The “Smart” Bulb Conundrum

For years, most home and SOHO routers kept 2.4 and 5 GHz networks separate. In fact, you can probably open the Wi-Fi settings on your phone right now and see SSIDs like “Pretty Fly for a WiFi 2G” and “Pretty Fly for a WiFi 5G”.

I recently moved to a new house. Although I hadn’t planned on creating a “smart home”, I kind of did. See, I already owned a couple Google Home Mini speakers when my missus told me that she wanted some kind of “digital” thermostat at the new house. Right on cue, our power company sent us an offer for a Nest thermostat, along with another Google Home Mini and a GE Smart Bulb, for a very reasonable price. So we took them up on the offer, and now had a Nest and several Home Minis.

Due to the layout of my new office – that is, the furniture and power outlets within – the best option for me, lightwise, was to put a lamp on top of a tall bookcase. But it would have been a pain for me to reach up to turn the light on and off, and my missus would have to get a step ladder every time she wanted to turn the light on or off. No worries – we have that smart bulb Duke Energy sent us, right? I can just put the lamp on top of the bookcase then say “Hey Google, turn the lamp on”, yeah?

I could. But the light put out by the “C by GE” bulb is ugly. I’ve always preferred daylight bulbs over traditional “soft white” bulbs, but the “C by GE” light looked more like an interstate rest stop sodium vapor bulb than soft white light. So off to Amazon to buy some new bulbs, and when that failed, off to Home Depot… which almost failed, too.

Why the failure? Well, most modern routers – especially mesh routers – treat 2.4 and 5 GHz bands as the same. My network has both, but only has one SSID, and most devices can automagically switch from 2.4 and 5 GHz, whichever is the best fit at that moment. My Roku TV, for example, typically uses 5 GHz because it needs the bandwidth when we watch The Crown or Jack Ryan in UHD. My phone defaults to 5 GHz, but might switch to 2.4 GHz when I’m out in the yard because 5 GHz won’t travel that far, and 2.4 GHz is better than zero GHz.

Here, at last, is the problem this whole post addresses: it seems like all – or almost all – smart bulbs are 2.4 GHz only. This makes sense, because 2.4 GHz is better at penetrating walls and appliances, and such devices only send small bits of data occasionally. But guess what? Neither the LOHAS bulbs I ordered from Amazon nor the Philips bulb I bought at Home Depot would connect to my mesh network.

One option would have been to go to the router’s settings and have it separate the Wi-Fi signals into discrete 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. You know, the traditional “My WiFi 2G” and “My WiFi 5G” situation. And when I did that, it worked. But I didn’t want separate bands. It’s almost 2020!

So… what to do? Well, I had an old TP-Link range extender – model TL-WA855RE – lying around. Fortunately, the range extender can connect to the mesh network, despite being 2.4 GHz only. And since it’s only 2.4 GHz, the smart bulb can connect to it… and, by extension, the rest of my network.

Setting it up is pretty straightforward:

– If your smart bulb and\or extender requires an app, go ahead and install them from your app store before doing anything else.

– I reset the extender to its default settings, then logged in to its Wi-Fi network with my phone. I believe the SSID is just the model number: “TL-WA855RE”.

– I then used the extender’s app to connect and initiate the setup process. This is basically just “let it scan for networks, then login to the target network”. Keep all other settings at default, unless you want to: a) use a more complex password for this extended network (which I did); b) hide the new SSID (which I didn’t, because the password I gave the extended network looks like I smashed my fist on the keyboard); and c) this extender also has a “power level” setting which I turned to LOW, because I only need to broadcast the signal a few feet. ‘Cos the neighbors can’t steal your Wi-Fi if the signal never reaches them!

– By default, the new network will have the same SSID as the “mother network”, but with “_EXT” added to the end. So: “My Wi-Fi_EXT”. I logged in to the “_EXT” network on my phone and went through the setup wizard for the WiZ software I had to download for the Philips bulb. The WiZ software inherits the Wi-Fi settings from your phone and sends them to the bulb, which is why you have to do this step.

– Once the WiZ setup was complete, I switched my phone back to the regular Wi-Fi network and added the WiZ service to Google Home. That way I can say “Hey Google, turn on the lamp”.

– Finally, just to be safe, I reserved the internal IP addresses of both the extender and the bulb. That way, now that it’s working, there’s no reason it won’t keep working.

