Some things just go well together. I have friends who like to select just the right wine to go with their meal. Cookies always taste better with milk. And of course a PB&J sandwich is much better than a plain peanut butter sandwich or a plain jam sandwich. Economists are good at coming up with fancy names for obvious concepts, and we call these complementary goods.

Just because I don’t listen to music while I read doesn’t mean this idea can’t be applied to literature and music. Some songs or albums are inspired by good books, and listening to one makes you appreciate the other that much more. Even better is when a musician or band’s work creates a mood that perfectly matches an author’s vision. I’ve recently found the perfect example.

As regular readers of this site know, I am a huge fan of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories. Conan himself is strong, principled, and fun-loving. He does all the things we want to do but are unable to because of either physical, legal, or sometimes moral constraints. To read Conan’s savage adventures is to be immersed in a fantastic and vividly portrayed land of magic and mayhem.

Amon Amarth is the white wine to Conan’s fish. They are a Swedish melodic death metal band whose songs are rich and powerful tales of battles between mortals and gods of the north. The drums, guitars, and vocals are fierce–just like Conan. Listening to their music on headphones is the perfect way to make a winter trip to the grocery store into an epic quest for sustenance. The fact is that words cannot do them justice. I hereby present to you the truly awesome Amon Amarth:

John Gruber loves to talk about how technology improves primarily through a series of small steps and the occasional big jump. While the first iPhone was revolutionary, the iPhone 5s is a far better product due to several incremental improvements, none of which got much attention along the way. In the last year, three small things changed in my home music system that make it better than the last time I wrote about it and a lot better than when I first wrote about it.

1. iTunes Radio

Right after releasing iOS 7, Apple updated it’s Remote app to 4.0. This is the app that lets you control iTunes on your computer from your phone. The main changes to the app were to the user interface–it became “lighter,” with thin fonts and textual buttons, and allowed you to move backwards by grabbing the left side of the screen and swiping. Feature-wise, it wasn’t much different from the previous version. This drove me crazy because iTunes Radio had just been launched and the new Remote app had not yet added support for it.

When iTunes Radio was just a rumor, I wasn’t very interested as it seemed like it would be a simple clone of Pandora. The strange thing is that it did turn out to be a straight-forward clone of Pandora, but I listened to it much more than I ever listened to Pandora. The integration with the iTunes Store is really nice. iTunes Radio keeps track of all the songs I’ve ever listened to, and with one click I can see a song in the iTunes Store, check out the whole album, and maybe even buy it. I also like the stations that are built in–tween pop is pretty good (for the kids, of course) and pop country is well curated too.

Like Pandora, I can pick any artist and iTunes will create a custom radio station for them. Since there’s no Metalcore station built-in, I made a station out of Killswitch Engage, the prototypical metalcore band. Unlike Pandora (as far as I can tell), iTunes Radio lets me “tune” the station to play more or less popular tracks by related artists by choosing “Hits,” “Variety,” or “Discovery” mode. And the pretty uncluttered UI in the iOS app is just what you would expect from Apple–definitely nicer than Pandora’s.

In early December, Apple released Remote 4.1 with support for iTunes Radio and now I can stream it all over the house. Remote won’t show my Radio listening history and it’s laggier than I’d like, but I still use it all the time.

2. My new Pioneer A4

Lots of folks are perfectly happy playing music on their iPhone and sending it to a nearby speaker with either Bluetooth or a dock. My Airplay-from-a-server set up has several advantages that in my mind outweigh the small amount of added complexity and expense. Since my phone is only controlling the music and not playing it, it doesn’t use up any power or need to be close by when the music is playing. That means I can wander to the other side of the house with my phone in my pocket and the music doesn’t come crashing to a halt. The sound quality over Airplay is better than over Bluetooth, and I don’t have to store any big music files on my phone–my whole library just sits on the Mac in my office.

