A Preference for Physical Media

I read an interesting article the other morning about the rise and fall of CDs, and it got me thinking about physical media as a whole. I began collecting vinyl LPs when I was in college in the '80s, got my first VCR just before the end of that decade, bought my first CD player in 1990, and my first DVD player in 2004. To this day, I tend to accumulate music and movies more rapidly than I can view or listen to them. And while I do make use of streaming technology, primarily for TV viewing, I have never been tempted to rid myself of physical media. 

Like many people of my generation, I focused primarily on vinyl in my adolescence and early adulthood, but I also made extensive use of cassettes, transferring favorite albums to that more portable medium for in-car listening, and copying things for and from friends. And of course, there was that ever fun pastime of creating mix tapes. I fell for the snob appeal of high bias cassettes like the Maxell XLII and TDK SA, and thus I would seldom buy prerecorded cassettes. For the money, I always preferred vinyl. 

I saw my first CD in the summer of 1983, when a classmate in a business writing course gave us a presentation on this new technology. He was also a part-time DJ for a local radio station and was very enthusiastic about how CDs were poised to revolutionize music, but surprisingly, although I saw them in stores over the following years, I didn't know anyone who actually had a CD player until after I had graduated from college, and I didn't get one until several more years after that. Frankly, I was afraid it would lead to yet another obsession, which it did.

I was still living with house mates back then, and when one moved in with a Pioneer six-disc CD player, and I quickly came to appreciate their clean sound and convenience in a diminutive package that seemed to embody the best of an LP and a cassette. 

Within a year or two of acquiring my first CD player, I made the conscious decision to close out my vinyl collection to concentrate on the newer, shinier medium. I didn't get rid of them and didn't replace most of them with CDs, but I stopped acquiring any additional vinyl. That was the spring of 1992, as I finished my second semester of graduate school. It was also at a point where CDs had surpassed both vinyl and cassettes in popularity.

A few years later, I acquired a CD burner for my computer, and around the same time, I got a 12-disc CD changer for my car, which together virtually eliminated the need for cassettes. It also was greatly convenient in that I didn't have to swap out discs going down the road. I could play through all twelve discs a couple of times before I got tired of them. A few years after that, I went through a period of financial struggle, during which I fed my music habit by checking out CDs from the local library and burning copies. Later, I began to discover online repositories like the Live Music Archive, which gave me even more access to fresh music without having to shell out for CDs. For several years, I was primarily burning my own discs, and ultimately branched out to doing the same with DVDs. For more than a decade, my purchases of prerecorded music dropped to almost nothing.

During this time, the music industry was changing. CD sales were slumping, both with the rise of streaming and digital downloads, and the unexpected resurgence of vinyl, sales of which have now slightly overtaken those of CDs. Ironically, this trend has led to a resurgence of CD purchases. I began frequenting a used bookstore that also sold music and movies. In the age of Spotify, many people were jettisoning their physical media, and this store was continually overrun with slow moving inventory. It wasn't that it was bad stuff, quite the opposite, there was just too much for them to handle, so many CD and DVD titles are sold for a dollar or two, making it possible to buy a whole stack of discs for the price of one new one. It's probably a good thing that the store has moved out of town, and I can only visit it once every few months, instead of averaging three or four visits a month. 

I've slowed down on my media acquisitions these days, and that's probably for the best, and while I do subscribe to SiriusXM in the car, mostly for safety reasons, so I don't have to change out CDs while driving, I definitely prefer a physical disc over a digital copy. Without that commercially packaged physical artifact, I just don't feel like I truly possess it. That disc is mine and no one can take it from me. The disclaimers on Amazon's Kindle books tell the full story. All I have there is a license to access that content. It can be taken away at any time. Compare that to my late father's 78 rpm records that I have inherited, some of which are now more than a century old. Now, that's staying power!

Section 31: The most un-Trek of all

Star Trek: Section 31, the first ever Star Trek telefilm dropped quietly on Paramount+ yesterday and after watching it twice, I'm still trying to figure out what to make of it. 

