I love Christmas: the lights, the food, the music. The music part can sometimes be fraught, though. There’s so many cheesy and badly done Christmas albums out there. Fortunately my favorite genre, jazz, has actually a really impressive collection of interesting interpretations of Christmas classics.
Over the years I’ve curated a few of my favorites. Thanks to Spotify, one of my favorite services I discovered in 2013, it’s easy to share them with you. Here’s my Xmas Jazz playlist, including my favorite holiday arrangement of all time, Duke Ellington’s version of the Nutcracker Suite.
Remember: It’s okay to play holiday music until at least mid-January.
If you have any favorites you’d like me to add, send them via Spotify messages or in the comments. Merry Christmas everybody!
I have some cool news: On Sunday the day after WordCamp San Francisco we’re going to host a WordPress developer day at the Automattic office on Pier 38. It will be Barcamp-style with no pre-announced schedule, but expect more hardcore geek content like heavy WordPress performance optimization, BuddyPress internals, an intro to Erlang, a guide to secure coding, WordPress-as-CMS discussions, and more. If there’s a topic you’d like to lead start thinking about it now, there should be plenty of room for everyone to connect. (Try to keep things local though, we’re not sure how the internet will hold up.)
The random photos are back. I wrote a quick hack to loop over every photo in every album and read its relevant info into a MySQL table. Now instead of taking a few seconds to get a random photo using the Gallery data stores, it uses a single query and takes a millisecond. Long-time visitors to the site remember that the random image in the corner has always been one of my favorite things about this site, but as the photolog grew to a thousand, two thousand, and then nine thousand images it slowed down more and more. I had to start caching it so it would change once every 15 seconds, then every minute, then every 5 minutes, and then I just manually rotated it for a while. Finally I put the random image out of its misery.
Now it’s fully dynamic, every page you view is completely unique, just like you.
I’ve been dubbed The Publisher by BusinessWeek as one of their “25 Most Influential People on the Web.” Before anyone else writes in that I beat Rupert Murdoch, I think the slideshow is in alphabetical order. 🙂
Been in Ireland since Saturday, and it couldn’t be better. What a lovely country with lovely people. One thing I’ve noticed, at least here in the “real capital” Cork, that “Guinness is for tourists.” Everyone here drinks Murphy’s. Anyway, back to work with Donncha on some WordPress.com goodies.
Just had a spam attack, about 90 comments over the course of two hours I was away from the computer. Not a single one is visible because every one was caught by my filter. How to delete them all? Comments Mass edit mode → Search for IP → Check all → Delete checked. Basically less than five clicks to delete 90 comments. The search could have keyed on any part of the name, email, or comment. It took longer to write this sentence than it took to delete two hours of spammers work. This isn’t a new 1.3 feature, this has been in WordPress for months.
One heterodox recommendation I have for audio and video calls when you’re working in a distributed fashion is not to mute, if you can help it. When you’re speaking to a muted room, it’s eerie and unnatural — you feel alone even if you can see other people’s faces. You lose all of those spontaneous reactions that keep a conversation flowing. If you ask someone a question, or they want to jump in, they have to wait to unmute. I also don’t love the “unmute to raise your hand” behavior, as it lends itself to meetings where people are just waiting their turn to speak instead of truly listening. I’m always hesitant to disagree with Seth Godin, but that’s been my experience.
So what should you do? Use the latest and greatest hardware and software to have the best of both worlds, a fantastic auditory experience for you and your interlocutors and little to no background noise.
The rest of this post I’m going to try out eleven different microphones and headsets, ranging from $35 to $1,000+, and record a short file on each, and intersperse some software tips for people on MacOS. You may want to listen to these samples with good headphones on to really hear the differences. I apologize some are louder than others, I didn’t edit to even out the levels, which Zoom or Skype would do automatically.
My previous top recommendation was the trusty Sennheiser SC 30, in my previous bag posts. It’s cheap and effective, but the cord was too long and it was USB-A. If you read no further, get this one and revolutionize how you sound on Zoom calls. Here’s how it sounds:
You can plug the USB-C into your iPad or Android phone as well and it works great, though the headphones can be a bit quiet on Android. Either of the above will spoil you for making calls, and you won’t want to go back to the old low-fi way of doing things.
