Liss is More
By Casey Liss
Appearance: Tangential 3

As if you haven’t enough of me already, I joined Joe Rosensteel on episode 3 of John Chidgey’s podcast Tangential.

Tangential is, by design, a show without an agenda. For the three of us, we talked about everything from Joe’s last name, euphemisms for the ways jet engines work, to a verbal tour of America that’s sure to make someone upset. Oops.

Analog(ue) Episode One

I’m extremely excited and proud to announce that Analog(ue)'s first episode is out and available for download!

I’ve spoken about the motiviations behind Analog(ue) before, and won’t bother to repeat myself here.

In this first episode, Myke and I discuss what it’s like to put something into the universe. Naturally, that’s particularly topical, given the official launch of Relay FM. We discussed the launch of Relay FM, the creation of Neutral and ATP, my woes with creating the ATP Showbot, and more.

It would mean a lot to me if you checked it out, and let me know what you think.

Appearance: Mac Power Users 209

Everyone’s favorite lawyer-nerds, Katie Floyd and David Sparks were kind enough to ask me to join them on episode 209 of Mac Power Users.

In the episode, ostensibly about workflows, we discussed becoming a dad, media management, Alfred, and more. David and Katie are a pleasure to talk with; it was awesome to not only join them, but also get some tips from the masters.

Party Like it's 1999

Last night I accidentally stumbled upon a treasure trove of 90’s nostalgia. Seemingly nearly all of Woodstock 1999 is available for streaming on YouTube.

I landed there thanks to Vertical Horizon. (I don’t care if you think they’re awful. I like them and that’s all that matters to me.) I looked at the description for the video and found a huge list of links to other performances.

Immediately I felt like I was back in high school, listening to all my favorite bands with my high school friends. Ah, the memories.

For your convenience, and my own, I’ve catalogued them here. I’ve done my best to honor the original event schedule.

Please note that this seems to be from a non-broadcast source and it’s Woodstock. There are shots of the audience that may not be appropriate for all viewers or contexts.

So many gems above. The only downside to this walk down Nostalgia Lane is that now I feel really old.

May as well start embracing it, I suppose.

Without Children

The BBC has posted an interesting article about coping with life-long infertility. As someone who struggled with infertility for 3 years, it’s an interesting and sobering read.

One thing that’s very frustrating about infertility is that no one’s experience is the same, and everyone’s own experience genuinely is the worst. Hearing someone say they understand our experience because they had a few months or a year of troubles is infuriating, and it feels extremely insensitive.

Just as infuriating as I’m sure it would be for us to say we understand someone else’s experience because they’ve had a miscarriage. Or have had to go through one or more rounds of IVF. Erin nor I would never dare say such a thing, because we thankfully don’t know what either of those are like.

For these women and couples, I cannot fathom what they’re going through.

Moreover, it’s a reminder of exactly how lucky Erin and I are to have been able to conceive Sprout.

Announcing Analog(ue)

Today I’m pleased to announce that my friend Myke Hurley and I are launching a new podcast. That podcast is called Analog(ue). The first episode will be available this coming Monday, 18 August.

Analog(ue) will be about the touchy-feely parts of our digital world. Or you could say, the space that exists between zero and one. We will be discussing how the digital devices in our lives improve them, but can also make our lives worse.

Analog(ue) is a part of the podcast network that Myke and Stephen just launched, called Relay FM.

I’m not leaving ATP; this is an addition and not a replacement. I couldn’t leave my first love; nor do I want to.

Analog(ue) has been in the works since January of 2014. In fact, way back then, we took a stab at it and recorded an episode, only to throw it away. The time wasn’t right, for many reasons.

You could say that we’ve already released the first episode, though it wasn’t officially an episode of Analog(ue). The episode in question is actually CMD+Space #96. Being an episode of CMD+Space, it’s slightly different than what Analog(ue) will be, but we plan to take a very similar approach.

Fast forward to now, and many things have changed. Myke and I have found ourselves in a wonderful position wherein we’re both available to dedicate time to a new show. While I can’t speak for Myke, ATP is — at the moment — a fairly well-oiled machine. Further, I’m a far more experienced and confident podcaster.

