I’m back! First long-range test-flight of the Raptor went well. As did the shows, I got invited a few more places, so did we-as-Leannan-Sidhe – thanks again Newport, Toledo, Glastonbury!
Not so many pictures this time. I’ll post a couple later. But I did make friends with a moth.
It was very one-sided. Mostly on Moth’s side, to be honest.
And we’re off – six shows in Oregon with Leannan Sidhe. See you when I see you – hopefully in Toledo or Newport or somewhere on the coast!
A while ago, I saw Tony Fabris of Vixy & Tony using a ridiculously large Windows tablet to display his lyrics and sheet music. He’d also whipped together some software to organise it and such. It was awesome.
The trick was he’d got the tablet relatively cheap, because it was huge, but also the first release of Windows 8 on tablet, and there was something weird about it I think? I forget. It already didn’t exist anymore, but he had one.
Anyway, I’ve been watching for a similar opportunity ever since, because I kind of realised there was an arbitrage opportunity floating around right about… well, let’s go to the napkin:
See, past a point, as tablets get larger, they become less useful as tablets. Above 11″ or so, they rapidly become both unacceptably awkward and heavy, particularly at widescreen ratios. Oh, sure, you can get a keyboard, use it as a really awkward laptop, and a lot of companies are making laptop “convertibles” now as people try to figure out that format. But even done well, that’s basically a laptop that can make do as a shitty tablet, all at laptop prices.
Now, on the other hand, if you want something to sit in front of you on a music rack and display your chords or whatever, you want that extra, impractical-for-carrying-around size. And you don’t mind a little more weight, because it’s a lot lighter than a bunch of three-ring binders.
And LCD screens in those sizes and ratios are everywhere now from OEMs, because laptops. So everybody keeps trying to make tablets at those larger sizes because IT CAN’T MISS AM I RIGHT? Except every time it’s the same plan, it’s the same plan, and everybody ends up on fire and dumping these things.
So the trick is to find something in that little red bar, at the end of the too-heavy, too-big-for-normal-people 13-14″ downslope-of-heaviness while still in the awesome-for-sheetmusic range of musician happiness, all at the right oh-shit-this-was-a-bad-idea-get-rid-of-these-things price range.
There’ve been a few qualifying tablets floating around pretty much constantly since I saw Tony’s, all from one or another GeneroMaker, but they’ve all been too junky for one reason or another. Bad screens, bad battery life, double-digit DOA rates, whatever.
Until possibly now. Meet the latest iteration of this mistake, at $150 on Amazon right now.
The photo here isn’t great, but I don’t want to move the tablet because it’s doing the first-time charge. But trust me: it’s huge. It’s slightly over three times the size of Anna’s Kindle. It’s got a good screen, it’s heavier than some laptops but it’s thin, it’s got 5-7 (claimed) hours of battery life, decent viewing angles, and it’s running Jelly Bean so can talk to the usual app stores. It’s got USB and expansion and all that. The onboard sound is terrible and it’s not super fast, but that’s not what I need it for.
And almost all the positive reviews are from musicians using it for exactly this.
There will probably be more of these, but this is the first one I’ve seen since that old Windows tablet of Tony’s that meets all the requirements for such appropriately little dough. I’ve had it for all of a few hours, so this isn’t a review, but it is your notice: the arbitrage opportunity you may have been waiting for is now here.
I kind of want to get a custom-made license plate frame. I’ve never bothered with anything like this before, but then again, I’ve never named a car before either. I’m kind of thinking of something like this:
“CF BSG75” is Colonial Fleet Battlestar Group 75, which is, of course, Galactica. (I’m not sure yet of how to do the spacing, either. CFBSG 75? CF BSG 75? If you have an opinion I’d like it.)
I generally don’t like my fandom references to be super-obvious. I like them to be the sorts of things that are in-universe and to be things that people who don’t care won’t notice. Like, I always wanted to build an Angelic Layer control helmet, and just carry it around at cons, like every AL player does at events in-universe. Nobody would get it, but it would be awesome.
This isn’t that good, but it fits the aesthetic.
(I’m also thinking of getting this, trimming off the COLONIAL and FLEET words, and putting it inside the driver’s side front side miniport window. This trimming should work as long as I’m careful, particularly since it’s a vinyl transfer sticker.)
eta: also, see my comment below. That kind of doing it wrong just … nnngngnggghgh. Really visceral NO reaction. I don’t even know why.
I added previous post/next post links at the bottom of each post in desktop view. Mobile phone view already had them, up top – but I thought they looked better at bottom in desktop.
Regardless, I had to write new code to do it. It’s pretty trivial code, but let me know if it breaks?
Oh, I also fixed <i>/<em>/<b> html markup in comments. Those work again if you’re commenting locally. I’ll have to re-fix it every time they update my comment management plugin – unless they accept the code change I just submitted – but at least it’s back and I saved diffs so it’ll be easy. Let me know if that gets weird also.
Thanks!
I’ve been thinking a little about Anna’s post about Black Widow in Avengers: Age of Ultron and about Black Widow as “love interest” and the “monster” comment and Disney/Marvel’s rather hideous sexism in merchandising and trying to separate out all those bits and pieces into a coherent thought.
