I purchase music outright because I'm old. I often buy from what at least used to be called the iTunes Music Store. The biggest advantage for me for doing so over, say, buying from Amazon or directly from the artist's site (which I often do, or buy from Bandcamp if available), is that Apple Music will stream those songs for me even if I didn't download them locally, so they're accessible any time I have an Apple device (or Windows!) and a network connection.

Well, almost. It doesn't work from my HomePod, you know, the device I spent a few hundred bucks on TO PLAY MUSIC.

All these phrases except maybe one used to work at some point. It used to be I could use the magic phrase "from my library" and get things to work, or say the name of a specific album. No longer!

And "shuffle my library" used to always work even when nothing else did. I'd sometimes get shuffle even when asking for something specific -- and Siri would tell me so before ignoring what I'd really requested ("Now playing your music library shuffled"). That shuffling the full library worked always drove me crazy because it'd tell me the music was there, Siri just wasn't going to play the way I wanted it.

Anyhow, the main course (Warning: this may say "Hey Siri" several times and light up as many Apple devices as you have within listening range):

Transcript:

Me: Hey Siri, play The Warning from my library.

Siri: The Warning Now Playing.

Also Siri: Sorry, there was a problem with Apple Music.

Me: Hey Siri, play Keep Me Fed.

Siri: Now playing Escapism by The Warning.

Me, silently: [Escapism? Isn't that the sixth song on the...]

Also Siri: Sorry, there was a problem with Apple Music.

Me: Hey Siri, play The Rolling Stones.

Siri: Here's The Rolling Stones.

Also Siri: Sorry, there was a problem with Apple Music.

Me: Hey Siri, shuffle songs from my... library.

Siri: Playing all songs, shuffled.

LONG PAUSE

Siri: Sorry, there was a problem with Apple Music.

I think that's a clear QA fail. Shouldn't these be well-established "user stories" by now? If they worked before, someone made it work. Did they do that on their own time or were they asked to? What happened to those tests? Why aren't those scenarios tested any more?

Like, I get it. I'm a dinosaur in a way that hasn't become cool again. I'm reminded of this Twitter ad I saw from the RIAA (boo! hiss!) last week (Oct 23rd):

I AM the 2%! There's are dozens of us...

Still, I think back to that picture of Jobs with the Tiffany lamp and hifi. Today's Apple seems to have completely lost the thread of Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Music".

It continues. On Apple's HomePod feedback page, the most recent HomePod OS version you can select is 16.5. Mine, after searching the Home app for a while, is apparently on 17.6 and is downloading 18 now. How much money does this company have again?

Labels: apple, apple fail, Apple Music, homepod, siri

From stackoverflow.com:

Taken from MSDN's page on InvalidOperationException: "InvalidOperationException is used in cases when the failure to invoke a method is caused by reasons other than invalid arguments." 

– STW

 Commented Apr 21, 2009 at 19:44

I often forget what the "right" exception is to throw when it's not an argument issue -- and linters are getting better at reminding me not to be lazy and to stop using Exception with no subtype. "Code is evidence of the beliefs of its authors" after all.

I suppose InvalidOperationException is as good a fallback as any.

Labels: c#, noteToSelf

TL;DR -- If you Ikea stiffed you some 101350 fluted dowels, you can buy 5/16" dowels from Home Depot, 50 for under $4.

Depending on the precise usage, however, you may have to cut them down.

One of the funniest things about Ikea is that they're scamming all sorts of bougie yuppies to save Ikea the cost of actually assembling furniture. Don't get me wrong: They're maestros at making it so most anyone who's walked past someone with a handy gene can, with enough desire, get from flatpack to functional in an hour. Still, if you're Ikea, you've got all sorts of schmoes who clock $80+ an hour at their place of employment doing $15 an hour work for you, for free. That's an amazing ability to employ the most widely distributed micro-gig workforce, allowing you to have tons more in your warehouses, save crudloads on shipping, etc etc.

But, you know what, I really enjoy putting them together. There's something about assembling the furniture that's very Lego-like, which might not be too surprising, as the companies' headquarters are a long but doable drive away from each other. Must be in the water.

Setting out space, putting together a minimalist's toolset, and solving a beginner's level brainteaser seems a small price to pay for furniture that... isn't embarrassing. Probably won't get listed by name in your will, but functionally excellent. I've put together a wide swath of Ikea choices over the years, from a kitchen table for six, with a leaf that lets it expand to eight that was so easy to assemble that it should have the Ikea label taken off, to a chest of drawers (and its slimmer sidekick, apparently no longer available) whose drawers really do slide open and closed with a special grace on those Ikea rails, to a loft/desk/closet unit with ladder for a kid that, um, was more complex to assemble.

Anyhow, as one does, I recently got a Tarva queen-sized bedframe, which comes with slats in place of box springs for $149. I've got an extra mattress and space for a bed, so... why not?

