Author: davehamby

A modern Merlin, hell bent for glory, he shot the works and nothing worked.

Introducing YouMail

Post author By davehamby
Post date January 31, 2018

I’m impressed. Favorably impressed. StraightTalk was OK but ATT, my MVNO carrier had gotten lazy. StraightTalk was not offering ATT visual voicemail, data tethering, or WiFi calling.

Changes in ATT’s ranking in Consumer Reports prompted me to change from StraightTalk to Ting. Consumer Reports ranked T-Mobile above ATT as a carrier and Ting above StraightTalk as an MVNO. StraightTalk is a competent discount MVNO but had not been keeping up on ATT LTE capabilities rollout. The Ting rate plan model offers data tethering, WiFi calling, and visual voicemail across the board.

Technology

The Moocher welcomes Ting Mobile

Post author By davehamby
Post date January 27, 2018

Ting Mobile has surged to the top of Consumer Reports wireless carrier popularity survey. Ting is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) serving the continental United States reselling T-Mobile and Sprint service in its service territories. Coverage is the same as the parent carrier. If you’re in town on or a major road, life is good. In the prairie or the mountains I can’t hear you now but I am never there.

References

https://www.ting.com
Consumer Reports carrier survey (website subscribers only)
Online review https://youtu.be/tpcxbBrEHgs
Funny Advert https://youtu.be/vV_l9ZoBfOI

Why did I change

The incumbent MVNO operator was OK technically but known for horrid customer service. Thanks to good articles on GigaOM and Ars, I made it through on boarding with the incumbent without needing to call them. Since then, I’ve not had to call them but I’m finding my website password goes missing from time to time. Most recently, when I started looking at the number porting. You have to mother may I to move your old number. Being a GV convert, i let Ting give me a new number and saved firing the incumbent for another day.

Personal finances

Bond Index Funds

Post author By davehamby
Post date January 13, 2018

How do bond index funds work? They’re not as easy as stock index funds. Stock index funds own shares of each stock in the index in the ratios found in the index. How do you do that with bonds? Especially when all bonds of a given issue may be held? Read on to find out.

Continue reading “Bond Index Funds”

Holiday Letter

2017 That Was the Year that Was

Post author By davehamby
Post date December 16, 2017

What a strange year. The first year of continuous scandal national government. Real scandals, not pretend scandal like those during 44’s watch. 45 became in violation of a building lease with the US Government upon inauguration (can’t lease to USG employees or elected officials) and it has been a steady slide from there.

Technology

Thoughts on Electric Power for Puerto Rico

Post author By davehamby
Post date November 5, 2017

As you may know, I’m a former electric power utility equipment engineer. Although no longer active, I continue to follow developments in my former industry. Hurricanes Irma and Maria significantly damaged Puerto Rico’s ailing state owned public utility. Because of economic conditions on the island and electric power pricing decisions, the utility has been unable to maintain its generation and distribution equipment. Apparently, the utility was also deferring tree maintenance long its rights of way. Because of the lack of care and the strength of the storms, most of the island’s retail distribution is down and some of its backbone transmission is damaged. Puerto Rico is in the position of rebuilding its transmission and distribution and cold starting its generation.

Personal Computing

Thoughts on the new iPhone 8 and X

Post author By davehamby
Post date September 16, 2017

The new iPhone 8 and iPhone X are beautiful examples of Apple design and product build. But when to trade phones? I’m not there yet. I’ll explain my thinking.

Web hacking

Updating a WordPress Page at a future time

Post author By davehamby
Post date September 16, 2017

Ever need to update a club page at some time in the future? There’s actually a way to do it using Tao Schedule Update plugin.

References

https://wordpress.org/plugins/tao-schedule-update/

Audio Personal Computing

The Moocher bakes a Raspberry Pi

Post author By davehamby
Post date August 9, 2017

In poking about audio sites, I discovered Roon Labs Roon music server product. Roon is the music server I’ve been looking for for 20 years. Roon Labs has its origins in the Meridian Audio Solooes product over in the UK. This is a highly regarded embed music server organized in proper client server fashion. This post describes Roon, my Raspberry Pi build of a Roon Transport, and the commissioning process. Though not a step by step (see the references), this post includes some lessons learned during the build and setup, and the bandaging of my knuckles.

