Fiio Btr3

30.06.2019 20:25

After trying to use cabled headphones with current iPhone models, caved after trying more or less everything else and bought a bluetooth DAC: the Fiio BTR3.

The problem with using cabled headphones is that you need some kind of converter dongle or bluetooth DAC. When you use a dongle, it basically disconnects with the most movement. And that is really annoying when you like to do stuff on your phone while listening to stuff. Especially while walking around when I travel from home to work.

So I decided to get a DAC, after using both the Apple dongle and a few others including one from Belkin.

It’s great, it is like a little bit larger than a USB thumb drive. Charges over USB-C; I also think you can connect it to a computer and use it as a DAC over the USB-C.

The battery life covers a full day for me. Easy to connect and manage. It has some annoying sounds when you power it on and off. And I’d love it to not have it’s own power level. But other than that great.

No regrets about getting it.

What I like about having a separate bluetooth device is that even though it’s not a lot cheaper together, you can upgrade things as it makes sense for you. And the cabled headphone market is a lot bigger than the bluetooth one.

Buy with a use in mind

30.06.2019 20:23

I have written about this before, and I’m doing it again because I think it is important.

When you are going to buy something, have a sue for it, a reason for you owning it before you buy it.

I see a lot of cool pens each month, but I never buy any of them compared to how many I see. I get maybe one pen a year.

Like when I got the YStudio pen I got it because I thought it would be a great pocket pen. I know a lot of people just buy stuff and try to find a way it is useful when they have it. Every time I have done that it have ended up being something I have at my desk, until I put it away somewhere gathering dust until I throw it out.

But if I wait until I see “X would be really great for Y” then it usually end up being muc more producutive. Somtime I don’t continue using it after a while. But I have a thing I want to test it out for by the point it show up in mail.

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29.06.2019 17:53

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22.06.2019 14:08

MacBook repair

19.06.2019 18:50

My MacBook Escape will hopefully be back home tomorrow. I handed it in to the largest Apple Norwegian Premium Reseller, and I think they are the official repair place for most Apple products in Norway.

What happened was that my MacBook have had some issues booting the last few months, but jumping into recovery and a repair drive usually fixed it. Then in the beginning of June it refused to boot at all, but it worked fine to boot with my SuperDuper clone. So I handed it in. My hunch was that the drive was dead.

I have received some updates from the technician as they have been looking into it, and they made it clear that it will all be covered by Apple, not because of warranty but because of customer protection laws in the EU (plus EFTA etc). First they ordered a new logic board (plus keyboard, trackpad and battery, and the casing around the keyboard etc; all of that is one “part” apparently). Then they found out that they also had to replace the drive.

My guess was that it was just the drive that was broken, but I’m not going to complain about them giving me all the guts of a new machine for free, and I get to keep my stickers.

But I think Apple have lost a lot of money on this machine, because first I got a new machine when the keyboard broke, and now they replace most of the hardware again.

Now, I also have some worries about this whole “your computer is basically three parts” strategy. It probably makes sense for Apple, when they have to pay for it. But lets say someone got a MacBook Pro in 2016 and it works fine, but they want a new battery in 2021, and they’re told: you have to replace more or less everything inside this computer to do that. How do you think they react?

I guess they have reasons, but there got to be a way for us, the consumers to replace stuff without having to pay for half a computer, either through them being able to recycle the parts or something.

A week without the Apple Watch

15.06.2019 17:23

I have gone over a week without the Apple Watch now, and I don’t miss charging it, or having constant access to push notifications on my wrist.

But there are some features of the Watch that I miss, most of it have been replaced by various Shortcuts and other stuff. What I miss is:

Playback control: to be able to play, pause, skip etc on the Watch was one of my favorite features.
Timers: I miss how fast and easy it was to manage them
Due and Drafts: two of very few apps that is awesome

At the moment I don’t plan to get back into it, but I might if I continue to miss the features.

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14.06.2019 19:13

React-Redux 7.1 brings hooks.

12.06.2019 17:57

The way grownups handle state in larger React apps is with Redux, and the only way to use it from React is by using the React-Redux package. Instead of the state being a part of your components it becomes a separate thing, this has many advantages like separation of concerns, easier to make re-usable code etc. The way it works is that you set up your redux stuff with reducers, actions, action creators etc, create a store and add that as near the root of your react app as possible. Then you used to use the connect function to inject state and actions into your components.

Connect is great, you can do a lot with very little code, but it is a little bit hard to explain to new people, and it can be a real pain in the ass to debug. The way most people use it is that you give it two callbacks one for selecting data from state and a second one for wrapping your your action creators in dispatch, and then you pass your component as the argument to the second function. It usually looks something like this: connect(({value1, value2}) => ({value1, value2}), dispatch => ({someAction: (input) => dispatch(someAction(input))})(Component).

It isn’t great, but the best we have had, and you can make it a lot better with some functions that make the job of mapping dispatch more automatic and having selector functions that select state etc.

The new hooks introduced in react-redux make this a lot better though. With this you can make proper container functions that are declarative. You can use useSelector to select values from the store, and useDispatch + useCallback to create wrapped actionCreators. I have not used it yet, but I do think it looks very promising. And I’m always a sucker for more declarative code.

More pens in rotation

09.06.2019 12:26

For some reason I just went a little bit nuts and inked up all the pens I love using last weekend. I’m not carrying all of them all the time, usually just two. But my plan is to rotate between them. All of them have different things I like about them

YStudio portable fountain pen
Lamy 2000
TWSBI Eco Broad nib
TWSBI Eco Stub nib
Pilot Vanishing Point
Pilot Metal Falcon

I’m not sure how long it will last. But I’m writing more with pens that I have in a long time at the moment. When I got into Pencils last year my fountain pen use went way down. But I think things are back to something more balanced now.

My take on test driven development

09.06.2019 12:18

If you do formal Test Driven Development (TDD) there are some rules for how you should do it, like you start with the test, then you write a failing test, but not more than to make it all fail. Then you fix it, add another test etc.

I’m not into this for a number of reasons, but I do agree with the basic idea: you don’t write anything without also writing tests to make sure it works. It takes some time, but it will save you a lot of time as you move forward.

This is how I do it for backend code:

I write the controller, and then the services behind it, plus model changes etc that are required for the controller to do what it needs to do. Sometimes that also means so extra filter/middleware stuff etc.
When the code makes sense I write tests for it.
I exclude what I don’t need to test (classes with just setters getters) or can’t test
Write unit tests for the rest
Finally I write a test in Javascript that use the controller over HTTP

The big difference between them is that I only care about making sure there are good tests in place by the time I’m done; how you do it isn’t that important.