 Set in the time period between Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and Star Trek: The Next Generation, Section 31 is centered upon Philippa Georgiou, the former empress of the mirror universe, last seen in Discovery, departing through the Guardian of Forever for points unknown to throw in her lot with Starfleet's Shadowy Section 31, a group charged with maintaining the integrity of the timeline. 

My initial take on this movie is it's the least Trek-like of any Star Trek I've ever seen. It does not focus on Starfleet, is not set on a starship, and does not revolve around any familiar characters, beyond Georgiou, who is interesting mainly because of her moral ambivalence. Is she a 'good guy' or a 'bad guy'? Sometimes, she's both. The only other familiar character is a younger Rachael Garrett, who viewers first met as captain of the USS Enterprise, NCC 1701-C in the Next Generation episode "Yesterday's Enterprise". 

Beyond that, the storytelling is a bit disjointed, and lacking those feel good moments, however fleeting, that make one feel like they're coming home to someplace familiar. At best, Section 31 resides on the very periphery of the familiar, and a huge part of what doesn't work for me here is that I never came to feel strongly about any of the characters. I never became invested.

It actually took two viewings for me to grasp what was supposed to be a major touch point in the movie, that it was a redemption story for Georgiou's character. To say more on this would be a spoiler, so I shall refrain. What was far more obvious, especially at the film's conclusion, is that it was setting the stage for future Section 31 projects, and that is perhaps also a way in which it falls flat. Like the pilot episode for a series, it spent too much time introducing characters and situations, and not enough time on substantive plot.

Originally conceived as a spinoff series from Star Trek: Discovery, it was finally re-imagined as a made-for-TV movie, possibly the first of several, dependent of course, on the success of this first one. Frankly, I'm on the fence about whether I want to see any more Section 31 movies. 

For me, the original Star Trek offerings from Paramount+ have been quite a mixed bag. Picard and Strange New Worlds are both excellent, representing the best of what Star Trek has to offer, as was the animated series Prodigy, which got handed off to Netflix for its second season. While the story arc included a setup for a third season, there has been no word whether that will happen, and the longer it drags out, the less likely it is to happen. Discovery was uneven at best, although when it was good, it was very good. It just had more than its share of forgettable moments. And the series I wish I could forget completely is Lower Decks, which is just too low-brow for my tastes, to the point that I have to watch it in very small doses. I am relieved that it is in its final season. It will not be missed, at least by me. 

Having watched Section 31 twice--I don't know that I can do a third viewing right now--it feels like it falls on the spectrum somewhere between Discovery and Lower Decks. The only thing I'm actually less excited about is the fourth J.J. Abrams feature film. The first one from 2009 was enjoyable, but the two sequels were both pretty awful. I'll gladly take quality over quantity, thank you very much.

I hear I'm getting old

 I've never thought of myself as geriatric, but now that I'm in my early 60s, I'm definitely on the high side of middle age, and I do enjoy the occasional senior citizen discount, but I think I recently crossed a threshold when I got a set of over-the-counter hearing aids. 

My mother and younger sister have both started wearing prescription hearing aids in the past couple of months, and this got me wondering whether they might help me as well. I have long struggled with tinnitus, that constant ringing in the ears, and have lately been experiencing greater difficulty understanding what people are saying to me, especially in noisier environments.

I have been told, both by my doctor and an audiologist, that hearing aids would be of little or no help for my tinnitus, but as other hearing difficulties have increased, I decided it might be worth experimenting with, just not at the price my mother paid for hers. What I got cost about an eighth as much and offers many of the same advanced features. So, what did I get and why were they such a bargain? 

The hearing aids I ordered are Audien Ion Pro rechargeable over-the-ear OTC hearing aids. Some critics might argue they are not true hearing aids, since they are primarily sound amplifiers and are not customized for an individual user, but instead employ an one size fits most approach. But that's not to say they don't perform as advertised--at least mostly.

