them, Valve has been attempting to crack this particular nut for years. The initial salvo was "Steam OS", a Debian fork that was an attempt by Valve to create an alternative to Windows. Microsoft had decided to start selling applications and games through its Windows Store and Valve was concerned about Microsoft locking partners out. It's not crazy to think of a world in which Microsoft would require games to be signed with a Microsoft client certificate to access DirectX APIs, so an alternative was needed.
Well...kinda
So SteamOS launches with big dreams in 2014 and for the most part flops. While it has some nice controller-centric design elements that play well with the new Steam Controller, these "Big Picture" UI changes also come to Windows. Game compatibility is bad at first, then slowly gets better, but a lack of support for the big anti-cheat tools means multiplayer games are mostly out of the question. Steam Machines launch to a fizzle, with consumers not sure what they're paying for and Valve making a critical error.
Since they don't make the actual pieces of hardware, relying instead on third-parties like Alienware to do it, they're basically trying to have their cake and eat it too. Traditionally game consoles work like this: companies sell the console at cost or for a slight profit. Then they make money on every game sold, initially through licensing fees back in the day. Now you make it through the licensing fee plus the cut of the console store transaction as games become more digitial. Steam as a platform makes its billions of dollars there, taking around 30% of the transaction for every digital good sold on its store.
So if you look at the original Steambox with SteamOS from the perspective of a consumer, it's a terrible deal. All of the complexity of migrating to Linux has been shifted to you or to Dell customer support. You need to know whether your games will work or not and you need to be in charge of fixing any problems that arise. The hardware partner can't sell the hardware at the kind of margin consoles usually get sold for, so you are paying more for your hardware. Game developers don't have any financial incentive to do the work of porting, because almost immediately the steam machine manufacturers shipped Windows versions of the same hardware, so chances are they don't care if it doesn't work on SteamOS.
The picture doesn't get much better if you are a game developer. Valve is still taking 30% from you, the hardware isn't flying off the shelf so chances are these aren't even new customers, just existing customers playing games they already paid for. You need to handle all the technical complexity of the port plus now your QA process is 2x as complicated. In short it was kind of a ridiculous play by Valve, an attempt to get the gaming community to finance and support their migration away from Windows with no benefit to the individual except getting to run Linux.
Alright so why is the Steam Deck different?
The Steam Deck follows the traditional console route. Valve is selling the units at close to cost, meaning you aren't paying the markup required to support a hardware manufacturer AND Valve. Instead they are eating the hardware cost to build a base, something everyone else has already done.
We know this form factor works. The Nintendo Switch is a massive hit among casual and serious gamers for allowing people to play both a large catalog of Nintendo titles on the go (which obviously the Steam Deck will not be able to) and a massive library of indies. Given the slow pace of Nintendo releases, I would argue it is the indie titles and ports of existing PC games that have contributed in large part to the Switches success.
Valve has done the work through Proton (a fork of Wine, the windows not-emulator) to ensure a deep library of games work. They have also addresses the anti-cheat vendors, meaning the cost to consumers in terms of what titles they will have access to has been greatly reduced.
They switched away from Debian, going with Arch. This means faster access to drivers and other technology in the Linux kernel and less waiting time for fixes to make their way to users. There is obviously some sacrifice in terms of stability but given that they have a hardware target they can test again, I think the pros outweigh the cons.
A common CPU architecture. This is a similar chipset to the current crop of Sony and Microsoft consoles, hopefully reducing the amount of work required by engine makers and game developers to port to this stack.
Who Cares, I Already Have a Switch
The reason the Steam Deck matters in a universe where the Nintendo Switch is a massive success is because Nintendo simply cannot stay out of their own way. For long term fans of the company many of their decisions are frankly...baffling. A simple example is their lack of emphasis on online play, considered table stakes for most services now. Their account system is still a mess, playing with friends and communicating with them still relies on you either using your phone or using apps not owned by Nintendo and in general they seem to either hate the online experience or would prefer to pretend it doesn't exist.
Dan Adelman, former Nintendo employee who worked a lot with indie developers shed some light on their internal culture years ago which I think is still relevant:
Nintendo is not only a Japanese company, it is a Kyoto-based company. For people who aren't familiar, Kyoto-based are to Japanese companies as Japanese companies are to US companies. They're very traditional, and very focused on hierarchy and group decision making. Unfortunately, that creates a culture where everyone is an advisor and no one is a decision maker – but almost everyone has veto power.
