In which Jeff recounts another thrilling tale of techology.
In the beginning there was a sound bar. It was fed from the TV, and sounded nice. Nice enough that to acquire a full-on Echo for the place seemed excessive.
At this time, the Echo Dot was brand new on the scene. The first batch had run out, and models were going on eBay for $200. But I held out and eventually picked one up when they came back in stock.
The Echo + Soundbar combo served to fill the apartment – and later, house – with great Pandora music. However, it suffered from two major drawbacks. With the sound bar turning itself off after a period of inactivity and the Dot plugged in via aux jack, Alexa was unable to answer any spontaneous queries; she could only be heard if I went to the trouble of turning on the sound bar and setting it to the right input.
Which is the second of the two drawbacks. The embedded software engineers and the user experience people at Vizio didn’t communicate when it came to switching user input. It takes a bit under a second for the on-board logic to change between inputs. I can buy that, it’s probably some complex circuitry. But they decided to perform this expensive input-switching after every press of the ‘Input’ button. Couple this with the fact that the TV and aux inputs are spaced four inputs apart, and toss in a sprinkle of glitchiness, and you’ve got yourself a very time-consuming input-switching ceremony that needs to be performed nearly every time you wanna put on Pandora. They really should’ve let the user rapidly tap the ‘Input’ button many times in succession, and only invoke the expensive input-switch logic after a fixed duration of inactivity.
So, I lived with it, until a couple months ago when a fellow Googler sent out feelers for anyone who’d be interested in taking his first-generation Echo off his hands for a cool $10. I figured what the hey, it’s cheap. And so it went in my bedroom. It was nice to finally have an Echo that could respond on-demand. And it gave me verbal control of the lights from my bed, which was nice.
A couple weeks ago I decided to spring for a third Echo on a post Mother’s Day sale, this time a 3rd-gen Dot. I figured it could go in my kitchen, so I wouldn’t have to yell to the living room to control lights. For a time it was good. Until I figured, hey, I really like being able to talk directly with these things. And the bedroom Echo is perfectly fine sound-quality-wise.
So here’s what I’ll do. I’ll move the bedroom Echo down to the living room and let it stand free, while I detach the old Dot from the sound bar and put it in the bedroom. With the Echo standing free it would be able to fill the living room with music, without me having to play the silly change-the-input game on the sound bar. And I didn’t really need that good a speaker in my bedroom. Plus, this would let me use an Echo feature that syncs up music playback between all Echoes in a house. Couldn’t use that previously since the sound bar introduced an intolerable delay.
Excising the sound bar Dot was a project, since I’d so tightly coupled its wiring in with the snake den behind the TV. But eventually it came free. The swap was made.
The former sound bar Dot’s speaker turned out to be really tinny, past my tolerance level. I’d never heard how it performed on its own before. I’d also severely overestimated the quality of the free-standing Echo compared to what the sound bar could produce. Finally, the synchronized-playback feature was not all that cool, as it turned out.
I really did not feel like going back behind the TV to reunite the older Dot with the sound bar. So I put the free-standing Echo back in my bedroom, sent the older Dot to the kitchen, and put the 3rd-gen kitchen Dot in the living room corner. I then resorted to pairing the 3rd-gen Dot with the sound bar over Bluetooth.
And an interesting setup unfolded. It turns out that the sound bar can, with a single button press, pair with a Bluetooth device; and with another button press, go back to its prior input. Thus the lengthy input-change dance is no more. And now that the living room Dot is not plugged into anything via aux cable, it can answer aloud even if the sound bar isn’t on. So I can get Pandora playing on the Dot, then with a single button press move playback over to the sound bar to really up the quality. As much as I loathe using wireless signals when hard-lines do the trick, this was a groovy setup.
And having the tinny older Dot in the kitchen is just fine. I only really want it there so there’s someone to hear me when I ask the lights to turn on, without having to yell across the house.