These devices offer a host of features found in higher end prescription hearing aids, including:

• setup and control through a phone app;
• a selection of six sound profiles to better match my hearing needs;
• a selection of three situational settings, conversation, crowd, and TV;
• Bluetooth connectivity for phone calls or audio streaming;
• built-in rechargeable batteries with a charging case, similar to wireless earbuds

 In addition, the devices came with a cleaning kit ear domes in four different sizes, and replaceable wax guards. Best of all, they were eligible for purchase on my flexible spending account, which has excess funds that either must be used by the end of the year or forfeited. I figured it was better to take a gamble on these devices than let the company that administers my FSA keep the money. So, how well do they work?  We'll break that analysis down into three phases--setup, operation, and comfort.

Setup--The Ion Pro hearing aids arrived charged up and ready to go, but I still needed to download and install the phone app to access the advanced features. That was the easy part. The hearing aids actually need to make a total of three Bluetooth connections in order to be fully integrated with one's smart phone--one for each hearing aid, plus a third to access phone call and audio streaming functions. This is where I ran into difficulty. I could only get one hearing aid to connect to my phone, which prevented them from being fully operational.

After several attempts to solve the issue myself, I called Audien's support line and managed to stump two different technicians. The second one put me on a call back list for an Ion Pro specialist, but I have yet to receive that call. Fortunately, I figured out what the professionals couldn't. The phone app has a "forget and start over" option that purges previous attempts to pair the hearing aids with the phone, and having done that, I was able to set the devices up and choose a sound profile, then activate the phone call and streaming functions.

Operation--The sound quality on the hearing aids is surprisingly good, with the exception of the sound of my own voice, which sounds as if it's coming from outside my body. The television and my car's audio system have minimal distortion, and the phone call system works well on both ends, and the audio streaming function is adequate, but only when the Bluetooth connection is working properly.

Comfort--The over-the-ear portion of these hearing aids are a bit chunkier than some prescription models I've seen, but not nearly as big as models from the past. They're still fairly discrete. I've never been a fan of earbuds, but these are comfortable to wear for a few hours at a time.

I seem to have a little difficulty keeping both hearing aids continuously connected to Bluetooth, which somewhat impedes functionality. My other gripe is interference from fluorescent lights. I noticed at work today, that whenever I walked directly under a fluorescent fixture, the hearing aids gave off a crackling sound similar to a Geiger counter. When I entered my tiny office, which has two fluorescent fixtures taking up most of the ceiling space, the noise was unbearable and I had to take them out and put them in their case. 

All that said, voices are indeed clearer when using the Ion Pros, and the small amount of what might be described as carrier noise or white noise they naturally produce is sufficient to make my tinnitus far less noticeable when wearing them.  It should be noted that tinnitus relief is only mentioned anecdotally on the company's Web site, and not claimed as a designed feature. 

The literature included with the hearing aids suggests it could take up to three weeks to become sufficiently accustomed to them to gain full benefit and ability to wear them all day. The recommendation is to wear them one to two hours a day for the first week, three to four hours the second week, and six or more hours beginning the third week. I'm only a couple of days in with them, so I have a ways to go before I can accurately assess how much they will help me, but I'm cautiously optimistic. The question of whether I got my money's worth is an open one. Even though I paid far less than what prescription hearing aids would have cost, it's still not an insignificant amount of money. But then again, it's money I would have lost if I hadn't spent it, and getting something for my money is clearly better than getting nothing.

UPDATE (two months later)--I have to be honest here. I have just started using these hearing aids again. I found I most needed them while teaching class, but I got out of the habit of wearing them once the fall semester ended. It took a little time to resume, but I'm glad I have. I have learned to select the appropriate situational setting, usually 'conversation' or 'crowd', and that can make a huge difference. The 'crowd' setting does an amazing job of eliminating excessive ambient noise. I have also figured out that the 'Geiger counter' noise at work is not coming from fluorescent light fixtures but the motion sensors deployed throughout campus to control those lights. I seldom wear these devices for more than a couple of hours at a time, but they are very helpful when I need them. Given my use pattern, I'm very glad I did not spend several thousand dollars on a prescription pair. These are quite adequate for my needs.