So… if you find yourself in a similar situation, you can buy the same model extender from Amazon here for $14.99, or Netgear’s EX2700 2.4 GHz extender here for $24.99.

FUN PLACE: Saint Pierre and Miquelon

Saint Pierre and Miquelon are two tiny islands off the northeastern coast of Canada. But they’re not Canadian: they belong to France, and they are the last tiny bits of French North America.

saint-pierre-and-miquelon-north-america

The 1763 Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Year’s War (sometimes called the “French and Indian War” in the US). The terms dictated that France give up all her claims to land in North America. But, for reasons I’m not entirely clear on, the British gave Saint Pierre and Miquelon back to France a few weeks after the treaty was signed.

Due to the way the French constitution works, the land that makes up the islands isn’t “a piece of land owned by France”, it’s a “piece of France itself”. The people who live there aren’t “colonials” – they’re French citizens. They belong to the EU and use Euros. If you get a passport stamp there it says “France”. Although it’s 2,373 miles (3,819 km) from Saint Pierre and Miquelon to Brest (the nearest point in Metropolitan France) it’s only 478 miles (770 km) as the crow flies from Hamlin, Maine to Saint Pierre and Miquelon. So if someone asks you how far France or the EU is from the US, you can win a bar bet with that little bit of trivia!

So… what’s so “fun” about it?

Well, aside from having a tiny bit of France just 1,307 miles (2,103 km) up the coast from me, it’s kind neat that street names generally aren’t used on the island. It’s a couple of tiny islands of a few thousand people whose families have lived there for generations. It truly is the kind of place where people say things like “yeah, turn left at Andre’s gas station, then make a right at Florian’s farm, then make a hard right after Gaston’s old treehouse. If you see the old red pickup truck by the side of the road, you’ve gone too far.” Only it’s in French.

Also, some islanders got filthy rich during Prohibition. Canadians sold plenty of Canadian whiskey to Americans. But it was, in fact, illegal under Canadian law to sell alcohol to Americans in quantity. But you know what wasn’t illegal? For Canadians to sell whiskey to French people. In 1931, the islands imported a total of 1.8 million US gallons of whiskey from Canada … for population of around 4.300 people. Almost all that liquor was bought by American smugglers who’d sailed up from New York or Massachusetts  or even Virginia. Prohibition was a golden time for the island.

But there’s dark stuff, too. Saint Pierre and Miquelon was the scene of the only known execution by guillotine in North America. A man named Joseph Néel was found guilty of murdering a Mr Coupard on Île aux Chiens on December 30,  1888 and executed 8 months later.  He probably would have been executed earlier, but the guillotine had to be shipped from France’s Caribbean outpost of Martinique. And it was damaged in transit, so authorities had to find someone to fix it. A few more weeks then passed as no local wanted to do the actual execution part of it. A recent arrival was coaxed into it on August 24, 1889. The whole sordid story is the subject of the 2000 film The Widow of Saint-Pierre starring Juliette Binoche. The guillotine still exists and is now in a museum on Saint-Pierre.

Random Fact #1604

As you probably know, the Internet works because of something called DNS. Computers only communicate via a numerical IP address, like 64.233.177.113. People are, of course, terrible with numbers. DNS acts as the Internet’s phone book, translating human-friendly domain names like “google.com” into the IP address your computer needs to connect to a site.

While domain names have been around longer than you might think, the idea really isn’t new, though. When telegraphs were the thing, a company, person or organization could set up a telegraphic address. Like a domain name, people could address telegraphs to FORD or STDOIL and they’d be passed down the telegraph lines until someone who knew the actual address sent it to its final destination. Just like domain names and trademarks, telegraphic addresses were a valuable property, and were fought over when companies split up. Competitors even bought addresses similar to legit ones, like COKECOLA or COCOCOLA.

A few companies and organizations are named for the previous telegraphic address.

Interflora rose to fame by using telegraphic (later, telephone) lines to send flower arrangements anywhere in the country. In the pre-Internet days, if your uncle on the other side of the country died, it was difficult to find a florist on in that area on your own. Instead you’d send the order from a local florist via Interflora, who’d telegraph an in-network florist near your uncle’s funeral home… for a cut of the money, of course. Which is kind of a good example of how this whole system worked.

