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Family weekend

Mum & Dad were over for a lovely visit this weekend. They arrived on Friday afternoon, so of course we had frites for dinner. (Friday is frites day.)

On Saturday five of us (no Alex) went in to Zaandam to do some shopping. We snacked on kibbeling (which, I just learned, used to be made from cod cheeks — kabeljauw wang — not just generic cod fillet) and deep-fried mussels from the market while wandering around. Abi and Fiona hit the crafts shop to get materials for crochet projects. Our other goal was for Mum & Dad to get Fiona a birthday present, and we quickly located a prized pink space scooter, although we did some price checking and stopped off for coffee (and hot chocolate) and cakes before actually buying it. Steak and salad for dinner.

In the evening we watched Robot and Frank, which is a sweet and funny film, lined with sadness. I’d seen the trailer, and I’d been too fascinated by the robot-human interaction story; I hadn’t realized that Frank’s dementia is the twin theme. It’s a sweet story, but it was a bit of an emotional trip for us.

Sunday, five of us (no Alex) had a walk around Oostzaan, ending up in at Eetcafé Oostzaan for coffee (and hot chocolate) and warm apple pie.

Mum, Dad, Abi, and Fiona

Our plan for the evening had been to order in Chinese-Indonesian from our wonderful local Het Oosten, but I’d forgotten that it was Chinese New Year. Fortunately our fallback take-way in Zaandam was open, so I drove out there to pick us up a minor feast. We played Kill Doctor Lucky after dinner for the first time, and it was a hoot. We’d been burned by the phenomenal complexity of Arkham Horror last year, but Kill Doctor Lucky is much easier, and plays moves nice and fast once you get going. We didn’t have time to finish a whole game before the kids had to go to bed, so we just called “sunrise” at 21:30. True to his name, Doctor Lucky lived to see another day.

Then we watched Drive, which was a trip of a whole different kind than Robot and Frank. The sound design of the film has incredible dynamic range, from ear-splitting car chases to long scenes of almost total silence. This matches the plot and emotional content of the story, which goes from calm and passive to brutal, gory violence in jumps you know are coming, but which nevertheless arrive as gut-wrenching shocks. The way the film builds tension is incredible. I loved it.

Monday was back to work and school. Mum and Dad went to Amsterdam for the day. We had burritos in the evening, and played De Mol (The Resistance) after dinner. Tuesday was a beautiful sunny day, and Mum and Dad went to Volendam and Edam, and we all went back out to Eetcafé Oostzaan for dinner in the evening. Alex ran into a classmate, and Fiona experimented with vanilla ice cream (turned out it was too delicious for her).

Departures this morning. But the kids and I will be over in Scotland in a few weeks to see them again soon.

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Red Panda

Yesterday evening while reading browser statistics I stumbled across the fact that Firefox is another name for the Red Panda. I think I’d known this before, but it had slipped my memory, and I wasn’t aware of it when I ordered our Kigus for Christmas. It’s fitting, because although I like Chrome’s devtools, Firefox is still my browser of choice.

Martin in red panda kigu

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Cui bono

Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life! Before succumbing to the intoxicating warmth of that promise, it’s critical to ask, “Who, exactly, benefits from making work feel like non-work?” “Why should workers feel as if they aren’t working when they are?” Historian Mario Liverani reminds us that “ideology has the function of presenting exploitation in a favorable light to the exploited, as advantageous to the disadvantaged.”

In the Name of Love, by Miya Tokumitsu | Jacobin

Via Alexis Madrigal’s 5 Intriguing Things

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Sound and vision

Not long after we moved house in 2008 I bought a lovely big screen TV: a 46″ Panasonic TH-46PZ85EA plasma that has made me very happy. (At the time it seemed (was) enormous, but over time I’ve come to think that I could have gone a liiiittle bit bigger. With the smaller bezels on TVs these days a 50″ model would probably take up less space, and maybe a 60″ wouldn’t look out of place. Until OLED displays get better and cheaper, I still prefer plasma to LCD. Panasonic are going to stop making plasma screens, maybe 3D is just a fad, and I really don’t want a “smart” TV. I just want a dumb monitor with awesome picture I can plug smart things into. So maybe the time is coming to upgrade while I still can…)