My favorite feature of the set up is being able to stream simultaneously to several speakers around the house, and this just got even better as I’ve added a Pioneer A4 Airplay speaker in the basement. The A4 got an amazingly positive review in the Wirecutter, and was just $200, even though it sounds like it should cost much more. The set up instructions are horrific, but the set up itself was not so bad. I’m a little perplexed about why Pioneer would discontinue it without an obvious replacement product, but they did. If you have one or manage to get your hands on one, I highly recommend holding the input button down for 3 seconds to turn on Quick Start Mode. This changes the start up time from 35 seconds to under 5 seconds, and while they don’t tell you how much extra power it burns standing by, it’s definitely worth it.

3. Simplified configuration for Spotify

Airfoil is the application on my Mac that grabs output from Spotify and sends it to any Airplay destination(s) I choose in the house. When Apple released Mavericks, the new power management features broke Airfoil. The latest version of Airfoil works around this and also bakes in support for remote control, so I don’t need to run a separate Airfoil helper application anymore. Remoteless, the iOS app for controlling Spotify on the Mac also released an update recently that supports Airfoil directly, so I no longer need a separate Airfoil remote app on my phone. The only software programs I need now to play almost any album anywhere in the house are Spotify and Airfoil running on the Mac, and Remoteless on iOS.

More than a year ago I wrote a quick review of what I thought were the three best PDF annotation apps on the iPad. The clear winner for my needs was PDF Expert. Things haven’t changed much since then. Ben Brooks just did a super-comprehensive review over at The Sweet Setup, and the latest version of PDF Expert (5.0) floated to the top. I just upgraded and worked it through its paces grading twenty 15-20 page papers.

All the features PDF Expert had before are still there, and now they all work just a little better. The new annotation toolbar sits on the side taking up very little room. You can have multiple documents open simultaneously in separate tabs. I flipped back and forth between each student’s final paper and their graded midterm draft so I could see if how they incorporated my earlier feedback. The synchronization with Dropbox is more reliable than it was–I used to get the occasional failed sync and 5.0 has been rock solid.

There are lots of new features I haven’t even tried yet. The most intriguing is a review mode that let’s you edit the text and then transforms those edits into MS Word Track Changes style annotations. If I’m working on a document with someone, I would much rather see their changes in a source format (like MS Word) where I can choose to accept or reject the changes. On the other hand, if I’m giving heavy-handed feedback to a student on a draft, this might be just the ticket.

My only complaint about 5.0 is ridiculously minor: when I backspace delete in a text box, the text flickers. That’s it–everything else works great.

For the last several months I’ve done most of my PDF annotation on the Mac. A big screen and a real keyboard are advantages that are hard to beat. PDF Expert 5.0 has brought me back to the iPad. In portrait mode, I can thumb-type fast enough and the new toolbar is very efficient. With my reading glasses and a 12 point font, my iPad’s screen size is fine. It’s nice to be able to spend some productive time on my couch again.

Conan the Snowman, was a fierce barbaric soul,
With a sword of steel and a battle cry, total victory was his goal.

Conan the Snowman, is a fantasy, they say.
He was from far North, but the children know, he raided their village one day.

There must have been some anger in that well-worn blade he held,
For when he swung it round his head, his enemies they were felled.

Oh, Conan, the Snowman, was alive as he could be;
and the children say he could laugh and slay,
any man and his family.

Thumpety thump, thump, thumpety thump, thump,
look at their heads roll.

Thumpety thump, thump, thumpety thump, thump,
vanquishing his foe.

Conan the Snowman, knew the sun was hot that day,
so he said, “Let’s fight, all day and all night, until rain washes the blood away.”

Raging through the village, with his deadly sword in hand,
Running here and there, all around the square, sayin’, “Kill me if you can.”

Then he wandered east to a fearsome beast and met it eye to eye.
and only paused a moment, when we heard him scream out, “Die!”

For Conan, the Snowman, made all his enemies pay,
But he waved goodbye, sayin’ “You better cry,
I’ll be back again some day.”

With the holidays upon us it seems like every geek blogger I read has been recommending family-friendly board games. MacSparky sent me to Fanny Pack Mafia, Marco says Power Grid is really good, and Kottke is sending me to Gautam Narula to improve my chess game. This is all well and good, but these games are a bit much for my 2.5 and 5 year old kids. Maybe that’s why our favorite game hasn’t been on any of these lists.