Opening it up, I was already impressed. What seemed like a great deal also seemed like $40 of plywood sitting on my bedroom floor. I mean, there's some metal for support rails and the fancy slats, but Ikea has to maintain a decent profit margin. Like it's literally just a bunch of 1"x4"s and 1.5"x1.5"s with nicely predrilled holes.

Not patient enough to stain the pine, which is likely a mistake, I did the usual.

1. Open box.
2. Toss aside cardboard packing spacers.
3. Organize pieces by material.
4. Open plastic bags of small things.
5. Separate small things into matching groups.
6. Scan the page in the instructions depicting the small pieces with the faintest attention. (This will be important later.)
7. Start following instructions.

Problem: I got to step 7. of the Tarva instructions and noticed I didn't have enough dowels. Like not nearly enough. I didn't notice until I had one side assembled and screwed down, but if I only used one dowel for every two indicated on the second side, I'd make it. So that's what I did, and tightened everything up.

Well, until I got to step 9, where I needed four more. So I gave up, feeling guilty I'd skimped on the headboard anyway, and took that last half of the headboard that only had half the dowels intended back apart.

Options:

1. Call Ikea and hope they'd mail me some dowels before, well, before too long.
2. Wait until I'm back near an Ikea, the closest being about 3 1/2 hours' drive away.
3. Find another dowel source.

So after taking one of the dowels with me to Home Depot, it turns out the 5/16" dowels they carry are right close, and almost exactly the right diameter. Fifty count for under $3.50!! That's got to less trouble than the cost of my time bugging Ikea for freebees.

Took them home, opened them up, and started in. Now they're a little longer than the Ikea part number 101350 dowels, but I'd noticed putting it together that longer might've be better anyhow, because leaving the dowels more than half-way out had let me catch just the end of each, making pushing the side board down and together easier. Or so I thought.

I put them in each missing hole on the middle, inner board and pushed the headboard slats in. No problem! Worked fine! Makes some sense. If you need a couple different sizes of dowel, but one length would be within tolerance and make do for each of those usages, of course Ikea just gives you a ton of the universal fit dowel. Saves them money and makes it easier for you now that you don't have to keep them organized by size. The Home Depot dowels are just over a quarter-inch longer. They work fine on the inside of the slats. That means they likely should work as-is all over!

Oops. That is what we call in the Ikea trade "an insurmountable gap".

So here's the deal: The holes on the inside can take longer dowels, but the holes on the outside can't. The drilled holes aren't deep enough. Two options.

• Remove all the short dowels from the inside of the slats and replace with longer ones, then use those short ones on the outside.

Downside: I'd still come up three dowels short. For this to really work, you'd need to take the first half of backboard slats back apart.

For some reason I really hate taking things apart that have been put together "right" already.

... orrrrrr ...

• Cut down some of the longer dowels.

You can guess what I did. First I put aside four Ikea dowels for the step 9 (having discovered that some usages require the regulation-length Ikea dowels, I didn't want to risk it on unknown step 9), I pulled out all the short dowels on the inside of the headboard with my teeth, just like you should when the Home Depot dowels say "Warning: Carcinogen" (hopefully Ikea dowels aren't made of the same stuff?), and went outside to hacksaw three Home Depot dowels down to Ikea 101350 dowel height.

Long story only slightly shorter: It worked! I cut the dowels down to match the stock 101350 length and poof! Didn't even have to whittle down the edges to fit; they went right in. After a bit of lining things up, the pieces went together and tightened up without a fight.

So, again, a trip to Home Depot, $3.50, and only another hour of my time and look! I didn't even have to call Ikea and wait for them to send me the missing dowels! What a bargain. And, once I got done with Tarva step 7 fully doweled, I even went ahead and finished up steps 9, 10, and 12 [sic] before writing this and going to sleep!

Good thing I got those dowels at Home Depot and saved so much time. I'm obviously in a real hurry.

Labels: ikea, Other Stuff, problem solved

From the Nikkor - The Thousand and One Nights Collection's 13th night (ostensibly about the <New> Reflex-Nikkor 500mm F8, which I may have recently purchased on eBay) at Nikon.com:

We used to call Mr. TSUNASHIMA with affinity and respect "Boss, TSUNASHIMA". Certainly, he was a big-brother type person and took thought for younger men. His dynamic manner did not limit to work-related things. Mr. TSUNASHIMA, who would play tennis for years, was a hard drinker equal to Mr. MORI, introduced in Tale Nine. Let me introduce you an episode of "Boss, TSUNASHIMA" at a drinking party.