 

 

Ticked off at Temu

 Have you heard of Temu? On the surface, it appears to be an e-commerce site similar to Amazon, but things are not always fully what they appear to be. I discovered Temu a few weeks ago, while looking for a way to control the water flow on my newly remodeled shower. A variable flow valve popped up in my search, and the price was quite reasonable, so I ordered it. I also perused the site to see what else they offered.

I found everything from shoes to tools to clothing items at seemingly outstanding prices, but not really needing anything at the moment, I clicked off and turned my attention to other things. The next morning, I was surprised to find an email from Temu, stating that my purchase had been refunded, but with no explanation as to why. A further examination on the Temu site revealed they had unilaterally canceled the order due to "irregularities" with my payment via Paypal. While Temu encouraged me to resubmit payment, I instead bought the same item from Amazon for a dollar more and received it far faster than Temu was promising.

Immediately following that aborted transaction, my email inbox was flooded with promotional emails from Temu, each touting their wares at outrageously cheap prices, and discount coupons on top of that. I finally decided to give Temu a second chance and ordered a package of five long sleeve t-shirts for a whopping $15 with free shipping. 

This order went much more smoothly, with the package arriving in a timely manner from overseas, but I was glad I had paid a mere pittance for the shirts. The sleeves were way too long, and the shirts were made of polyester, not cotton. Looking back at the product description, fiber content had not been specified. But for $3 each, I can roll up the sleeves.

Thinking that the previous problem was just a glitch, I decided to dig deeper into Temu to see what else they had to offer. I eventually ordered a pair of comfortable looking casual shoes. In doing so, I learned something about their pricing. Often, the low, low prices advertised in their emails bordered on, well, false advertising. For instance, the shoes I ordered had a very low price that turned out to be good for only one size and color, neither of which were what I wanted. The rest were at a good, albeit not spectacular, price. 

Once again, this order went sideways. Temu again canceled my order, which I had placed with the same PayPal account I had used for the shirts, citing the same "unusual activity" they had used as an excuse with the aborted flow valve order. Undeterred, I re-ordered, using a credit card for payment, and the transaction was held up as they asked me to verify ownership of the account, which I did. The next day, I received yet another email, requesting that I send them a picture of my credit card statement as further proof of ownership, but at this, I drew the line, canceled the order, unsubscribed from their emails, and bought my shoes elsewhere.

Besides being a general pain, the repeated requests for additional information set off alarm bells for me that this just might be a scam.  This 2022 article from Time would seem to bear that out. https://time.com/6243738/temu-app-complaints/

In all, I have never had such a negative experience with a shopping site, and I want nothing more to do with Temu. I would advise others to steer clear as well.

What the Heck Happened to the Archive?

 For more than two decades, I've been an ardent fan of the Internet Archive, aka archive.org. It's been an amazing repository for recordings of live music, public domain literature, vintage video, and other such ephemera. I've always said you have to be careful going in, because you might not find your way back out for quite a long while. I've even used a few selections from the Archive as materials for the classes I teach, but a couple of weeks ago, I got an email from my department chair at work, asking if I could fix a broken link from an item on the Archive. When I went to the site, I found the whole thing was down with no real explanation on the error page, beyond an assurance the condition was temporary. 

 My first thought was that the copyright police had finally caught up with them, since in recent years, an increasing amount of copyrighted material has found its way onto the site, but that was not the case.

On further investigation, it turns out the site had fallen victim to a cyber attack. Things are gradually coming back up now, but as they say, it isn't what it used to be, at least not yet. Administrators say the content is all safe and they're working to strengthen the interface to resist future attacks. I was able to find the missing video my department chair inquired about, but I couldn't get to it from the proverbial front door of the site's homepage. I had to enter the title into a search engine to access it directly. 

Today, 26 October 2024, I was listening to a Phil Lesh and Friends concert on SiriusXM, in observance of the former Grateful Dead bassist's passing yesterday at age 84, and decided to see if it was available on Archive. I was able to go in from the home page and find multiple copies from different tapers, but I couldn't download any of them directly from the Archive site, as has been my habit. Fortunately, I was able to select a torrent for the one I wanted and downloaded it that way.