And I’ve got various things to say about various parts, but I think want to talk about this one tweet. It gets spoilery below here, so consider yourself warned now.
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Wow, that’s unexpected: I’m in a movie trailer! The film – a documentary – is called GTFO, and it’s about sexism and misogyny in video game culture, something I’ve written about a lot.
I’m not in it for long; it’s only a couple of seconds of footage, shot at PAX in Seattle in… 2013, I think. But it’s specifically of me. I remember the game I was playing at the time, even if I’m not sure of the year; I don’t remember the camera crew.
Anyway, here’s an article in The New York Times about the documentary. Here’s a review. I wonder how it did at SXSW?
Hat tip to Randy Mac Kay for pointing it out to me. Funny thing is, at first mention, I thought it was from a different movie, one that I do know I’m in. This film? I had no idea. SURPRISE!
I’ve got all these “passive” speakers that are part of my PA kit. “Passive” means they are speakers without built-in amplifiers. That was the norm for a very long time, but isn’t so much now.
And I’ve been thinking there’s this super-snazzy mixer I’d like. It’s this, in the 1608 model specifically.
Now, I can use that with external amplifiers. I don’t have to do anything clever. But it’d be nice not to have to haul around as many pieces and leave the amp at home, right?
So I started looking around at amplifier boards I could build myself, with the idea of making my non-powered “passive” speakers into powered “active” speakers, with built-in amps.
And that’s when I discovered “class T” amplifiers, which are fairly new, and are single-board units like this one.
And it’s like $23, which is crazy. But they’re all priced like that. All the Class T amps are dirt cheap, but commentary on gear boards is actually pretty good, particularly for these 2050-based units.
Does anybody know anything about these personally? Because I’m pretty intrigued.
I continue to be bemused by the ongoing return of vinyl LPs. Another year, another set of gains, in both units and revenue. Data from Statistica:
It matches what I was seeing in an RIAA PDF from earlier this year. Vinyl sales are doing very well, thanks, and are the only ownership segment that’s actually rising. Streaming revenue is climbing too, but wow, not enough to make up for all the down segments.
I think there are a couple of things going on here.
First, the LP surge – yes, of course it’s at least partly a fad. That’s not durable, and the increase in rate of increase is most probably a warning sign.
But aside from that, I think the rise in LP sales may be related to the LP package being a physical/tangible object that’s interesting to have for itself. Certainly, if you’re going to pick a CD vs. a vinyl LP as an interesting physical object, the LP wins. Bigger covers, more interesting art possibilities – the whole drill. But…
I wrote a while ago about how the RIAA made music ownership a negative value. I think that’s still pretty much true, for digital.
But I don’t think that perception ever reached vinyl. Vinyl had been written off by the time the RIAA swung into self-destructive smashy smashy. And I’m wondering if vinyl still caries a weight of ownership that digital no longer does.
I mean, I just had a friend of mine who has never owned a turntable and is the opposite of a hipster say she’s thinking of getting one. This shouldn’t be ignored.
The downside for the artist, of course, is that LPs are a lot more expensive to make – particularly for indies. And smaller living spaces mean less space for storage of any kind of stuff, including LPs. That’s a limiting factor, and while it might become less of one as housing stock rebalances, that rebalancing is a longer cycle, and probably won’t come early enough to matter.
The second statement I take from these graphics is that the industry – as of 1st half 2014 – is still both sinking and on fire. That Forbes chart shows year-to-year revenue changes in stark numbers – down categories at $-394m (downloads, CS, synchronisation, others) vs. up categories at $+231m (streaming, vinyl) year-to-year.
That’s a $163m revenue loss. I certainly don’t see how vinyl can staunch that much bleeding. And the streaming revenue gains – while obviously more substantial, and where the industry is betting its future – don’t even make up for the drop in paid downloads. They’re just cannibalising their own revenue streams.
We’re still living in a post-scarcity environment. And there’s no rearrangement of desk chairs that can change that fact. Delay the repercussions a little, sure; stop them, no.
Me, I want to release something on Edison cylinder. It can in fact be done; there’s a company in the UK doing it. And wow, it’s expensive. But if, you know, 20 people want to go in at $50/each for cylinders, I will do it. I will do it in a heartbeat.
No? Yeah, I didn’t think so either. XD
This is Part 11 of Music in the Post-Scarcity Environment, a series of essays about, well, what it says on the tin. In the digital era, duplication is essentially free and there are no natural supply constraints which support scarcity, and therefore, prices. What the hell does a recording musician do then?
…I just realised I’m going to miss the U. District Streetfair here in Seattle for the first time in … decades?
Seriously, I’ve gone to this thing since forever, more or less. I’m not originally from the U. District? (I don’t even know where I was born?) But I’m from the U. District. And Streetfair was always just a hop over the hill to the Ave and then STREETFAIR! which means summer is here, in a way Opening Day never did for me, even though I go to that too sometimes, and there’s way too many foods and booths and vendors and clothes and street performances and and and…
…and I’ll be in Oregon doing shows with Leannan Sidhe.
Which is awesome. Don’t get me wrong. If I had to make that decision intentionally I probably would. Probably.
But… streetfair. snif.
THE NEW SINGLE
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