In order to have a bit more flexibility I tried out the much more expensive ($134) Sennheiser MB Pro 1. I liked the freedom of wireless Bluetooth, but you can hear that the sound is much worse. Connecting over Bluetooth lowers the quality a ton, and also occasionally means you need to disconnect, reconnect, etc.
All three of the Sennheisers above come in two-ear versions, which I prefer if I’m in a noisy environment, but at home I find the one-ear a bit more comfortable. I got excited about this $70 TaoTronics “Trucker Bluetooth” headset because it had Bluetooth 5.0 so I foolishly assumed it would have better quality, but it sounds really terrible:
But does wireless have to mean terrible quality? The Apple Airpods Pro ($249) are actually pretty decent, and you can easily switch them between your phone and your computer in the audio menu. If you haven’t tried the Pro version, the noise canceling is actually pretty amazing for something so small and light — I jog with them.
And one of the best sounding mics in this entire roundup was the wireless $119 Antlion Audio ModMic Wireless, which sound amazing, but you have to provide your own headphones to attach it to, and the entire thing ends up being fairly bulky and has its own wireless adapter. On the plus side, you can bring your own super-fancy headphones and get amazing audio quality. With certain headphones it did cause a buzz in the ear of the headphone I attached it to.
But hot dang that sounds good. If they made an over-the-ear USB-C version with an earbud, and had the mic be a little smaller, it would be work-from-home nirvana.
I ventured into the gaming headset territory for this SteelSeries Arctis Pro Wireless Gaming Headset, which at first felt totally ridiculous with its own connector box, a million cables, etc, but goshdarnit grew on me. It has this really cool boom mic that extends out, and I think it’s the most comfortable headset I’ve worn for an extended amount of time. I tried it out via its proprietary 2.4ghz wireless connection + USB, and Bluetooth, and unfortunately the results weren’t great, including the Bluetooth being a little garbled. I hope Steelseries does another iteration because they’re so close, it just needs to be USB-C on the headphones, the cables, the everything, and super high quality recording.
Next up is the Shure SM7B Cardioid Dynamic, which is what I usually use to record the Distributed podcast, and costs about $400. This is milky and smooth. (I accidentally called it a Sennheiser in the recording.)
It’s a great sound, but the part of the house where I recorded all of these is pretty noisy with an AC unit on the other side of the wall, and there’s a ton of background noise in this.
Software eats the audio world
Just like photography has been completely transformed by software enhancing images to the point where the top-of-the-line Apple or Samsung smartphone camera is better than all but the very top pro SLR cameras, I think the same thing is going to happen for audio.
None of these clips are processed, which is why some of the volume levels are different, but I thought it would be fun to demo a tool I’ve been recommending to a lot of people.
There’s a $40/year program called Krisp.ai, which I first learned about in 2018 from this awesome post on the Nvidia developer blog, Real-Time Noise Suppression Using Deep Learning. What it does is create a virtual microphone, like a filter that exists between one of your physical inputs and what the software on your computer “hears.” For fun I re-recorded the MKH416 in the exact same place, but filtered through Krisp.ai:
Now the audio quality is not as good, it sounds a bit clipped, but throughout there is no more distracting background hums or noise. Krisp can be a little awkward to use but they’ve made it a lot more user friendly. You could mix Krisp with almost any option here and it would make it sound much better, in fact when I’m in a pinch my favorite go-to is Airpods Pro + Krisp.
With everything, a pro tip on MacOS is to hold Option when you click on the sound icon in your upper right taskbar, and it will let you select both input and output devices. Sound Preferences, linked at the bottom of that menu, are your friend. If a mic is too soft you can boost the input volume in the preferences. To choose a camera or mic in Zoom, click the arrow next to the mute button in the bottom left. In Zoom audio settings, under Advanced, they are starting to expose a number of new options for real-time audio processing.