Even Mr. Iwata is often loathe to make a decision that will alienate one of the executives in Japan, so to get anything done, it requires laying a lot of groundwork: talking to the different groups, securing their buy-in, and using that buy-in to get others on board. At the subsidiary level, this is even more pronounced, since people have to go through this process first at NOA or NOE (or sometimes both) and then all over again with headquarters. All of this is not necessarily a bad thing, though it can be very inefficient and time consuming. The biggest risk is that at any step in that process, if someone flat out says no, the proposal is as good as dead. So in general, bolder ideas don't get through the process unless they originate at the top.
There are two other problems that come to mind. First, at the risk of sounding ageist, because of the hierarchical nature of Japanese companies, it winds up being that the most senior executives at the company cut their teeth during NES and Super NES days and do not really understand modern gaming, so adopting things like online gaming, account systems, friends lists, as well as understanding the rise of PC gaming has been very slow. Ideas often get shut down prematurely just because some people with the power to veto an idea simply don't understand it.
The last problem is that there is very little reason to try and push these ideas. Risk taking is generally not really rewarded. Long-term loyalty is ultimately what gets rewarded, so the easiest path is simply to stay the course. I'd love to see Nintendo make a more concerted effort to encourage people at all levels of the company to feel empowered to push through ambitious proposals, and then get rewarded for doing so.
None of this is necessarily a bad culture, in fact I suspect this steady leadership and focus on long-term thinking is likely the reason we don't see Nintendo fall victim to every passing fad. However it does mean that the things we don't like about the current situation with Nintendo (locking down their hardware, not playing well with online services, reselling old games instead of backwards compatibility) is unlikely to change.
On the flip side it also means we know Nintendo will make truly mysterious decisions on a regular basis and will not react to or even acknowledge criticism. On my Nintendo Switch I've burned through three Joy-Cons due to drift. I'm not a professional gamer and I play maximum an hour a day. If I am burning through these little controllers at this rate I imagine that more serious enthusiasts have either switched to the Pro controller a long time ago or are just living with tremendous problems. Despite two new models coming out, Nintendo hasn't redesigned their controllers to use better joysticks.
Even though the hardware supports it, the Switch doesn't allow me to use a bluetooth headset. Online play for certain games either doesn't work or is designed in such a way as to be almost user-hostile. Splatoon 2, a flagship title for Nintendo has largly abandoned its online community, just stopping their normal rotation of activities. Animal Crossing, maybe the biggest game of the COVID-19 lockdown, is a perfect game for casual gamers to enjoy online. You cannot enjoy a large community of other gamers island without the heavy use of third-party tools and even then the game is fighting you every step of the way.
So with a company like Nintendo, while I currently have a good experience with the Switch, it increasingly feels like it was a fluke. I'm not sure if they know why its so successful or what is currently holding it back, so it becomes difficult to have a lot of confidence that their future versions will prioritize the things I value. It would not surprise me at all if the Switch 2 didn't have backwards compability with previous games, or if there wasn't a Switch 2 but instead a shift back to a traditional box under the tv. I just can't assume with Nintendo that their next decision will make any sense.
What Challenges does the Steam Deck Face?
Loads. The Steam Deck, even with the work Valve has already put in, faces quite an uphill battle. Some of these will be familiar to Linux fans who have run Linux at work and on their personal machines for years. A few of these are just the realities of launching a new console.
Linux still doesn't do amazingly at battery life for portable devices. You can tune this (and I fully expect that Valve will) but considerable attention will need to be paid to battery consumption in the OS. With the wide range of games Valve is showing off, the Steam Deck is going to get a bad reputation among less technical folks if the battery lasts 30 minutes.
Technical support. Despite its flaws the Nintendo Switch just works. There isn't anything you need to do in order to get it to function. Valve is not a huge company and games don't need to go through a long vetting process before you can launch them on the Deck. This means that when users encounter problems, which they will a lot at first, Valve is not going to be there to help. They simply have too much software. So its entirely conceivable you can buy this thing, launch three games in a row that crash or barely run and there is no number to call to help you.
