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Apple Music – A Fresh Look

With the shifting allegiances in streaming music, I found myself re-enabling my Apple Music subscription. There are some benefits, and some less desirable aspects.

This is relevant as I again ponder the mix of music that I have in my collection, as well as the convenience of streaming. In the following post, I lay out the pro’s and con’s of Apple’s Music subscription plan. $9.99 a month, it is in the ballpark of the offers, between Amazon and Spotify. All three of them also offer family plans for the same price (alas, my Wife isn’t interested in sharing a plan.) Continue reading →

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Music, part 5,231

If you dig through the archives, you will read my travails around a permanent solution to my streaming/collection.

The last “winner” was Amazon Music, hands down the best app experience, a decent library (not as big a selection as Apple, but enough) and the instant “AutoRIP” feature of what I bought from them were clinchers. The real win for Amazon is that whatever magic they do, even when I hit deadspots in my commute (via VTA Lightrail in San Jose), it just kept chugging. Continue reading →

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Fucking Referrer Spam

Sorry for the language. However, I run a handful of small, fairly low traffic sites. This one, my product management site, one for my dog(s) and their exploits, and my Wife’s professional site.

All of these use WordPress, and I have Google analytics set up to track and monitor them. Continue reading →

Pork Chili Verde

Growing up in the south bay (the San Francisco Bay Area) we often ate at Mexican restaurants. One of my favorite dishes was, and remains to this day, a hearty green pork chili, called Chili Verde. While there have been many differences in the dish, it is always a green chili pepper of modest heat (Anaheim is milder, and Poblanos make it hotter, but I often use what looks freshest when I shop, even Jalapeños). Continue reading →

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Vietnam by Ken Burns

Currently in the queue on Netflix is the “Vietnam” by Ken Burns. I just finished it, and, like all the Ken Burns targets, it is outstanding.

It starts well before the common story (with advisors ramping up through the early Kennedy administration,) back when the real drama started with the French trying to maintain its hold on its Indochina colonies after WWII. The French were abysmal stewards of their colonial properties, ruthless, and exploitative to the extreme of the indigenous population. However, their strength sapped, they turned to us, and our paranoia of the spectre of communism leaking out of the USSR and China realm, took the bait. Continue reading →

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Serverpilot Changes

A service that I absolutely love is changing their business model. Serverpilot, an automation, and management front end for simple VPS1 deployments, that takes a minimalist droplet from Digital Ocean and abstracts the drudgery and risk of managing that installation from the user. Continue reading →

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One Month Free

Friday July 6th marks a full month without Facebook. As soon as the second week transpired, I got the notifications of all the other “attached” bits being severed. A good sign that I had held out the full two weeks. Apparently once they “delete” (cough cough) your account, it takes about 90 days to tag your data for removal, and for it being removed1 from their servers.

I have removed the hosts file redirection of facebook.com to localhost. The temptation to go back to it has waned. I have refocused some energy on this blog (and my other greytbros head over and see some fun about our new family addition). Continue reading →

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Back to the Mojo

About a year ago I got a burr up my butt to learn something about FPGAs. I bought a Mojo board, and some accessories, and did some of the beginner tutorials. Really cool stuff, but I was using this well aged (read: shitty) windows PC that was pretty underpowered, and an AIO (all-in-one like an iMac). Since that computer was camped out on our kitchen table, it was inconvenient as hell. But the toolchain, ISE from Xilinx doesn’t run on the mac (and while I could have setup a virtualbox and ubuntu VM, that was a drag.) Continue reading →