Lows and Highs of Tech

[captainsblog]

My last post was about tech woes with crossposting and paywalling. This is the follow-on I promised about another tech woe: digitization of creative content. However, I'm happy to be able to add a follow-follow-on about a tech whoa! from this week, where I actually experienced some good tech stuff.

Over the weekend, Eleanor posted about our love of reading and the hundreds of books that we keep in service of it. Real books, with real covers and pages and, yes, even a little mildew on some of them.  We've both tried digital editions, but I'll usually resort to them only if the real book isn't one I want to own and the library doesn't have a paper copy of it.  (Publishers don't help, usually limiting public libraries to one or two copies of new book releases in digital format to go around our 30-plus branches.)  It's too easy to drop and break the Kindles, Nooks and other tablets that hold these things, the screens are smaller than real pages, and if you can bookmark your spot in them at all, it's hard to do.  So it's real books here, mostly. Here's what she had to say about them:

My mother read prodigiously.  I remember dinner table conversations that revolved around books.  Okay, the tone was preachy, and as the youngest in the family, I had little voice to participate.  But I remember the passion with which she discussed what she read. FWIW, I don't remember my father opening up such a discussion, although I know he read quite a lot.

I'm currently updating a list of all the books we have in the house.  Even with gleaning out crappy self-help books and things Nanci Griffith would call dime-store novels, we have upwards of 700 books here. 

I'm grateful that my mom taught me to love books and reading.



That photo is of just a single shelf of the 700 cast all about the house.  I was brought to a similar love of reading by all of my family, parents and sisters alike, and I'm proud to have lived it for a lifetime since and brought up a child with it, as well.

The same morning Eleanor posted that, a longtime author of friend of ours, who I go back to East Meadow days with, posted this piece from the New Yorker about the music side of things.  Tunes are the other collective love of ours, and I decided to add these words to what Eleanor and Clea had to say. Consider it my two cents- which is about what Spotify pays artists to stream their songs.

We do listen to digital music. A lot. But we get 99 percent of it from actual CDs that we buy and keep, most of it from the artists themselves or from shops like Rochester's Record Archive that support the artists. It’s work to rip and transfer to computers and phones, and it sucks that you basically can’t buy a laptop with a CD drive anymore. But it’s worth it: to the musicians who get a fairer deal, but to us, too. We still get the tactile experience of holding a real album, seeing cover art, reading liner notes, remembering “Oh yeah, we bought THAT one from Looney Lonnie in Stoke!” (Okay, that was a cassette, of Paul Simon’s Graceland, which we also still have along with a ton of other cassettes; we even bought a player two summers ago to listen to them through.)

The author of that New Yorker piece linked to an earlier one he wrote, in which he contradicts the illusion of streaming music being environmentally friendly. The end product may not be made of plastic, but the servers and transmission lines that get it to the end user go through a ton of carbon. The re-emerging medium of vinyl isn't much better, and he concludes that "a turn toward recyclable materials in recent years has made the lowly CD perhaps the least environmentally harmful format on the market."

I feel better about what we have in THAT department- and this is only the half of it:



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My tech success arose oddly from a semi-fail and an occasional need.

I sometimes turn my phone wi-fi off. Usually it's when I'm heading out of range of home or office and don't want an online station to drop.  Yesterday after doing this, I noticed this on the screen:



 
I'd never noticed "Left Behind" in that message before. Was I in a bad Fundie movie with Nic Cage? NO! The latest IOS version supports something called Airtags, which are basically GPS devices you can stick on a keychain, bury in your wallet or pair with some other eminently loseable thingie; you can then track down your missing thingie through the Apple FindMe system.

Using rewards credits, I snagged one for 15 bucks and popped it in my wallet, which usually goes missing on me at least once a week.  So now if it winds up on my desk at work when I'm home, or vice versa, or a cat knocks it under a chair cushion, I can ask Siri to find it for me.

Even better, the $15 purchase got us a three month (versus the usual one week) trial of Apple TV+, home of the elusive Ted Lasso series and many other Steve-only deals. Last time I checked, I couldn't get its app onto our living room tv because of too much bloatware on it, but this time it installed right away. I still had to activate the 3-month trial, though, either by following an onscreen QR code (didn't work) or by going to an Apple activation website and entering a 4-character code shown on the tv screen.


This is what they made me use, which seemed a little rude:



Still, it worked, and that $15 purchase got us $15 worth of Ted Lasso and other such things for the next three months. iWin.

We started the series tonight; there are ten episodes in the first year and twelve in the season just ended. It's funny but sweet in more moments than I expected. There's a character named Moe Bumbercatch, whose name has to be a riff on a certain Strange Englishman. I just hope he doesn't spend the entire season playing Yellow Card.

There's other good stuff on there, as well, including the Joel Coen adaptation of Macbeth and Marlee Matlin's Coda, both of which are up for a bunch of Oscars.  Probably we'll stick to the $5 per month after the trial, plus whatever it will cost to stick an Airtag on the tv remote;)

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[onepageatatime]

Given my ability to misplace objects, I went all-in on AirTags as soon as they were released. I bought a four-pack: one for my car key, one for the rest of my keys, and one for my purse. (The fourth one is still waiting for its chance to prove its worth.)

They have greatly helped with "where did I put my keys" with the ability to make them make a sound. (They would help more in directing me to them, if I had a newer iPhone… I think my phone is one release too old for the type of chip that would be required for that help.) I have been fortunate to never need to use them for objects left in public yet. (I suspect that's mostly down to me not being out as much due to pandemic and expired driver's license.)