I started the most important part of packing for my vacation: syncing some TV shows to my iPad via Plex.

I wish I had purchased my first pair of (good) open-back headphones about 8 years ago, when I started on this headphone hobby of mine. I think they sound better, though their sound leakage means I can only use them while I’m alone. I work alone, so that’s not a problem for me.

I enjoyed reading this article from the New York Times:

Estrada was playing a Pocket Operator, a device released four years ago by a Swedish company called Teenage Engineering. To date, the company has made nine different models of the same basic design, and it has sold more than 350,000 of them worldwide, making the Pocket Operator one of the most popular synthesizers in history. The Korg M1 — famous for producing the sound of Seinfeld’s slap bass and Madonna’s “Vogue,” and one of the best-selling and most influential synths of all time — is estimated to have sold 100,000 fewer units over nearly twice as much time. The “portable” version of one of the Pocket Operator’s earliest forebears — the telharmonium, constructed more than a hundred years ago — cost more than $5 million to build in today’s dollars, weighed 200 tons and required a team of specialists to achieve peak performance. A Pocket Operator costs about $60 and fits in the palm of your hand.

The pocket synth by Teenage Engineering, the company that designed Panic’s upcoming PlayDate handheld gaming console, looks really cool. I kind of want to pick one up, even though I no longer consider myself a musician of any kind.

I just had to re-send a fax to my health insurer because the prior fax, sent last week by a third party, did not fully print out. No one notified me until now. I am 99% certain that my insurer’s fax machine ran out of ink, which is the cause of the problem. Companies should not be using fax machines anymore.

Panic’s Nova code editor, which is entering private beta soon, looks incredible. I wish I were in the market for a code editor on the Mac. I only code in Swift on the Mac, and Xcode is fine for that. I only code in other languages on the PC, for work.

I was thrilled to re-learn today that WinSCP can connect to SharePoint sites via WebDAV. I know SharePoint sites can be opened in Windows Explorer, but, for some reason, my user account does not have that ability. WinSCP gives me a more reliable method than a WebDAV share anyway.

I updated my iPad Air 2 to iPadOS 13 Developer Beta 4, which is the only device I have that I can live with beta-related bugs for a month or two. So far, the app that I develop, SwiftoDo, works, though it did not work prior to this beta, so I am happy.

I don’t think the person who put a hard-coded limit on Excel file path names, one that is way lower than the longest path name allowed on the file system, ever imagined how much grief it would cost me at work.

I may finally set up a RetroPie “for the kids”. 😀🕹

I had a plumber repair my bathroom faucet today, and I am starting to question the intelligence of having running water altogether. 💸 😀

I think that every bit of this article from the New York Times illustrates what is wrong with the way we pick presidents in the US.

Five Democratic presidential candidates raised a combined $96 million from individual donors in the last three months — about three-quarters of the total fund-raising by the entire Democratic field, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission on Monday.

I have to admit that I am annoyed because my favorite candidate is not at the top of the fundraising list. That is a small worry, though. Overall, I am annoyed that all this money is spread out so widely amongst candidates, many of whom should gracefully drop out and run for lower, but still very important, offices.

Meanwhile, Trump looms over everything like Calamity Ganon over Hyrule Castle in “Breath of the Wild”:

Trump has more than twice as much cash as the best-funded Democrats.

President Trump has a big head start on the Democratic field in raising money for the 2020 election. He ended the second quarter with far more cash on hand than even the best-funded Democratic candidate.

I don’t think the Democratic candidates and campaign strategists have a real plan to win. I know there is still a good amount of time to make such a plan, but I’m not sure if there is enough time. I am already tired of the primary process, and it has barely even begun.

Sometimes I think I should run for office so I can share my political opinions endlessly and, just maybe, someone would listen to them.

Like a true nerd, I am drafting a technical document for work using five Markdown tabs in a Sublime Text window, rather than in a huge Word document. Word will get used in the end, though, when I integrate all the Markdown sections together.

I think another Amazon Prime Day will pass me by without enticing me to purchase anything.

I’m proud of myself for teaching myself so much of Microsoft Powershell this week. I really get it now. Unfortunately, since I’m not a Windows administrator, my list of uses for it are short. At least I can write elegant scripts now, though.

I don’t know what’s better: (1) having an email address that is not tied to Gmail, or (2) deleting almost all of my incoming emails rather than archiving them forever. (Most of my emails are notifications from companies.)

My summer project is to get into drinking fizzy water…which is not particularly ambitious. 😃

I added some “pages” to my Micro.blog

I fleshed out my hosted Micro.blog with a few new pages tonight:

• Elsewhere
• Photos (thanks, @cleverdevil, for the code)
• On This Day (thanks again, @cleverdevil, for the code)

Just fixing bugs on one of my iOS apps tonight while my work PC chugs away generating analytical reports from a program I’ve been working on for weeks now.

I just upgraded my Mac’s external display from a large but mostly awful 28"4K TN panel from Dell to the “BenQ PD2700U 27 inch 4K UHD IPS Monitor”. It is way, way better—almost as good as getting a new set of eyes.

I’m super happy that I did not install the iOS and iPadOS betas on any of my devices yet, based on the comments I have seen from other iOS developers. I don’t really have “test” devices lying around that I wouldn’t mind getting screwed up for a couple months, anyway.

Once I figure out how to fit them on my shelf, I will probably pick up at least one Raspberry Pi 4.

I use two older ones so far for:

• Pi-hole server (DNS/ad-blocking)
• Homebridge server (to control my Nest thermostat via Sirit & HomeKit)

I could use one or more newer, faster Pis for:

• A VPN server
• A self-hosted RSS back-end for Reeder (accessible via the VPN)
• A download server that connects to my NAS (I used to use a Raspberry Pi for this, but it was really, really slow)

I could, of course, replace all of these single-purpose servers with a single Intel box running virtual machines. I have not found such a thing at a good price, or that runs silently. My NAS box, currently running FreeNAS, is off limits right now when it comes to adding Internet-facing services. It is also too old and under-resourced to dedicate chunks of its RAM to virtual machines.

I’m excited about the newly announced Raspberry Pi 4, especially about the news that it will have gigabit Ethernet that is not tied to is USB bus. I have several older generation ones (I skipped gen. 3) that are in use as little servers in my house. I wish, however, that the form factor was a little neater for cabling. I don’t like having power and Ethernet on different sides. (I probably need some kind of Raspberry Pi server rack, if such a thing exists.)

I set up a new email address at my own domain, and now I’m deleting almost every email from my Gmail account that wasn’t sent to me by my wife…as you do.

From Vox:

Facebook doesn’t have much consumer trust. But it does have a hell of a lot of consumers.

And that’s enough to make Libra, the new virtual coin that Facebook is announcing on Tuesday, the most consequential cryptocurrency effort undertaken in several years.

I have done a lot of research on cryptocurrencies for work, and keep coming back to my thoughts that they are a scam. Bitcoin works like a pyramid scheme, where the early adopters (the early miners) gain the lions share of wealth, once the value of the coin increases, due to the way that mining works. In the best case scenario of cryptocurrency use, some companies will do an end run around the current financial system intermediaries, and insert themselves as the new financial system intermediaries. Meanwhile, cryptocurrency holders/customers are trading worthless bits they can’t pay their taxes with.