Interpol, the international crime-fighting agency founded in Vienna in 1923, was originally known as the International Criminal Police Commission. It later changed its name to its telegraphic address. So if you wanted to squeal on someone, you just send a telegram to INTERPOL.

Oxfam, a charity founded at Oxford University, but with independent branches all over the world, was founded as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief in 1942, initially to help fight the famine in Greece due to its Axis occupation and the Allies’ retaliatory blockade during the war. OXFAM was, of course, it’s telegraphic address.

RANDOM THOUGHT #608

In college I knew a girl from Baton Rouge. When she was sober she had a “general Southern Accent”™. My best friend and I used to take her to this bar for Guinness pints. After the first pint the Louisiana twang would start coming out. By pint three she sounded like Justin Wilson:

By beer five it was half Justin Wilson, half backwoods French, and neither myself nor my best friend – nor anyone else for that matter – could understand what the fuck this girl was saying.

Spotify vs. Apple Music

So… back in June Spotify released a new version of their Android software. At first glace, it didn’t look so bad – mostly a huge PODCASTS tab added to the “My Library” page. Which makes sense: Spotify is pushing podcasts hard because they don’t have to pay royalties when you listen to them like they do with music.

Come to find out, it was way worse than that.

A quick refresher: in Spotify when you “save” an album to your library, you’re basically just saving a link to the music files on Spotify’s servers, like a browser bookmark. And Spotify’s Android app used to have a “My Library” page which had tabs for “Artists”, “Albums” and “Songs”. So if you saved 10,000 Maniacs’ In My Tribe album to your library, “10,000 Maniacs” would then appear under “Artists”, In My Tribe would appear under “Albums”, and the songs from that album would appear under “Songs”. If you deleted the album, those entries went away. Simple, yes?

Spotify also has a “follow artist” feature. When I first joined the service in 2015, following an artist was how you got notifications that they had released new music. But Spotify’s notification system never worked that well, so they removed most of it. But they kept the “follow artist” feature, which folks in the Spotify Community said was for “shaping” the music in Spotify’s playlists. If the artists in your Discover Weekly or Release Radar playlists weren’t to your liking, follow a bunch of your favorite artists, they said, and your playlists would get better. And that seemed to be true.

So – here’s what Spotify’s June update changed:

– The “Artists” tab now only shows artists you follow. So if you add 10,000 Maniacs’ In My Tribe to your library now, 10,000 Maniacs no longer appears under “Artists” unless you specifically tapped the “Follow” (or “Heart” icon), too. It’s effectively as if your iTunes install from 2008 suddenly lost the ability to sort music by artist, as if artist information was completely gone. There are lots of people who had been with Spotify since the service rolled out here in 2008 who never used the “follow” feature… and they were pissed that Spotify, without telling anyone or giving any advance notice, emptied their “Artists” lists. These poor folks had to recreate their “Artists” lists by hand. It took some people days.

– The “Albums” tab still works as expected, but for reasons only God and Spotify’s developers know, they removed the alphabetical scroll bar. It used to be, if you wanted to listen to U2’s Zooropa, you’d tap “My Library”, “Albums” and “Z” to get pretty close. Now you have to scroll all the way down manually, like a medieval French peasant!

– It also used to be possible to save only some tracks from an album. So if you liked the sound of The Cars’ remastered Candy-O album but didn’t want all the demos and outtakes that come on that version, you could save just the album tracks but not the outtakes. No more – it’s all or nothing now.

– The “Songs” tab went away entirely, replaced by a “Liked Songs” playlist with all the songs from your old “Songs” tab, but now in totally random order! And since the songs are now in random order there’s no use for an alphabetical scroll bar, so they got rid of that, too. So instead of tapping “W” to get to Roxy Music’s “While My Heart is Still Beating” I now have to scroll through 3,719 songs listed in random order until I find it. Terrific!

– They also moved the “Recently Played” list from the My Library page to the Home page, and they removed all actions from it aside from “open”. It used to be that you could tap on an album or playlist in Recently Played and several options would appear: “Remove from this list” was great for hiding any trace of your secret Def Leppard obsession, “Queue” or whatever. By moving and neutering it, Spotify effectively got rid of a feature that tons of people used.

*     *     *

Needless to say, many users were pissed about all this. I was pissed enough to give Apple Music a try.