Build quality and QA. I've purchased all the hardware that Valve has made up to this point and so far its been pretty good. I especially like the controller, even though it is kind of a bizarre design. However a controller is a lot less complicated when compared to the Deck, and how Valve manages QA for the devices is going to be a big thing for consumers. You might love the Google Pixel phone, but their hardware support has been garbage compared to Apple and it makes a difference, especially to less technical users. How I can get the Deck fixed, what kind of build quality and consistency there is, etc are all outstanding questions.
Finally is Valve going to support the machine long-term? Valve loves experiments and has a work culture that is very flat and decentralized. Employees enjoy a great deal of flexibility in terms of what they work on, which is...a strategy. I don't know if its the best strategy but it does seem to have worked pretty well for them. For this machine to be the kind of success I think they want it to be, customers are going to want to see a pretty high level of software quality out of the gate and for that quality to improve over time. If Valve loses interest (or if the Proton model of compatibility turns out to require a lot of hand-holding per title for the Deck) I could easily see Valve abandonding this device with the justification that users "can load their own OS on there".
In closing the Steam Deck is a fasinating opportunity for the Linux gaming community. We might finally have a 1st class hardware target for developers backed by a company with the financial assets and interest in solving the myriad of technical problems along the way. It could be a huge step towards breaking Microsofts dominance of the PC gaming market and, more importantly, bringing some of the value of the less regulated PC gaming space to the console market.
However a lot of this is going to depend on Valve's commitment to the device for the first 12 months of its life. Skeptics are going to be looking closely to see how quickly software incompatibility issues are addressed, consumers are going to want to have an experience similar to the Switch in terms of "pick up and play" and Linux fans are going to want to enjoy a lot of flexibility. These are hard things to balance, especially for a company with some hardware experience but likely nothing on the anticipated scale of the Steam Deck.
I'm pretty new to the whole audiophile world. It wasn't until I started working in an open office in Chicago that the need for headphones became an obsession. One concept I've run across a lot is the idea of "endgame headphones", which are presumably the last headphones you'll ever need to buy. I don't know if the SR80e's are that, but they're damn close.
Wait, who the hell is Grado?
Don't be embarassed, I also had no idea. As someone who spent years going through Apple headphones, I'm far from an audiophile. It turns our Grado is a fasinating business. They are a US-based family business, based in south Brooklyn and you would have no idea what you were looking at if you drove by.
They've been making the real deal since the 50s and for the audiophile community and started out making phono cartridges for turntables. I strongly recommend reading through their company timeline which they've put on their website in a easy to read scrolling page. You can find that here.
What's not to love about a global HQ like this?
Packaging
The SR80e came in one of the strangest packages for electronics I've ever seen. I bought it from Amazon and got a very nice but extremely flimsy cardboard box with the headphones. It didn't bother me, but I am glad I bought a carrying case. This is the one I ended up with.
This is minimal packaging at its best. You get: Headphones, Warranty, Grado story-sheet, 6.5mm Golden Adapter and that's it. So if you need anything more, make sure you buy it. I recommend a DAC at the very least, which I'll have a review up later about the ones I tried. One surprising thing was the headphones are made in the US, which shocked me at the $99 price point.
Fit and Feel
First impression is these headphones remind me of my dads ancient hifi gear. They feel solid, with a nice weight that is good to pick up but isn't too heavy on the head. The headband adjusts nicely to my head and the cord is remarkably thick, like industrial thick. There is something incredible in this modern age of aluminum and glass to having something that feel retro in a fun way. Throwing it on the scale, it weighs about 235 g without weighing the cord. I found these a lot more comfortable to wear when compared to the AirPods Max I tried around the same time that weigh in at 385 grams.
The best way to describe these headphones is "professional grade". They feel like they could last for years and I have no doubt I could use these daily with no problems. The foam ear cushions are comfortable enough and I love that they are replaceable for when I wear them out in years. There are no bells and whistles here, no mic or anything extra. These are designed to play music.
I love the grill mesh look that lets you see the drivers. The ear cups are fully rotatable and you get the sense that if you needed to break these open and soldier a wire back, you could. The sturdy design philosophy extends to the cable, which clocks in at an extremely long 2m or 7 ft. However Apple designs their incredibly terrible cables, Grado does the opposite with thick cables and durable straight relief at the jack.
Sound Quality
These are some of the best selling headphones in the "beginning audiophile" section of websites and once you start listening to them, you can tell why. I don't "burn in headphones" because I think its junk science, I think you just get used to how they sound which is why people report an "increase in quality". Most of the headphones I've owned have had some sort of "boost" in them, boosting either the bass or the midrange.