So, if you're wondering as I was, what the heck happened to the Archive? That's the information I have been able to gather thus far. It looks like we'll just have to be patient for a little while longer as administrators continue working to recover the site and make it more secure, but where there's a will, there's a way to get to what you need.

UPDATE--As of today, 10 November, one can now stream audio and video from the Archive, but direct downloads are still unavailable. Many text resources are still completely unavailable via Archive, but may be accessed through other Web sites such as Project Gutenberg. The only option to download audio and video files is via a torrent, but this hit-and-miss at best. It only works if another user is actively seeding an item. As an experiment, I downloaded torrents for a couple of old radio shows yesterday, but have yet to capture a single byte of data. They just don't get the traffic of, say, a Grateful Dead concert recording. Recovering the entire Archive will doubtless be a lengthy and arduous task. One can hope it will be completed soon, but patience is necessarily the watchword. 

UPDATE--2 January 2025: Earlier today, I downloaded a 1975 Little Feat show from Archive without resorting to using a torrent. While I can't say categorically that the site is now fully operational again, this is a major step forward and a good reason to be optimistic. Happy New Year indeed.

A Better Way to K

 Like a lot of people, I succumbed to the convenience of Keurig coffeemakers about six or seven years ago, but I have always felt a bit guilty about the plastic waste from those little single-use K-cups. That and their expense were enough to keep me from initially jumping on the Keurig bandwagon for several years after they first came out.

I have several of the reusable K-cups that can be filled with regular ground coffee, but they've always been less than satisfactory. The coffee has always come out tasting fairly weak. My solution to date has been to add a small amount--less than a quarter teaspoon--of instant coffee to the grounds to boost the flavor without giving it that bitter instant coffee edge. Fortunately, I've now found a better way. 

For quite some time, I have suspected the coffee grounds were too coarse, so I finally decided to test my theory by getting an electric coffee grinder to grind my coffee a little finer. The grinder arrived late yesterday, so I decided to test my theory and re-grind some coarse-ground coffee to a finer state, then loading up a reusable K-cup for my morning coffee. All I can say is this is what the coffee should have tasted like all along. And with the lower cost per cup for ground coffee versus K-cups, my $10 coffee grinder should pay for itself in no time.

I'm glad to have solved this conundrum and I can now have the convenience of my Keurig with less of an environmental impact. Still, there's one other problem. I only have one single-serve reusable K-cup that works with my Keurig 2.0 brewer. The problem is the Keurig 2.0 models use a digital rights management technology to lock out unlicensed K-cups. Thankfully, the DRM scheme garnered enough consumer backlash that Keurig phased it out with the Keurig 2.0 models on which it had been introduced. There are YouTube videos out there describing which wires to cut to disable the system, but that's a little more "Mission: Impossible" than I really want to get into with my coffeemaker.

Unfortunately, that DRM system locks out most reusable K-cups as well, unless they have a lavender stripe around the lid, which only one of mine does. The others are solid black and the system doesn't recognize them. Those will soon be retired, now that I have just ordered a six-pack of Keurig 2.0 compatible reusable K-cups so that I can use loose coffee grounds instead of single-use K-cups on a more regular basis. 

From a practicality standpoint, I'll still be using single-use K-cups at work, because I don't have the time or facilities to be grinding (or in this case, re-grinding) coffee there. It may take a little while to fully transition to the reusables at home, but I will will be manageable and in time, and soon I will be going loose, instead of single-use.

Linux Mint, A Year later

 It's been almost exactly a year since I bought a second hand Dell Latitude 7490 laptop computer, loaded with Linux Mint as its operating system. I had experimented with several flavors of Linux in the past, including Mint, but none of them had actually stuck, until this one. A year later, this one is still my daily driver. 