So… signing up for Apple Music seemed simple enough. But then I installed and opened the latest version of iTunes on my laptop… and now what? Spotify is a stand-alone app. You open it, and there’s Spotify. Apple Music is… buried somewhere in iTunes? Even though I was signed in to iTunes with the correct account there were no “Hey, we see you signed up for Apple Music! Here’s how it works in iTunes for Windows” prompt. Nothing. It took a few clicks, but I found it. And when I did, the selection was as expected. I looked through several of my more “problematic” artists, and Apple Music seemed to have the same library holes Spotify does: early Saint Etienne and Dramarama albums were missing from Apple Music, too.

Continue reading “Spotify vs. Apple Music”

QUICK REVIEW: Chromatics + Desire

Chromatics live

Chromatics
Desire
In Mirrors

Variety Playhouse, Atlanta, GA
05/15/2019

Few shows have set off my “teenage concert hype meter” more than this. It’s the first time any of these bands have ever played my home city of Atlanta, which means it’ll be at least five years before they’ll even consider coming to my adopted home city of Charlotte. I asked the missus if she wanted to go. She said no. I decided I wasn’t missing the chance, so a solo trip it was.

Johnny Jewel is the heart and soul of almost all the bands on his label, Italians Do It Better. He’s a full-time member of Chromatics, Desire, Glass Candy and Symmetry. He produces and contributes to most of the rest. He does soundtracks to films. If you’re old enough to remember when Ivo Watts-Russell ran 4AD Records back in the 80s… yeah, it’s kinda like that.

So: In Mirrors kind of sounds like Washed Out, if Washed Out were kinda going for the Twin Peakysy, “Stranger Things soundtrack” vibe most Italians Do It Better bands have.

This is a good tune. Sadly, lead singer Jesse Taylor just looks… awkward on stage. The music sounded fine, but he barely spoke above a whisper between songs, and just looked uncomfortable overall. Just RELAX. Take a deep breath, dude. You’ve got this!

In Mirrors

By the time Desire came out the crowd behind me had swelled… with Desire! Hahaha – I’ll show myself out. They kicked off with fan fave “Mirroir Mirroir”, then the even more popular “Don’t Call”.

Desire - "Don't Call"

“If I Can’t Hold You” followed, which was a bit of a surprise (I was thinking it’d be “Tears from Heaven”). After that, the biggest surprise of all: they launched into a cover of New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle” “just for this tour”:

[Sorry, the video was yanked from YouTube!]

The sound in the video doesn’t do it justice. I hope they release some version – live or studio – because it was fantastic!

And speaking of, you know how you go to tons of shows and it’s all cool and everything… but once in a while, for some unknown reason, you hear a song live and you’re like “HOLY SHIT I’VE HEARD THIS SONG A MILLION TIMES AND IT NEVER SOUNDED LIKE THIS BEFORE ‘COS THIS IS AMAZING!”… that kind of thing?

Well, Desire closed out with their one hit, “Under Your Spell”, made slightly famous by appearing in some commercials and the 2011 Ryan Gosling film Drive.

The song was absolutely fucking amazing live. It’s like, they somehow tweaked it for the live show and somehow made the song even better? All I know is, the crowd behind me went nuts, and I looked back at one point and it looked like the entire venue was jumping up and down. Honestly, it was the highlight of the show for me.

Desire live

Note the blonde Aja, of the IDIB band Heaven, in the lower left in the above pic. She played keyboards with Jewel for Desire. She didn’t get to sing any of her own songs, unfortunately:

Chromatics played a much different set than I thought they would. Which, looking back on it, was good. Basically, it wasn’t the playlist I woulda picked, but Jewel picked a much better one – more balanced, more theatrical, a much better “this is Chromatics” playlist than I woulda come up with:

Tick of the Clock
Lady
Night Drive/Paradise
Back From the Grave
I Can Never Be Myself When You’re Around
Time Rider
These Streets Will Never Look the Same
Blue Girl
I Want Your Love
Cherry
Into the Black

Encore:
I’m On Fire

Shadow

Running Up That Hill

The band sounded fantastic, and the guys put on a really good show. I just wish we coulda heard more stuff from the (alleged) new album Dear Tommy. If you’re out of the loop on this one, Dear Tommy was supposed to come out in 2014. But Jewel destroyed all physical copies of it after a near-death experience in Hawaii. He decided it “wasn’t nearly good enough”, so he started all over again. 4 years ago. I don’t know what you’d call Chromatics – indie pop? electropop? Whatever it is, Dear Tommy has become the Chinese Democracy of its genre. As you can see from the playlist, the show ended with several covers, and it’s amazing that Ruth Radelet single-handedly got me to like a Bruce Springsteen song, for God’s sake.