The rules for Sequence for Kids are simple. The game starts with each player getting three cards and a pile of their own colored chips. The cards have animals on them as does the board which is a 6x7 square grid. A turn consists of playing a card and putting one of your chips on a square that has the same animal that was on the card. Players replenish their hand by picking another card from the deck at the end of their turn. The goal is to get four chips in a row. There are two “magical” animals: The Unicorn card lets a player put their chip on any square while the Dragon card lets a player remove any chip from the board.

Many games for little kids are designed simply to teach rule following and maybe some hand-eye coordination as the player spins a spinner or picks a card and moves their token along a track. Chutes and Ladders and Candyland are the canonical examples of a genre that rots adult brains. Sequence includes enough strategy that kids are challenged, and enough randomness that they have a chance to win against adults.

The set of skills kids can learn (or practice) while playing is surprisingly rich:

• Forward thinking: Players need to make sequences of two before they can make three and then four to win. They need to recognize when their opponent is about to win, and then block them if possible.
• Patience: Players should save their special cards for when they need them for defense or offense.
• Reasoning about uncertainty: I wonder if my opponent has a Lion in their hand and could win next turn? I wonder if I could pick a Lion from the deck for my next turn? Maybe two Lions have already been played and none are left!
• Pattern recognition: Where are my winning opportunities? Four in a row wins whether it is across, down or diagonal.
• Creativity: R thinks the magic animals are the best part of the game and we often make up our own rules to create more. Sometimes the Kangaroo card lets you put down a chip on a Kangaroo and another square next to it. Sometimes the Shark can eat another animal and let you put your own chip in its place. The possibilities are endless.
• Reading: The game even promotes reading in a subtle way. The cards have pictures of the animals for non-readers, words for the animal (e.g. “Penguin”) for learning readers, and even a fun name for the animal (e.g., “Percy”) for actual readers.

Perhaps the best part of the game is that it’s easy to modify the game for players of any age. We often play with cards face up. This makes reasoning about your opponent’s next move a little clearer and has two other big advantages: Little uncoordinated hands don’t have to try to hold three cards at once, and it’s a lot easier to teach strategy when you can see what cards your kid is holding. I’ve also played a fairly rule-free version of the game with one and two year-olds where we just deal out cards and place chips on the board. These kids love the animals and the bright colors of the chips and even like matching the animals to the squares on the board.

Sequence for Kids really is fun for the whole family!

One of the best things about having a second child is getting to do all your favorite little kid things again.¹ Near the top of that list for me is re-reading our best picture books, and L, at 2.5 years old is just now appreciating the stories as well as the pictures. These five books have been particularly popular over the last few weeks:

• Uncle Elephant (written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel) Like all of Arnold Lobel’s books, the illustrations are classic, the stories are clever, and the messages are deep. A boy loses his parents at the beginning and he bonds with his Uncle who takes care of him until his parents come back. Among other things, they walk in the garden, sing songs, and grant wishes to spiders. Uncle Elephant is the grandfather everyone wanted when they were growing up. We’ve also been enjoying Lobel’s Frog and Toad stories.

• Pup and Hound Catch a Thief (written by Susan Hood, illustrated by Linda Hendry) This criminally under-rated series of books is published by Kids Can Press where it gets lost in a slew of mediocre tales of poorly behaved cats (Mittens) and dogs (Sam). The rhymes and artwork are cute, and the stories have twists at the end that both L and I can appreciate.

• Lyle Walks the Dogs (written by Bernard Waber, illustrated by Paulis Waber) Not to be confused with Zack’s Alligator Bridget, Lyle the Crocodile is as sweet as Bridget is sassy. In this counting book Lyle builds a business through competent hard work and positive word of mouth.

• Curious George Rides a Bike (written and illustrated by H.A. Rey) My personal favorite George book when I was a kid, I’m happy to report that L loves it too, even if she does admonish George for not wearing a helmet.

• There Are Cats in This Book (written and illustrated by Viviane Schwarz) I’m cheating here since we just discovered this book a month ago at the library, but it’s just so good and so perfect for the two year old age group that I had to include it. It follows in the interactive mode of Herve Tullet’s Press Here asking the reader to do things (like toss a ball of yarn or look inside a box) and reacting to them. The only potential downside is that the pop-up features are not totally robust, but isn’t that what Scotch tape is for? I just realized there’s a well-reviewed sequel (There are no cats in this book) and can’t wait to check that out too!