It's hard to explain but this makes music sound "correct". There's a smoothness to the sound that reveals layers to music that I have not experienced before. I've always been suspicious of people who claim they could instantly tell the quality of speakers or headphones with music, mostly because sound feels like a very subjective experience to me. But when relistening to old favorite albums I felt like I was in the studio or listening to them live.
Common Questions about Sound:
Are they good for an open office or shared working space? No, they're open-back headphones which means everyone will hear your music.
Are these good for planes? No, they have no sound isolation or noise cancellation.
What kinds of music sound awesome on these? I love classical music on these headphones along with rock/alternative that has vocals. EDM was less good and I felt I needed more bass to really get into it.
A dad posted on a forum I frequent in Denmark asking for some help. His child loves Mister Rogers, but he was hoping for a way to download a bunch of episodes that didn't involve streaming them from the website to stick on an iPad. I love simple Python projects like this and so I jumped on the chance. Let me walk you through what I did.
If you just want to download the script you can skip all this and find the full script here.
Step 1: Download Youtube-DL
My first thought was of youtube-dl for the actual downloading and thankfully it worked great. This is one of those insanely useful utilities that I cannot recommend highly enough. You can find the download instructions here: http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html
Step 2: Install Python 3
You shouldn't need a super modern version of python. I wrote this with Python 3.7.3, so anything that number or newer should be good. We are using f strings because I love them, so you will need 3.6 or newer.
I'm checking the version here but only to confirm that you are running Python 3, on the assumption that if you have 3 you have a relatively recent version of 3.
version = platform.python_version_tuple()
if version[0] != "3":
print("You are not running Python 3. Please check your version.")
sys.exit(1)
Step 3: Decide where you are going to download the files
However if you just want them to download into the Downloads folder, uncomment the line above this one by removing the # and delete the line I show above. So you'll want path = str(Path.home() / "Downloads") to not have a # in front of it.
Download the script and run it locally. The script checks if it is the first or third Monday of the month and only runs the download if it is. This is to basically keep us from endlessly spamming the servers hosting this great free content.
The first Monday of every month will feature programs from the early years 1968-1975. The third Monday of every month will feature programs from the “Theme Weeks” library 1979-2001.
NOTE: If you just want to download 5 episodes right now, delete these lines:
today = date.today().isocalendar()
if today[2] == 1 and (today[1] == 1 or 3):
logging.info("There is a new download available.")
else:
logging.info("There are no new downloads today.")
sys.exit(0)
Step 5: Set the script to run every day
This script is designed to be run every day and only go out to the servers if there is a new file to get.
If people actually use this script I'll rewrite it to use celery beat to handle the scheduling of the downloads, but for my own use case I'm comfortable writing cron jobs. However if you run into issues running this, either add a comment on the GitLab link or shoot me an email: mat at matduggan.com.
One of the more common questions I hear get thrown around expat groups is "what should I buy before I move" or "what should I send to a loved one who is currently living in Europe". While I am not an expert on what is available everywhere in Europe, here are some things I miss in Denmark and likely are hard for most expats in Europe to get. Hopefully this helps you pack or buy some great gifts.
American Plastic Food Wrap - Denmark has this stuff, but the domestic stuff is terrible compared to the American version. I have no idea why, I assume some sort of super dangerous chemical. Anyway buy it.
Taco Seasoning - I have no idea why, but the stuff they have here is terrible. It has almost no flavor except for salt.
Twizzlers - If you like them, buy them because you can't buy these in Denmark.
Poultry Seasoning - mostly for Thanksgiving but you can't buy that here.
Cream Of Tartar
Good Doritos - they have some Doritos but they don't have any of the good flavors, so no cooler ranch or nacho cheese.
Everything Bagel Seasoning - honestly there aren't a lot of bagel places, but this seasoning goes great with everything
Aspirin
Pepto-Bismol
Tums
Melatonin
Corn bread
Grits / pancake mix - you can find it but it costs 5x what it should
Maple Syrup is available but only the expensive real stuff
Old Bay
Peppers! Spicy food doesn't exist in Europe like it does in the US. The only stuff you can get here is like tobasco sauce and red pepper flakes. So get some guajillos, puyas, chiles de árbol with the stems if you can find them.