Listening Experience

After several weeks of living with Roon and the HiFiBerry Digi+ transport, I’m seriously taken with the product.

The composer, composition, and performance reviews are of high quality, written in an engaging and informative style.
Roon Radio is helping me rediscover records and tracks I had forgotten I had. Starting with a Thile-Meyer track, it worked through the album, into Fleck & Meyer, then to Nickel Creek, and Punch brothers and back to Thile-Mehldau. Poor dogs had to listen to acid grass and acid folk while I was shopping.
The Digi+ kit just works with the metal case and HiFiBerry standard power supply. There’s no need for expensive linear supplies or unobtainium wire cryogenically aged in unicorn blood. The DAC is going to jitter buffer, retime, and reformat for rendering and any exotica outside this final device is unable to improve the sound. Save your money.
Parasound got things right with the P5. The Optical and Coax inputs work well. USB input is reserved for disk mastering off my old Mac Mini and Parasound Z-Phono USB. This device has an ADC with line level and moving-mangent/moving-coil phono preamp. And it works as well as the P5 preamp and DAC. John Curl is a wizard!.

I really love the sound of this rig. If the album is well recorded and the mix is phase coherent, Brad Mehldau’s piano notes dance in space from string to string with a Brad and his Stienway are in the lounge sound.

Audio Personal Computing

Introducing Roon Audio

Post author By davehamby
Post date July 22, 2017

I’ve been using Plex as my audio player for a while. Noodling around on the Internet looking Raspberry Pi stuff, I stumbled across HiFiBerry and from there Roon Audio. Roon Labs is a spinoff from Meridian of their multi-room digital audio player. These folks have done something right by starting with a client server open architecture which organizes the system as

A music server process
A music management service that builds metadata for your library
A control service that determines what plays where
And endpoints that play content or deliver content to an audio system

They’ve made the endpoint easily embeddable in high fidelity and home theater components. They’ve made the server run as a service so a machine need not be logged in to make your music available. The control runs on Linux, MacOS, and Windows and as iOS and Android applications on phones and tablets.

Where I’m At

I have a two week trial running on my new Mac. In August, I’ll subscribe and build a dedicated Roon Bridge using HiFiBerry parts. This Roon Bridge will replace the AppleTV 3 serving the HiFi. I’ll keep the TV and ChromeCast TOSlinks initially but will likely retire the ChromeCast.

Listening Impressions

It works with less fuss than Plex, a superior user interface, better library material encouraging music discovery, and potentially, state of the art digital audio as a result of removing first-mover constraints from the protocol designs and software architecture. I find Roon very listenable using the iMac’s built in speakers. They image surprisingly well in the near field when playing good source material. The sound is also good through an AppleTV and Parasound P5 built in DAC. This combination sounds less good than the Chrome Cast Audio feeding the same DAC. There seems to be a bit more image via the Chrome Cast than the AppleTV.

Personal Computing

Introducing “Trey”

Post author By davehamby
Post date July 22, 2017

I name my hosts after notable greyhounds. The new iMac is no exception. It’s Trey, named after Kiowa Sweet Trey, Nick’s sire and Crash’s sire. Crash is a friend’s hound pawcationing with us this week.

References

Apple’s iMac user guide at the iBook store describes the basics.
David Pogue’s “MacOS Sierra, the Missing Manual” explains how to make best use of a Mac running Sierra.
There are no current manuals for High Sierra coming this fall.

Revision History

Original issue

First Impressions of Trey

Packaging and Unboxing

Apple packed Trey cleverly in a trapezoidal box, an outer corrugated shipping box covering a similar pasteboard point of sale box. The boxes are designed to stack up nicely in an outer shipping container by putting one base up next to one that is base down.

It was a surprisingly easy procedure to open the boxes. Tamper evident paper tape closed the outer box at the top. Cutting the tape allowed the front flap to drop down and the top flap to fold over revealing the inner package and its carrying handle. Once freed from the outer packing, the pasteboard point of sale box is opened the same way. Flipping the top open gives access to the accessory tray holding your choice of keyboard and pointing device.

Opening the inner enclosure shows the foam shock protection which is easily separated from the machine. A non-woven fiber envelope encloses the machine. A film covering protects the screen finish and case finish. All of this is easily removed.