Myke and I are great friends, and we both felt like some of our best work came out of talking about our feelings. It’s not always the easiest work, but it’s often the most worthwhile.

The show may last forever. It may be a miniseries; that’s something I have some familiarity with. Either way, we’re eager to share it with you guys.

“Analog(ue)?”, you ask.

Feelings aren’t digital. They’re not ones and zeroes. They’re about the grey; about the in between. They’re analog.

Myke and I are from very different countries. One of the unique differences between these cultures is that I don’t understand Britain’s obsession with sprinkling the letter ‘U’ into words that do not need it. However, as a compromise between us, we figured we could acknowledge both cultures. Thus, Analog(ue).

“Analog” if you’re from 🇺🇸.
“Analogue” if you’re from 🇬🇧.

We’re not sure where this little project will take us, but we hope you’ll join us on the ride.

The first episode will be posted this coming Monday, the 18th of August.

Adding WiFi Clients to the Home

Over the last few months, I’ve added a few devices to our home that are network-enabled:

I should note I did not pay for the Lifx bulbs nor the Slingbox.

The Honeywell thermostat is a thermostat that, when paired with an Internet gateway, can be controlled via the Internet. Think of it as an uglier Nest, with less Google.

The WeMo we added to ensure that Erin’s hair curler is off if we leave the house. Though 99.9% of the time she remembers to turn it off, and it’s on a timer, it was worth the peace of mind to put a WeMo between the curler and the outlet.

(Where by “worth the peace of mind” I mean “just the excuse I needed to try a WeMo”.)

The Lifx bulbs live in our bedroom and can illuminate it with seemingly any color in the rainbow. They also go from very dim to very bright, all while not needing near as much power as our normal incandescent bulbs.

The Slingbox I quite like as it allows us to watch our home TV and DVR outside the home. This was super useful during the World Cup, as the ESPN feed was generally considerably more delayed than the few seconds delay coming off the Slingbox. Additionally, when paired with the AV adapter I keep in the go pack, I’ll be able to stream college football games from networks other than ESPN to our tailgates once football starts. (We have a pretty serious tailgate.)

For the last couple years, I’ve really wanted to find a way to know whether or not our garage door is open. For bonus points, I’d love to be able to open or close the garage door remotely. There have been a couple of nights when we’ve accidentally left the door open, because we’ve forgotten about it.

Last weekend, a friend showed me something he just added to his house: the Chamberlain MyQ. It is a combination of two pieces of hardware and an app for your phone, and allows you to raise or lower your door remotely. I ordered one nearly immediately.

The install process was extremely simple. The hardware is two pieces: a piece that attaches to the garage door and a piece that is mounted near the opener. The part that attaches to the door is so the MyQ knows whether the door is open or not. The part that mounts near the opener serves the dual purpose of connecting via WiFi to your home network, as well as masquerading as a standard remote control for the opener.

Once the hardware is in place, you pair your phone with the base station via Bluetooth. Upon being paired, iOS asked me if I wanted to share my home network’s information with the MyQ base station. I didn’t even realize that was possible, but seems so.

Once the base station is connected to the home WiFi network, you start the app and it walks you through the setup process. There were just a few steps:

  1. Press the test button on the on-door box
  2. Specify what kind of garage opener you have
  3. In my case, I had to unscrew the front of the opener and press a button to get the opener to learn a new remote
  4. The app had the base station attempt to learn/pair with the opener

After a minute or two, the garage door opener kicked on and started opening. Setup was complete. Total time? Roughly 5 minutes.

In my quick testing, the app works really well. It allows me to open or close the door, as well as see how long it’s been in its current position. If I wanted to, I could also have it alert me if the door has been open or closed for a certain amount of time, or even immediately upon it opening/closing/both.

While certainly not cheap, I am really glad to be able to have the peace of mind and convenience of being able to be in bed and see that the door is shut, or to be able to open it from afar if I need to let someone in the house.

Just don’t hack me. Please.

Being Wrong

Brent Simmons wrote an excellent post about his motivations behind blogging. What I found most interesting was what he said about being wrong:

Everything is provisional — it’s what I think now, and I might change my mind in a year. Or in a day. Or in a minute, when somebody posts (or tweets) more or better information or has a solid argument.