I’ve always found the Wishlist concept to be cool, especially as Amazon implements it. I love it when the developer of a plugin or software I use links to their Wishlist because then I can buy them something personal, it seems less crude than a Paypal donate link where you’re putting an explicit price on things.
If you click that link, you’ll see in red letters: “To shop from this wishlist, please add items to your cart using this form only! Otherwise, your gifts will not be removed from this wishlist, and the recipient may get duplicates.”
Okay — a little weird, but ThinkGeek’s home-grown shopping cart has always been a little odd, I’ll run with it. I add it to my cart from that form, go to the checkout form and sign in (I’ve spent lots of money with ThinkGeek over the years), and complete the order. (How to Survive a Robot Uprising, for the record.)
So I send an email to their customer support: “I ordered something off someone’s wishlist, order e5886bb4. Everything in the order looks like it’s being shipped to me, not the recipient. Could you confirm it’s going to this guy’s wishlist and not me?” I then linked to the wishlist. Next morning, a response:
Matt,
This order is being shipped to [my address redacted]
United States
That was the address entered when the order was placed.
Thanks,
Tracy G
Customer Service
Not helpful at all… my reply: “Why would I buy something off someone else’s wishlist and then ship it to me? If it can’t be shipped to the person who made the wishlist, then please cancel it.”
No response, and two days later the order ships, to me. This morning, a final response from Tracy:
Mr. Mullenweg,
When the order is placed the order you had the option of entering an alternate ship to address.
Since your order has already shipped we can not change or cancel the order.
Thanks,
Tracy G
Customer Service
Given the next-day shipping I paid extra for, the book should be arriving any day now. The whole point of a wishlist is that I don’t know Kent’s address, nor should I need to. Also the big red sentence on the wishlist page implied to me that Kent would get anything I order from that specific form/page, otherwise why would I need to add it to my cart specifically from that spot?
To Kent, my apologies. If the robot uprising comes before I’m able to get you this book and we both die in the aftermath I’ll buy you a drink.
To ThinkGeek, you’re cooler and smarter than this. Please fix your wishlist functionality.
To everyone else, set up a wishlist on Amazon. It works, and if you link to it from your blog and do nice things people may order from it for you, and there’s nothing nicer than a surprise Amazon box showing up at the door.
Anyone have any favorite tricks for geographically diverse real-time file replication on Linux? It seems like most information is pretty dispersed, and suggestions range from every-30-seconds rsync to putting all files as BLOBs in MySQL and replicating that. There has to be a better way. (The scariest part is Microsoft seems to show up first for most Googles I can think of, but Windows is not an option.)
In this one we cover the GPL and how it benefits WordPress, why WP is under the GPL, commercial themes, how the GPL fosters innovation, creates value, and affects themes and plugins.
I said I would take it down, I never said for how long. Thank you to everyone for taking a little time out with me in celebration of the big day. I was as surprised as everyone else, and watching the reactions come in was pretty interesting. The emails ranged from shocked to congratulatory to incredulous to angry. Thank you to everyone who wrote in. Many people linked to the site being down which should help solidify the #1 position in the eyes of the fickle mistress Google. Thank you all as well.
You’d think it would be cooler here in Houston, with hell freezing over and all, but it is as hot as ever. At the same time I’m told in San Francisco I need to dress in “layers.” I packed all my layers up months ago! Might have some <div>s around though…
I was able to get some of the work I was planning to do on the site done, mostly tweaks to the look and layout of things. I wouldn’t call it a redesign, more like a summer variation on a theme. Many of the changes are very subtle, but in my eyes important. The most obvious change, the sun in the corner, looks nothing like I want it to, so I’m not sure what will happen to that. (If you have any ideas, send them in.) Many other things still need attention, so expect to see occasional breakage and constant tweaking over the next week. I finally closed the comments on the mosaic. So it will stand at 1,017 comments,. The page is still huge, so I’m going to move the comments to a separate page just for that entry. The jazz quotes need some cleaning up, and I’d like to add a little information about each player to each page, including at least a picture. The photolog is being overhauled, and the long-promised classics section is almost done. Finally I promise that photo will be random again, any day now.
