Xbox One Background Music still can’t play your own music, WTF!

This is my second post on this subject, but I just can’t believe that Microsoft has released background music and not updated Media Player to work with it, so you basically can’t play your own music on the XBOX ONE. This was a release feature on the Xbox 360, WTF Microsoft!

The first app was a damn Podcast app! What is that? And now I guess that Groove Music, Microsoft’s paid music service will work in the background. And supposedly it will play music you have copied to your OneDrive, if you have enough space, but you seem to have to have a paid account for that to work (though I could be wrong on that). The thing is that the 360 worked off a DLNA server from your computer, so with the help of an app, I could stream all my music from my Mac to my XBOX and pick tracks and play them. I want to play my own music, not paid music, and not even Pandora (which is supposed to work soon). I want my own music!

And honestly the fact that Microsoft’s paid music service GROOVE will work soon makes me very wary! WTF! Let me play my own music! Hell if I have to I will rip CD’s to my One as I could with my 360! It is better than just streaming or paid music! Hell even if I have to put them on a USB stick and do it that way, it is at least my music, but again that would require Microsoft to update their Media Player app!

Picked up an LED worklight at Costco

  • Post category:Light
  • Post comments:0 Comments

I was at Costco today and saw a new LED Worklight on Sale for $29.95. It is a Snap-On LED Worklight 2000 Lumens that promises a 5000K color temperature. It has a nice little adjustable base, and I am planning on shooting the rest of my 4th Macy the Bear short, and realized I likely need more light so I am going to give it a try.

I figure at the worst I can use it to bounce off the ceiling.

I will report on how it works out as soon as I give it a try.

Xbox One Background Music released with only one app, and it isn’t Media Player

Microsoft released it’s summer 2016 update, and finally after 2 years they have released Background Music, which was released late on the original Xbox and a release feature on the Xbox 360. The problem is, they didn’t update their own apps! Seriously the only app that supports it is CAST, an app to listen to Podcasts! WTF!

Now they have announced support for the crappy Microsoft Groove, it’s paid app, and Pandora, but no word on Media Player and that is the rub! On the Xbox 360 you could stream music from a dlna server on your computer, and control it via the app or via a quick pop up. The Media plays music from DLNA servers or USB, though you can’t rip music to the hard drive like you could on the 360, but no the app does not support Background Music, and there is no world when it will.

The New NVIDIA TITAN X is the King of the Hill!

Yes there is a new king of the hill in the consumer video card arena, and that is the new NVIDIA TITAN X. I had expected this to take a while to come out after them releasing the new 10 series, 1080, 1070 and 1060, but it was quickly announced and is coming out August 2nd! Wow! And the specs are amazing!

GPU Engine Specs                                               TITAN X                 GTX 1080

NVIDIA CUDA® Cores                                          3584                         2560

Base Clock (MHz)                                                   1417                         1607

Boost Clock (MHz)                                                  1531                        1733

Memory Specs:

GbpsMemory Speed                                                10                              10

GDDR5XStandard Memory Config                        12 GB                       8 GB

Memory Interface Width                                         384-bit                      256 bit

Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)                                 480                           320

Thermal and Power

Maximum GPU Temperature (in C)                       94                             94

Graphics Card Power (W)                                       250 W                     180 W

Supplementary Power Connectors                          8 pin and 6 pin       8 pin

That is an extra 1024 CUDA Cores for Adobe Creative Suite to play with, and an extra 4GB of faster RAM for not that much more power draw!

If you have been reading my posts, I have come to the realization that my next computer won’t be a Mac, and have been looking at custom build PC’s like Origin PC or Puget Systems. For a bit I was thinking that maybe 2 SLI GTX 1080’s would be the answer for my CUDA needs, but that would basically eat all of my PCI slots. And I likely need some sort of Black Magic Design card to kick out video at least to an HD Monitor for editing, if not an Intensity Pro 4k. And while I can get a USB 3,1 external Raid for hard drives (as I likely won’t get a ThunderBolt 3 Motherboard, unless I decide to build for myself), so I could live without a raid controller I would like need a Firefire PCI board to deal with my all my old hard drives until I can afford new enclosures.

So it looks like the new NVIDIA TITAN X would be my $1200 card of choice.

Trying to figure out what programs I will use if I move from Mac to PC

I have been talking about it for ages, and have used Apple Computers since I was 7 and got an Apple IIC. I love my Mac, but it getting old, and the next macOS Sierra has end of lifed my 4,1 MacPro. Luckily I can hack it to become a 5,1 with a simple firmware hack, so I can install Sierra, but it is likely the last Mac OS my computer will run. And big Adobe updates usually require the latest Mac OS. And the new “MacPro”, the trashcan is a joke that has not been upgraded since it’s release in 2013. It isn’t upgradeable, nor can it have more than one harddrive internally, so it isn’t pro. And it’s use of a Xeon processor is not a boon. Xeon’s are usually a few generations behind on technology, the big difference is that Xeon’s don’t have an integrated graphics processor (which doesn’t affect you if you us a high end graphics card) and they 2 processors! But the trashcan can only use one! And yes it can have 12 cores (for an insane price), but i7’s have now reached 8 or 10 cores and are newer tech, so why not use those if you are only using one processor. I really don’t get it!