What has been lacking from this lovely viewing experience is sound. The layout of our living room doesn’t allow for a surround sound setup. A good set of stereo speakers would fit, though, and that would also allow me to play music downstairs on something other than tinny iPod/iPad plug-ins. So just before Christmas I went on the hunt for some speakers, which inevitably led me to a search for an AV receiver, which turned out to be the trickier problem. The cabinet on which our TV stands has slots that are tall enough for a game console or a cable STB, but full-size AV receivers are enormous. I had to look for a “slim” model, which immediately cut back on choice.

I’m not an audiophile. I knew that anything I chose would sound an order of magnitude better than the Panasonic’s unremarkable built-in speakers. (A bit like getting an SSD to replace a spinning metal hard disk.) So although I read a whole bunch of reviews, my selection eventually came down to price and features. At least 5 HDMI inputs was a hard requirement, because I’m anticipating hooking up at least a PS4, XBox One, cable box, and an Apple TV over the next few years, and every now and then I’ll probably want to plug in my laptop or something else as well. YPbPr component video input was also a must-have, because we haven’t moved up to an XBox One quite yet, and I still need to hook up the 360. And we still have a Wii, so a legacy composite video input was also necessary.

Built-in wi-fi and Airplay streaming were unnecessary, because I had a spare Airport Express that would bridge the house wireless network to wired ethernet, and I’d be plugging in an Apple TV for Airplay. The aforementioned room layout meant that 7.1 channels instead of 5.1 and various high-end Dolby Pro Logic features were not selling points for me. I can’t see me getting a 4K TV any time in the next few years, so 4K support was also irrelevant. On the other hand, upconversion (as opposed to upscaling) from SD analog to HD digital was something I realy wanted, because I liked the idea of running a single HDMI cable from the receiver to the TV, not a different set of wires for each type of video.

When price is a consideration, it definitely makes sense to look at previous years’ models, because the receiver I eventually settled on was the Marantz NR1603, rather than the more recent NR1604. The NR1603 doesn’t have 4K like the NR1604, and only has 5 rear HDMI inputs instead of 6 (both with 1 front HDMI), but because it’s older it’s also significantly cheaper. For speakers, I got a pair of Wharfedale Diamond 122s. The Marantz doesn’t have the outputs for bi-wiring them, but they fill the room with a sweet enough sound anyway (not an audiophile, remember).

The first time I plugged it all together and played a movie through the new setup, my reaction was: “Wow! Stereo separation!” The receiver’s on-screen UI is fiddly, the remote control is ridiculous, and the iOS app for controlling it remotely just flat-out sucks ass, but once everything is configured it’s great. Games and video are much richer experiences with good sound; toggling from the stereo speakers to the TV’s built-ins shows what a difference it makes. I’m looking forward to enjoying this new arrangement for many years to come.

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Tim Bray on Software in 2014

In his article “Software in 2014” Tim Bray says about the present state of front-end development:

Thus, for ac­tu­ally build­ing ap­pli­ca­tions, you’re going to have to pick a higher-level frame­work. There are lots of them and they com­pete vig­or­ously, it’s easy to poke around the Web and find knock­outs and cage matches; one good high-level com­paro is Rich JavaScript Ap­pli­ca­tions – the Seven Frame­works (Throne of JS, 2012) but wait it’s eigh­teen months old thus prob­a­bly now wrong, which is a symp­tom of the prob­lem. “What prob­lem,” you ask, “choice is good, right?” It is, but this isn’t an or­derly choice, it’s a Cam­brian Ex­plo­sion. I’m sure the soft­ware arche­ol­o­gists of 2113 will enjoy study­ing it, but it’s a prob­lem.

ongoing by Tim Bray · Software in 2014.

I completely agree, right down to the term “Cambrian Explosion”, and I ranted a bit about it in one of the few posts I wrote last year. Client-side development is a scary mess right now, where almost every choice you make stands a chance of blowing up in your face a year down the line.