It was just a little over a day, but it feels good to be back. Let’s not do that again though. I really missed writing here.
I’m going to be in San Francisco next week, so if you are too I’d love to meet up. Drop me a line.
Rich Brooks on Fast Company asks What’s the Best Blog Platform?. That’s an easy one to answer. There’s still some disagreement over “What’s the best CMS?” but we’re trying to make that one easy to answer, too.
Dear MobileMe / Me.com, I really think you’re swell. I’ve been dreaming dreams of sync since my first Handspring, and you are the best I’ve used. Two things would put you over the top. First, the notes application on the iPhone is handy, but please sync this to a quickie app on Me.com so I can put stuff in and out of notes easily. Second, and this is a stretch, I know you don’t like to-do applications, but I also have an inkling you could do something that would make me stop using paper and pen for to-dos. And synchronize it. With love, Matt.
On the bright side, last week’s hatchet job in Techcrunch generated some great blog posts. For whatever reason they don’t show up as links on Techcrunch’s page, but here’s some of the better ones:
The Grey Area is from Mark Jaquith, a core contributor to WordPress, makes part of the case for why Akismet is a good anti-spam plugin to bundle with WordPress.
I have no problem with people making money from Open Source, in fact I think some of the most successful OS projects have profit motives aligned with user motives.
Related: I have no problem with Pligg being sold. I think it’s better than them selling links in the software.
It is possible to make money while giving your users something they want and provides value rather than something they never asked for. (Think of selling a hosted version vs. selling paid links meant to spam search engines.)
The fact that I made a similar mistake in the past gives me unique perspective into both sides of the issue.
The developer blogroll links in WordPress are nothing like the links being bought and sold for the intention of spamming search engines, but regardless they have been replaced with links to WordPress resources instead of individual contributors.
Duncan said “Money is money, no matter how you make it.” I could not disagree more.
While anyone can do almost anything with WordPress under its license, that doesn’t mean we have an obligation to promote folks who we feel are doing so in a way which is not ethical or in the best long-term interests of the community.
The first year of my thirties was both incredibly challenging and incredibly rewarding. I started a new decade and a new role as CEO at the same time, and at Automattic we grew to over 300 people and raised money for the first time in a while, both of which I couldn’t have predicted five or even two years ago.
My big takeaway from the year was the importance of habits and small actions for accomplishing big things. To be productive I don’t need any fancy setups or project management software, just a well-groomed todo list and a pomodoro timer. This year on my birthday I find myself in Egypt which is an awe-inspiring place in many ways, but most striking to me has been the enduring beauty of craftsmanship with access to only the simplest of tools.
In running, which I started this past summer while in Italy, I was able to slow down to go further and without injury, and ended up putting in about 140 miles which took my fitness to be better than it’s been so far in my adult life. At least half of those miles were with friends and you can’t underestimate the importance of friends in helping you overcome mental blocks. (Also flew 425k miles in 2014, a new record. You can run anywhere and with minimal equipment — it’s a great way to explore a city.)
Reading and writing, two of the activities still most important to me, benefitted from a “just do it” philosophy of putting one foot in front of the other. I published more words on ma.tt than any year since 2007, and I find blogging one of the most rewarding pastimes in my life. It was also a year of not trying to be all business all the time: I started reading fiction regularly after a decade away and letting the topics here drift wherever my interest is at the moment. Last year I talked about balance, and I think this is what drove many of the accomplishments I’m looking back on fondly now.
I’m proud of how 2014 went, and I hope to build on that foundation to be a better person and reach even more ambitious milestones in the year to come. Here’s to slowing down to go further, and tackling big tasks with friends.
I wanted to take a moment to wish everyone a happy, safe, and prosperous new year. 2009 looks like it’s going to be a heckuva year. 🙂 Here’s a quick video clip of Grandmaster Flash from the NYE party last night at The Apartment:
A few months ago I was recently interviewed on KTEH’s program “This is Us!” and the result ended being a nice 5 minute overview of WordPress, something you could show to your Mom to explain the whole thing. Here’s the video (using Youtube’s new beta iframe player):