Chromatics live

Anyway, I’ve rambled on enough. It was a very good show, and I’m glad I went. The venue was nice – I go to shows there every 4-6 years and, oddly,  it somehow gets nicer every time. The staff were friendly and polite. I was one of the first x people through the merch line, so my t-shirt purchase ($25) was placed in a complimentary tote bag (normally $10) with two 12″ singles\EPs and an album inside, along with 5 folded posters. Nice! Too bad the “XXL” tour shirt is more like a Taiwanese L.

Here’s the Spotify playlist:

JIM MAKES: “Brie Butter”

Sorry for so many food posts lately… but let’s face it: once you get to be 48 years-old, your days of chasing women, drowning in whiskey and going on peyote-fueled vision quests with Jim Morrison’s ghost are over. So… FOOD IT IS, THEN!

“Compound butter” is what happens when you let butter sit out to soften, then mix in some stuff, then put the butter back in the fridge to firm up again. The “stuff” you put in the butter can be a liquid, like wine or honey (hmmmm… honey butter!). It can be spices and herbs, like the garlic-herb butter on top of your steak. But it can also be… cheese!

This post at The Takeout talks about “brie butter”. You just get 8 ounces of good Irish or French butter and an equal amount of brie cheese.

Brie Butter 2

Cut the rind off the brie, cut both into small-ish cubes, then mix in a food processor until it becomes a smooth paste. You’ll probably need to stop several times and push the butter\cheese mixture down the side of the processor bowl with a spatula, by the way.

Brie Butter

The traditional thing to do would be to put a thick line of the stuff on a piece of plastic wrap, then use the plastic wrap to form it into a summer sausage-sized log… which is why the garlic-herb butter you get on your steak at restaurants is often shaped as a perfect disc. But I’m lazy, so I just put mine into a Chinese takeout soup container.

Let me just say that this stuff is the Truth and the Light. And the post at The Takeout knocks it out of the park when it says:

Somehow, both ingredients come through in equal measure; it’s almost like they agreed to take turns. You get hit with the brie right up front, but then the cheese yields to its counterpart, giving way to a creamy, buttery finish.

They’re spot-on: the brie and butter somehow compliment each other perfectly, the flavor of one fading out while the other gently takes over. This stuff is absolutely delicious – sinfully delicious – and I’d recommend it to anyone!

JIM MAKES: “Burrito Bisquick Bake”

There was a ripple of excitement on the Internet last week. There’s a writer at The Takeout named Gwen, and recently she went through her friend Julie’s old family recipes. She noticed several 70s casserole classic recipes by someone named “Buggy”. Buggy had a recipe for a burrito-style beef casserole; it intrigued Gwen, so she shared it with everyone. People on message boards, Reddit and Facebook picked up on the recipe… so I decided to give it a try.

The recipe is at the link, but it’s pretty damn simple: brown a pound of ground beef; when done, drain, add taco seasoning and water per the package instructions. While that’s going on, mix a 16 oz. can of refried beans, a cup of Bisquick\Pancake mix and  ¼ to ½ cup of water in a large bowl. Make an even layer of the bean & Bisquick mix in a greased 9-10″ pie plate or oven-proof skillet. When the beef is done, pour it over the bean & Bisquick layer. Then pour a 15.5 oz jar of your favorite salsa over that, then top with your favorite shredded cheese. Bake at 350F for around 30 minutes.

Do that, and you end up with this:

Burrito Bisquick Bake

So… how is it? Meh. It’s not bad. It’s food, and it’s fairly tasty. But I ate it without any kind of emotion whatsoever. Ya know? Like, when I make Mom’s Tuna Casserole I feel a wave of childhood nostalgia. When I make Cracker Barrel’s hash brown casserole I almost feel like I’m cheating the system. I don’t feel anything like that when making Burrito Bisquick Bake. It’s just something to stuff in my face on a Tuesday night.

Burrito Bisquick Bake 2

Would I make it again? Sure. Why not? In fact, the reason I made it in the first place was because I already had most of the ingredients on hand, which is how 70s casseroles worked. But the jury is still out as to whether this would make my regular rotation.