(Note: You might want to read my other posts about photo management for context first.)

I am extremely happy to report some actual forward progress in this episode of My Photo Management Quest. The short story is that all my photos now live on Dropbox in a nice hieararchical folder structure where I can browse and share them from any of my computers or iOS devices. My new system isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good and I think it’s a solid foundation for the future.

Moving from iPhoto to Dropbox

iPhoto is fundamentally an application for doing light editing and organization of photos on a single computer. Any new system that involves access from multiple different devices is going to require getting your photos out of iPhoto’s black box. My first step was to do what Federico Vittici at MacStories did through a combination of PhoShare and Hazel. The process created a set of year folders, and in each of those, a set of month folders that contain all my photos named and sorted by date. I also followed his lead and created a Hazel rule to move files from the Camera Uploads folder (where Dropbox puts my just-taken photos and videos) into my new Photos hierarchy. That means I need do absolutely nothing after I click my iPhone’s shutter button for my photos to be organized and accessible (by me) forever in the cloud. What a breath of fresh air compared to Apple’s Photo Stream!

My photos currently take up about 20GB, and Dropbox charges $99 per 100GB. Give how rock solid Dropbox is and how many iOS apps support it, I think that’s a great deal.

Further Organization and Editing on the Mac

I’ve been manually adding a bit more organization in two ways. First, I’ve split some months into separate events. For example, I created a “2013-10-halloween” folder (inside the “2013” folder) that contains the requisite costume and pumpkin photos. These photos no longer live in the generic “2013-10” folder. I’ve also created a few special folders (e.g., “yummy-things”) outside the date-based hierarchy that have copies of some pictures in the date-based hierarchy. That way I can find those pictures by date or subject. I can also easily share these folders (read-only) with friends and family using Dropbox shared links.

The best way I’ve found so far to actually create these new folders is Coverflow view in Finder. It’s buggy in Mavericks and it doesn’t let me see enough at the same time, but it works. I’m sure there are better ways (maybe Unbound for Mac when it’s more stable, maybe Photo+ by Arcsoft, maybe Lyn) but I haven’t settled on one yet.

One of the biggest advantages of having my photos live in the file system is that I’m not locked into iPhoto for editing–I can now use whatever app I want. Pixelmator is nice and I’m sure I’ll eventually settle on an even lighter weight app for easy stuff (e.g., cropping/red-eye reduction/brightness adjustment).

Browsing on iOS

Now that my photos live in Dropbox, I have at least three choices of iOS apps to browse them. The Dropbox app’s photo tab lets me scroll through thumbnails of all my photos sorted by date and download full resolution versions as needed. I can also browse the folder structure through the standard file browing UI and grab photos, though I don’t get a pretty set of big thumbnails. Playing videos and sharing links to files and folders is easy.

Heliog is fast and pretty–it preserves my folder hierarchy and shows nice screens of thumbnails. I can share folders or sets of photos and easily move photos between folders. The downsides are that it doesn’t play video and I can’t delete photos from the photo view (have to be in the album view). These both seem easily fixable.

Right now, I think Unbound is the best of the bunch. Unlike Heliog, it plays videos and let’s me delete photos from the photo view. Like Heliog, sharing Dropbox links is easy and browsing is fast–you can even make the app cache folders for quicker (or offline) access. Unbound will show you all the photo’s EXIF data and even show where a photo was taken on a map. Moving pictures between folders is easy, but I don’t think it’s possible to copy pictures to other albums. It shows me all my folders, but flattens the hierarchy–i.e., my month folders are no longer grouped by year. The ordering is correct, so this isn’t actually so bad.

The Future

The next step for my photo management system is to integrate the rest of our family photos. Right now they’re scattered across several computers, folders and hard drives with tons of duplicates. Dropping these photos into my Camera Uploads folder will immediately sort them into my master folder structure, but it won’t remove duplicates. There are lots of apps out there that promise to remove duplicates, but I’m scared to death that they’ll remove too much and the one app I tried (Photos Duplicate Cleaner) didn’t come close to catching everything.