The only downside right now is that if I ask the living room Dot a question, the kitchen Dot will answer ~30% of the time. I could fix this by changing the kitchen Dot’s wake word to something other than “computer”, but that would introduce a mental load that I’m not sure is worth it yet. Time will tell.
Our Logan friends eventually made their farewell, but not before a group date to a local arcade place.
Sunday before last was a special Third Sunday, in that the surrounding wards were sending their graduating high schoolers to our ward for exposure to the YSA way. It was my job to arrange enough Third Sunday teachers to cover the increased load. We’d need about 12. I spaced until Friday night, and we ended up with nine. Hayden was one of them, and he was already on the hook for speaking that Sunday (which was a quite nice talk, well done), so major kudos to him. Even with stuffing the tables well past their normal capacity I had to take two tables’ worth into another room to teach them all together.
But it all seemed to go well. The month’s food theme was “favorite family dinners”, so we got lots and lots of carbs.
On Friday I met up with Uncle Dave and Aunt Mary Ann for a Google tour, after which we visited my place and then all drove with Hayden up to James and Karen’s place, where Kirsten was staying with her kids. It was great to hang with everyone (and have everyone hanging off me and Hayden).
Got trounced in a couple rounds of Scum before we had to make our exit and head back to Kirkland.
On Saturday Hayden and I had planned on mountain biking, but unfortunately the weather turned sour. So it was an inside day. We did end up installing a smart switch and smart outlet in Hayden’s room, so his corner lamp is now switched – a corner lamp I was able to pick up from another Googler last week.
Having thoroughly introduced Hayden into my solitary life style, it was time to shake things up with a proper Game Night. So that evening I had a bunch of ward friends over to play a round of Conspiracy. My old roommates would be proud to hear how well the game holds up. Finished the night off with the Name Game, What’s In Your Milk, Psychology, and Smurf, for that Provo vibe.
The next evening we had a few other friends over for a smaller-scale game night to play Tales of the Arabian Nights. I believe I brought this one home one time. I think people enjoyed it then; it made a good impression here too.
Monday’s weather was much nicer than Saturday’s, so we celebrated Memorial Day morning with a trip to Tiger Mountain. And I learned something about myself, which is that if I ever become obscenely rich, I’ll have my people find a nice mountain biking hill and lug massive speakers throughout the forest, all along the trail. I’ll then have them track my position and play this Survivor remix, from different areas based on my current location.
But Hayden and I just had to make do with the sounds of nature over our own haggard breath.
After the trail we grabbed some Subway, cleaned up at our place, then headed out with some friends to Folk Life Festival. This was the third summer I’d been here and I hadn’t yet gone, so it was great to finally partake.
Having had enough of the place, we caught some Lime bikes back to the bus stop and headed on home.
We finished off the holiday watching How To Train Your Dragon 3, which I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. Unfortunately it’s got some pretty weird plot holes, so HTTYD 2 remains my favorite of the trilogy.
Tuesday night I went out with friends to see the new Aladdin movie. There were some scenes with terribly wooden performances, but overall it was very good fun. Will Smith as the Genie had been lambasted online from the trailers, but he was honestly the best part of the movie.
Wednesday night I traveled to California to attend a “deep dive day” on the project I’ve been heading up. When it came to select a rental car this time around, I was greeted by a no-nonsense character, and I knew the sports car streak was broken. Thus I found myself driving around a quite-nice-but-not-very-sporty Toyota Camry. I wouldn’t mind picking something like that out as a daily driver, actually. However, #honda4lyfe
This was one of my shorter visits; in Wednesday night, back out Thursday night. The most eventful occurrence was when I was lying in my hotel bed and scratched an itch on my chest, only to inspect my fingers and see a small spider abdomen, separated from some small spider legs. Ew ew ew.
Did the presentation, flew back, then used the last of my travel funds to pick up a pizza for me and Hayden. I’ll let Hayden tell the tale of the scene when I arrived back home. It was legendary.