It was about my freshman's time. At a drinking party on a company trip, several people (hard drinkers) of us were sitting in a circle and drinking sake (Japanese rice wine). Sake bottles were rapidly emptied one after another. The party really came alive and people's laughing voice and cheers echoed. Finally, all the sake bottles were emptied. So, Boss, TSUNASHIMA gave a cry to me, one of organizers, "Hey, SATO! Sake is empty." So I said, "Yes, sir," and brought several bottles of beer. Then, Boss, TSUNASHIMA exclaimed, "Hey, SATO! Is this really sake ?" I replied, "Well ?" Boss, TSUNASHIMA suggested, "Well, this is an alcoholic beverage called BEER, isn't it ?" So I knew that after all, a heavy drinker was different. The scales dropped from my eyes. I realized that I could not join in the party unless understanding their delicate manner and feelings.

That's, um, unexpected.

I've always thought reflex lenses were interesting, but always read about their poor image quality and small aperture, meaning you couldn't take very quick pictures in low light, so I never really gave them a serious thought.

But after buying a used, manual focus 300mm f/4.5 lens years ago and really enjoying using it on my D40, I've been a little less adverse about putting really old lenses on really new cameras.

I've got a few pictures on Wikipedia that I took during NFL games years ago, and kinda missed having my camera with me when I went to a game last week. But the rules have changed, and my old 80-200mm technically shouldn't be allowed in any more, since it's over the new rule of a max length of 5" on detachable lenses.

You can probably see where this is going. How can I get an ultratelephoto lens into an NFL game? Well, you get a 500mm reflex mirror lens that's 109mm long (so 4.3") to a bright arena without much in the way of shadows, and see what you've got.

We'll see how good of a specimen I bought when it arrives, and I'm a little worried about how narrow the depth of field is, but that does seem to go with the wide-open telephoto territory. I think the extra ISO digital allows will more than make up for the loss of one stop of maximum aperture.

Will be fun to give it a shot in any event. Don't know that I'll have much to report about sake or BEER, however, other than my absolute horror at how many $18 cans people around me seem to be downing. Seriously, dropping $50 to buy your best friends a round seems, um, a little steep.

And a little more context on why Mr. Tsunashima factored into what amounts to a blog on the history of Nikon's reflex lenses:

The optical system was designed by Mr. TSUNASHIMA, Teruyoshi of 1st Optical Section, Optical Designing Department (then). Mr. TSUNASHIMA ranked with Mr. MORI, Ikuo, introduced in Tale Nine, and Mr. SHIMIZU, Yoshiyuki, introduced in Tale Five, was one of the designers who built up the golden age of old Nikkor lenses.

He completed optical design of Reflex-Nikkor 500mm f/8 (New) in August 1982 and, later, obtained patent right both in U. S. and Japan.

Waiting until the time was ripe, the lens was on sale in spring of 1984, when trees put out leaves. The specifications of the lens, being light and compact and having amazingly short closest focusing distance of 1.5m, got publicity and accelerated the Reflex-lens boom of those days.

...

In other words, Mr. TSUNASHIMA designed the Reflex-lens in person, struggled to produce it in large quantities, and strictly controlled its quality by himself to put it on sale. Consequently, Mr. TSUNASHIMA participated in the own designed lens up to a stage just before shipment, which was the nearest stage to users.

Labels: Nikon, Other Stuff, photography, photos

Okay, I've had this open in drafts too long. I think it's got most of the info I wanted, so let's cut it loose for when I need it in the future.

I often take a different laptop with me when I'm travelling than whatever the "prime" development box is for a project, often to ensure I don't lose sensitive information if the laptop "disappears" while I'm out. When doing this, I usually copy the folder I'm working in, remotes (so personal access tokens, VPN setup, etc) be darned, and work from that.

The issue is often getting that work back onto the "prime" boxen. That usually means remembering how to make and apply git patches.

Look, here's the deal... ;)

If you want to copy over and preserve individual commits, you want to use "email" formatted patches. You can envision why. If you came before the time when everyone had shared remotes or if your workforce is distributed and most simply don't have remote access, it's easy to schlep around code via email. And so git has email support built-int! Though do note we're only using the format, as it carefully preserves each commit separately; we're not actually emailing anything. Unless you really want to.

On the travelling box:

Let's say I wanted the last 5 commits. I'd use this command to create an email-formatted patch file:

git format-patch -k --stdout HEAD~5 > patch.patch

Open up the text file and take a look! It's actually kinda interesting, begging for an SMTP server to send it on its way.

On the "prime" development box:

git am -3 patch.patch

Now look, if you used git apply here, it would apply EVERYTHING IN THE FILE AS A SINGLE ACTION and not commit anything. It's like rolling all the changes into a single worksession that needs to be committed. Using git apply for an email versioned patch reduces to the same operation as creating a diff with git diff and git applying it.

We DON'T want that. You have to use git am to get the email action going.

The -3 is for three-way merge if there's a conflict git can't resolve, and is the way I (and several other StackOverflow users, apparently) best prefer to manage conflicting patch applications. But you really shouldn't run into that much if you just worked on an existing branch.

Do make sure you're on the right branches on both boxes.

TODO: How do you get the patch to include staged files?

Labels: git, noteToSelf