In the early days of the internet, companies like Yahoo tried organizing the web by manually creating big hiearchical lists of sites. Now we just Google for what we want and leave it to racks of servers and fancy algorithms to index it. The same thing has happened to mail. I used to carefully file all my mail into topic-specific folders, but now I just dump it all into one archive folder and rely on search when I need to find something. Photos will eventually be handled the same way. People won’t have to spend gobs of time dividing stacks of photos into events or tagging photos with their friends’ names–that’s what EXIF data and face recognition are for. Everpix (may they rest in peace) was moving in this direction and I’ve heard great things about what Google+ is doing with pictures.

I am very excited to try some more cutting edge services as they roll out. With our photos safely backed up and accessible on Dropbox, I won’t have to worry about being locked into a deadend or that the service will mess up my photos.¹ I’ll have the best of both worlds.

This post has moved to Teach Better.

Great products get reviewed and talked about, but great features of good products often fly under the radar. They can seem obvious in hindsight or just have a niche group that really appreciates them. Here are three of my favorites that deserve more notice.

1. Control Center

Hands down my favorite new feature of iOS 7, the Control Center removes lots of little dead moments from my life. Every night I lock my phone into portrait mode when I get in bed. I use the flashlight at least twice a day. I select an Airplay destination or use the music controls about twice a day. And in the morning I free up the phone’s orientation again. Since I don’t even have to unlock the phone to do any of this, it saves me at least five seconds each time. That adds up to a minimum of 30 seconds a day and three whole hours a year.

2. Whispersync

After the kids go to sleep and I’m cleaning the kitchen or putting toys away, I like to listen to audiobooks. When it’s particularly gripping, I continue to read the book on my phone in bed using the Kindle app. Whispersync means I automatically pick up right where I left off on the audio. The next night when I start listening again, the Audible app jumps to where I was in the e-book. I can’t imagine too many people take advantage of this, but I love it. 

3. Sneeze Shield

Maybe our bedroom is dusty. Maybe I have allergies. Maybe I get a lot of low-grade colds. I don’t know why I sneeze a few times almost every morning when I wake up, but I do. And with two little kids, we all get our share of normal-grade colds. This means we go through a lot of tissues. Sneeze Shield means the tissue doesn’t fall apart when a grown up blows into it. I don’t miss handfuls of wet snot at all.

(Note: You might want to read my first photo management rant and Part 1 for context.)

Ever since Everpix went belly up, photo management has been a common topic on the blogs I read and the podcasts I listen to. The current consensus favorite is Loom and when I read their feature list I was pretty excited. They seemlessly sync your iOS Camera Roll and your Mac’s iPhoto Library with the cloud. Unlike Everpix, they store original files instead of lossy compressed versions. Unlike Everpix and Adobe Revel, they store photos AND videos. Their web app lets you browse your photo collection from anywhere. I loved that you could create and manage albums of photos from anywhere. Even their pricing ($40/yr for 50GB and $99/yr for 255GB) was reasonable.

I signed up for the service, and while it took longer than I thought it should, the iOS app eventually pushed my 300 photo Camera Roll up to the cloud. After enjoyably browsing this little collection on my phone, iPad, and Mac (using the web app), I decided to pony up for a month of 255GB of storage and try uploading my whole iPhoto library. I won’t bore you with the details, but after six days of synchronization hangs, duplicate photos, and unanswered support email, I gave up.

It’s possible that the problem was just me as I haven’t found anyone else complaining about Loom synchronization on the web. My internet connection’s upload speed is not that great–just 1.5 Mbps–but this is the first time I’ve had a product give me trouble. Dropbox has been successfully syncing more than 50 GB of files for about three years now and I have used BackBlaze to successfully replicate about a terabyte of data.

I found the whole experience rather depressing. The service even on paper wasn’t perfect. They don’t remove duplicate photos. They don’t offer even rudimentary editing tools. They won’t stream videos through any of their apps. They won’t synchronize folders on Windows machines with the cloud. That said, their feature set was above my bar and they seemed like they were moving in the right direction. This time software quality was the show stopper.

Sigh. The quest continues.