I completely agree with Brent.

Everything I write here, and everything I say on ATP, is my point of view at that moment. Ask me again even an hour later and I may have dramatically changed my mind.

One of the things that I struggled with a lot in early ATP episodes, and continue to work on today, is being confident in my assertions. It’s hard to be so confident and sure, without actually… well… feeling confident nor sure. Given that the audience for both my podcast and this website tends to skew toward the nerdy, and the nerdy tend to skew toward the pedantic, I feel like everything I “put out there” has an implied “COME AT ME” attached to it.

However, the feedback I’ve gotten from both the show and this site make it all worth it. Some of it is hard to read — often times it’s hateful and generally unproductive. But many times it’s constructive rather than destructive, and makes me think about myself and my views a little bit differently.

As Brent said, once you accept the beauty and utility of being wrong, “putting something out there” quickly becomes one important step on the path to being right.

The Talk Show... now with video!

As was mentioned previously, my cohosts and I were lucky enough to be asked by John Gruber to join him on a live episode of The Talk Show when we were all at WWDC last month.

Up until the eleventh hour, we were not expecting to be able to get video of the event. By a wonderful cosmic coincidence, John realized just in time that two fine filmmakers, Jake Schumacher and Jed Hurt, were in the audience. They, heroically, were happy to jump in and save the day. John details the back story over at Daring Fireball.

You may know the names Jed and Jake because they are the fine folks that are currently trying to secure funding for App: The Human Story.

I’ve only been able to watch a few minutes of the recording, but what I’ve seen has been — unsurprisingly — excellent quality. This makes me extremely hopeful that App: The Human Story reaches its Kickstarter goal. I do not doubt that, if funded, we will all be blown away by the film that Jake and Jed produce.

As I said before, I’m deeply honored to have been a part of The Talk Show at WWDC. I’m quite proud of what we all did, and would love it if you’d spend a couple hours to check it out.

The Neat Ice Kit

As someone who does not drink fussy coffee, fizzy water, nor have a clicky keyboard, I had an emptiness in my life. Clearly, I needed something to be fussy about.

On 28 August 2013, everything changed. I backed the Neat Ice Kit on Kickstarter.

10 months and 28 days later, on 18 July 2014, I received my Neat Ice Kit in the mail.

24 hours after that, I had my first brick of ice:

Beatiful. Frikkin. Ice.

As you can see, half of this brick is cloudy and gross. But half is, as the guys at Studio Neat say, a big-ass crystal clear ice cube.

As you can see in the Vine below, a few minutes later I had a beautiful, crystal clear ice cube to pour my vodka over.

It. Was. Magnificent.

Over the last week I’ve been messing with my routine, in order to try to get the most reliable, well, big-ass crystal clear ice cubes.

While nothing particularly earth-shattering, here’s a few tips:

  • Dan and Tom both recommend making your freezer as warm as possible. Ours can go as warm as 8° F; I’ve found 5° works well.
  • Using water from the fridge, which is filtered using an onboard filter, makes for some pretty great results. I haven’t bothered messing with bottled, distilled, boiled, or otherwise fussy water sources.
  • The ice chisel has a sharp end and a not so sharp end. Do yourself a favor and make sure that you place the sharp end against the ice. Should you miss this step, as I did once or twice, you’ll destroy the rubber on the muddler. Oops.
  • Most importantly: Once you remove the ice brick from the mold, let it sit for a little while. I’ve found 5 minutes to be a great compromise. This will make breaking the ice way easier. As Tom and Dan say, it will take very little effort to break your ice.

At the end of the day, I’m unconvinced that making my drinks with this fussy ice makes them taste any better. But the ceremony of forming the ice in advance, then splitting it when I want my drink, is really enjoyable. It’s rather silly and a bit of a waste of time, and I love it.

Highly recommended.

Neat Ice Kits are not currently available for sale, but you can sign up to be e-mailed when they are.

UPDATED 2014-10-09 9:00 PM: The Neat Ice Kit is, and has been, available for sale for a while now. Thus you have no excuse; go get one.

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