And yes I could build a Hackintosh, but I have been using a Quo at work,mand while it is great, upgrades are never too fun, and you must disable security features to even install El Capitan.
So it is looking like my next computer is a PC, cause I can put an NVIDIA Geforce 1080, but I need to figure out moving away from many of my current programs.
I know I can move iTunes to PC, though I hear it doesn’t work as well on the PC, but my library and ratings will make it over.
I can export and move my mailboxes, browsers and the like pretty easily. There is nothing to easily move my Photos library to Windows, but I can import my Library into Adobe Lightroom and it will take my Keywords, then move to PC so it will work there. Pages and the whole iWorks suite is a pain as I need to open each file and save it out to word (hopefully I can automate it).
Making my web sites is more of a pain. I have used many programs over time, starting with Net Objects Fusion before it went Windows only, and I have even used Dreamweaver, though my HTML skills have gone to hell, and I don’t want to code anymore. So currently I use Rapidweaver, which makes it easy and I have 2 different web sites for me and my mom’s web site, which can link to much web site content. Now I am starting to look at Adobe Muse as an alternative, but I am not sure it will easily plug into all the content I currently use, from YouTube, Vimeo, 500px, or Flickr, so sites you can easily upload things and have them automatically show up on your web site. And it looks like there is no way to embed my blogger blog into muse, as I have done with Rapidweaver. Might be able to do my self hosted wordpress, but not my blogger blogs. Damn!
Then I will of course have to figure out a bunch of other programs, and especially system tweaking, and a new backup system, as I can’t use time machine anymore.
It is surprising to me how little info there is online for moving from Mac to PC. Any info or even programs to help seem to be made to go the other way.
Oh well, when it happens I will likely be running both machines for a while, until I am sure everything is moved over.
And I am sure I will miss my Mac in many ways as I have Windows 10 in parallels and bootcamp on my mac, but it works, and honestly is a more pro system nowdays.

Still fixing my iTunes Library after disasterous update to El Capitan

After my disasterous update to El Capitan which tanked my iTunes Library, I am still working on cleaning it up!

I have fixed the music, and re-rated all my tracks, and only lost about 20 tracks out of my 40,000 plus itunes library, but now I am working on video and that is such a mess. So many tracks have been randomly renamed! I have to go through and watch some of them and figure out what they are and rename them!

All I can say is never move your iTunes library to an external Synology as it just ruined my iTunes library completely!

More fun with Frontier Communications, who took over my Verizon Fios service

Already been pretty unhappy with Frontier Communications, who took over FIOS from Verizon in Southern California. They had many features not working, like being able to add your family to video users so they can also watch streaming video (which they seem to have added now, though in a much more difficult way than Verizon did, but it isn’t working right for my mom and she can’t watch Showtime), and the internet just seems less responsive and slower, and their tech support is not nearly as good as Verizon’s. Plus there is the fact that I never got any notification of the change and one day could not longer log into Verizon to see my account.

Well today we have been having weirdness with our home phone, where the people would call and there would be nothing, and if we called the phone never made any sound and never connects. So their phone service seems completely down.

So I decided to contact customer support, but low and behind, while Frontier’s sales site is completely up their account site is completely down.

All I get is Internal Service Error.

So I tried tweeting them on Twitter, but have not heard anything back and see tons of people from all over the country seemingly having problems. And even better they are saying you need to submit to them to try to even get money back for their downtime (which should just be automatic).

So far the service from Frontier has been very substandard. I used to love my FIOS, but now I am so unimpressed with their service!.

More fun with Xmarks and Safari

So I am still having major xmarks issues. On my Mac on El Capitan 10.11.5 I am running Firefox 47.01 and Xmarks 4.3.19, and I am running Safari 9.1.1 and Safari Technology Preview 9.1.2 (which was recently updated, and maybe the issue) and Xmarks for Safari 2.0.19.

After creating my clean bookmarks in Firefox and making a clean backup of them I kept uploading them and overwriting the xmarks servers, but when I uses Xmark for Safari it has been seemingly just wiping out all my Xmarks in both Safari’s, but leaving my completly messed up bookmarks on both my iPhone and iPad. So this time I turned off iCloud Sync for Safari on both iPad and iPhone and deleted the bookmarks then overwrote the Safari bookmarks on my mac with the clean bookmarks from Xmarks, and it left Safari empty of bookmarks once again. Weird. So I let it sit overnight with no bookmarks in Safari on my Mac, iPhone or iPad, but when I woke up that was no longer the case. Once again Safari had messed up bookmarks on my Mac (though nothing on iPhone and iPad sync iCloud is off completely) and the server copy on Xmarks is messed up again too!

Great! So now I have also turned off iCloud on my Mac and have re-installed my good backup bookmarks into Firefox and re-uploaded them to Xmarks, and redownloaded them with Xmarks for Safari (which I have also uninstalled and re-installed) and once again I have no bookmarks in Safari. Maybe having iCloud though on all my devices it will eventually clear the bookmarsk in iCloud which are obviously totally messed up, though eventually I do want it to sync to my iPhone and iPad.

I have contacted Xmarks support to see if they will do anything.

I am thinking after this I may just need to kill Xmarks for Safari and just work from an exported bookmarks from Firefox and put them into Safari, as for sure something is not working with Xmarks!

The Palette Gear Controller

I can’t believe I never heard of the Palette when it was in it’s Kickstarter campaign, but this is a fully customizable controller with analogue controls. It has 4 levels of kit from $199-$899mfor a wooden controller,mand you can also get additional buttons, controllers and sliders which are all controllee by the core untit, amd they have programable lcd lights, so you can remember which button is set for what.

This sounds very cool, and I would love to try one out, though the lack of SpeedGrade control makes it certainly not as impressive, though it does work with basically the rest of the suite.

Jonny Elwyn has an awesome review, which goes heavily into the details.