I bought this laptop on impulse out of three-way frustration. I was using an aging Apple MacBook Pro as my daily driver, but it had aged out of receiving any updates, so the writing was on the wall for that one. I also had a slightly newer HP notebook computer that was reaching the end of its line as well, since it lacked the system resources to upgrade to Windows 11. Finally, I had an HP Chromebook that was simply too limited for my needs. I tried to expand its functionality by installing and running Linux applications under the Linux Developer Environment (aka Crostini) in Chrome OS, but I never could make it do what I needed it to do. 

When the Dell arrived, I was immediately impressed with its performance and user friendliness. The computer practically configured itself, automatically adding both of my printers, and finding my wireless network so that I only had to type in my WEP password to get online. I was literally ready to roll in minutes. Most of the applications I needed were present, although I chose to replace the outdated version of LibreOffice with the latest one, downloaded from the LibreOffice Website, and installed manually, using one terminal command I had learned from the Crostini experiment. I had everything configured to my liking within an hour, and quickly realized this computer was exactly what I was trying to turn my Chromebook into, but which it was simply not capable of being, and thus the Chromebook was almost instantly retired.

The novelty of having a new (to me) computer was enough that I set my old MacBook Pro aside to take some time to acclimate myself to the Dell, but the funny thing was I never really picked it back up again, except to retrieve needed files and transfer them to the Dell via a Web-based tool called Snapdrop. After a couple of months, I realized that it, like the Chromebook, had effectively entered retirement.

The eBay seller from whom I had purchased the Dell had thoughtfully included a bootable flash drive with a copy of Linux Mint to be used to restore the system, if necessary. But after being greatly satisfied with the Linux Mint experience on the Dell, I decided to use it to load the operating system onto my HP Windows 10 laptop, creating a dual-boot system. I did this so that I would still be able to access both the files I had on the HP and the applications with which I had created them. Linux Mint ran marginally better on that computer than had Windows 10, but in the end, it was just too slow, especially compared to the lightning fast performance of the Dell. Such are the joys of running a system with modest system requirements on a machine with resources far greater than that system needs.

About a month after I had acquired the Dell, I spotted an eBay listing for another Dell 7490 laptop at less than half the price I had paid for mine, albeit with a quarter of the onboard storage capacity. Its internal solid state drive held 256GB, versus my Dell's 1TB. Still, for such a modest price, I decided it would make a good replacement for the HP, so I took the plunge. The computer was advertised as not having an operating system, but in fact had an unregistered copy of Windows 10, loaded down with enough adware to make it next to useless. Within an hour of being delivered, the second Dell was booting into Linux Mint, courtesy of the same flash drive, never to see Windows again.

Over the past year, a couple of things about Linux have been reinforced for me. One is that desktop Linux need not be difficult to use, and the other is it isn't just for programmers. It is true that there are dozens of Linux distributions out there, and some have steeper learning curves than others, but if you stick with the more mainstream distributions, such as Mint or Ubuntu, you will find they are mature, user friendly, well supported, and well suited for most users. Some people think the only legitimate way to run Linux is from the Terminal screen, and that's their prerogative, but I am no programmer, beyond knowing the rudiments of HTML, and I almost never type commands into the Terminal. When I do, I most often just copy them from a Web site, and if it doesn't work, it's because I mistyped something. Day in and day out, it's just point-and-click, no different and no more complicated than Windows or Mac OS. The ironic thing is many people don't realize they're using Linux already, as both ChromeOS and Android are based on Linux.

So, for the past year, I have been using Linux Mint on both of my daily driver computers, and for the first time in more than 30 years, I do not have a Mac OS machine in daily use. This was never a scenario I would have imagined a year ago, but I feel just fine about it; in fact, it is rare that I even think about what operating system I'm using, or that I have become a full-fledged full time Linux user. I'm just using my computers to do what I need to do, and they're far more than adequate for my needs. I won't say 'never' again, but I have no desire to ever own a Windows computer again. I use them at work, because that is what my employer supplies, and they drink deeply of the Microsoft Kool Aid. Another, Mac at home? Maybe someday, but for now, count me firmly on Team Penguin!*

 

*For those who are not aware, Tux the penguin, as pictured at the top of this article, is the official Mascot of Linux.