I’m interested in pens, but as with watches (and hi-fi, ski pants, rain coats, etc.) once I find what seems the best design, I’m done. Until I lose it or it wears out.
I wasn’t a fan of the Parker 25 ballpoint when it was introduced in 1975. Its aggressive modernity, with a flat rectangular clip with a cheap plastic shield (Wikipedia calls it a “tassie”?) replacing the classic Parker arrow-shaped clip, bothered me back then. Over time its future-optimistic brutalist-lite aesthetic grew on me. Also, as I get older I want a fatter barrel, so that shape is perfect. So a decade ago I got a second-hand one as a present and declared victory.
What comes close?
The problem is I lose pens, and the 25 has long been discontinued. I want a pen I can easily replace. I used to rely on the Parker Jotter, with its lovely top and cheap plastic barrel. I got a couple of branded ones from a friend, and lost them. When I went looking, it turns out there’s a 70th anniversary “Originals” version of the Jotter, “a fresh update of an iconic design,” and Pen Boutique had it in navy for only $8 (plus $7 shipping), bizarrely cheap. It didn’t come in a Parker box and the ring around the push-button is a bit scratchy.
(As an aside, the merchant’s generic “thanks for ordering” card looks like an AI-generated image of a dog holding an unrelated pen, and the weird MONT BLAWANC text is probably because in 2023 image AIs were bad at text (and fingers).)
An iconic British American brand, now made in France!?
I was taken aback to read on parkerpen.com “crafted in France,” considering that Parker was an iconic British brand and the Jotter comes in colors like Bond Street Black, Kensington Red, Chelsea Orange, etc. Then I learned from Wikipedia that the Parker Pen Company was founded in the USA in 1888! It’s another American company that in England seemed as British as can be, like Heinz beans and Hoover vacuum cleaners. It turns out that after a management buyout in 1986 the company has bounced around various conglomerates; Gillette owned it, now Newell Rubbermaid’s Sanford Stationery Division owns Parker along with half-a-dozen other famous pen brands. And it closed Parker’s USA and UK factories.
Getting the platonic Parker ballpoint
So I don’t use a pen much and again, I’m not a collector; but for a low price it’s nice to have the best design (for me). I like the Jotter, but it’s narrow. It turns out that since 2018 there has been a wider-bodied Jotter XL, so I ordered the Monochrome Grey stainless version for only $33. It’s an improvement, but it doesn’t feel modern.
I remembered a variant that had a modernized arrow clip; it turns out that’s the Vector model, which Parker USA still makes in stainless steel. There’s a multi-function black/red/pencil Vector from Japan, and Parker’s Indian licensee makes a stainless steel Vector with a gold clip… so I ordered that from India! I like the modernized arrow, but it’s too light and dainty and short.
There’s also the fancier Parker Sonnet with the traditional gold arrow clip ($95) that’s also available in Parker’s famous Ciselé “chiselled squares” pattern for a lot of money ($236). Pen Vibe (sounds NSFW) has a page detailing all the Parker ballpoints, including more India-only variants and the strange Duofold. There are many other web pages that nerd out: all the different refills that fit Parker ballpoints and an extremely detailed table graphing pen widths and centers of gravity. It’s a fun rabbit hole and I admire the dedication of collectors, but in the end I just want one great pen.
Parker Sonnet, another classy but old design
Revive the Parker 25 in 2025!
These all have some appeal and I don’t regret the $70 ($15.26 + $38.48 + $16.27) I spent on stainless steel ballpoint pens, but the Parker 25 is very special. I’m not alone, the fan MoreEngineering has pages dedicated to the Parker 25, including an exhaustive list of every Parker 25 variant. His history page says British industrial designer Sir Kenneth Grange came up with the design, so I wasn’t wrong to associate the pen with 1970s British optimism about design engineering in the space age that brought us the Concorde supersonic airplane, the Intercity 125 high-speed train (which Grange also designed), and some groovy hi-fi equipment. I hope Parker’s current corporate owner will reintroduce the 25 on its 50th anniversary so I can use one without worrying about losing it. Parker should make a fancier version, for example it could replace the blue plastic badge/tassie that wears out with a beautiful lacquered square clip with a gold arrow, similar to the Montblanc “snowcap” shape; it could put something similar on the top that’s nicer than the recessed plain colored plastic dimple. Are you listening, Parker?
MoreEngineering actually tracked down and acquired all these variants of the Parker 25, and many more
Fountain pens
Some day I’ll blog about my fountain pens. (Do people even know what that term means any more?)
Amazon and other online stores are drowning in returns, yet they still do a terrible job of helping customers locate the right product. Our ironing board and wall holder accept an iron at most 5 inches wide, and modern irons have turned into bloated SUVs. Can I filter on irons less than 5 inches wide? No. Is there a smart product comparison page that shows me what I care about? No. Surely an eleventy-billion-parameter AI chatbot trained on Amazon’s data can help me? See the screenshot for how Amazon’s chatbot Rufus fails.
Smartest mind in the shopping galaxy…
Put a ruler on it
Amazon listings have turned into glossy advertisements many screens long that don’t inform. Product size is one of the key things that determines if something will work. So Amazon could and should require sellers to post a picture of the assembled item next to a ruler. That would also help weed out useless sellers that just resell goods, though I guess they would just rip off or hallucinate images with a ruler.
Warranty? what’s that?
And for ^$#! sake, prominently show the warranty offered by each manufacturer. I cannot locate them on Amazon, which violates the intent of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act and FTC rules:
Since 1975, the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act and two rules promulgated by the FTC have governed how and where the terms of consumer product warranties are communicated to consumers. Specifically, manufacturers and sellers of consumer products that include warranties are required to provide consumers with detailed information about the warranty coverage in writing prior to the consumer’s purchase of the product. Warranties must contain certain specified information about the coverage of the warranty in a single, clear, easy-to-read document and the information must be available prior to purchase.
Obviously people will prefer and pay more for the product with a 5-year warranty. (Briggs & Riley luggage and Osprey backpacks FTW with their lifetime warranties.)
Why don’t retailers care?
Writers at The Atlantic have written a series of articles about returns and return policies. As Amanda Mull wrote in 2023:
In the best-case scenario, efforts to limit returns also mean that retailers clean up some of their own bad behavior—by, say, listing products more carefully or providing people with more detail so that they’re more likely to buy stuff they want to keep. … Listing products is labor- and data-intensive work that’s prone to errors, and retailers that rapidly expand their selections or rely on third-party sellers to make their own listings forfeit some of their ability to ensure that what they’re selling is presented truthfully. Bad listings beget bad return rates, and so does prioritizing growth over all else.
Portrait d’Ira P. (1930). Her belly must be overjoyed.
Tamara de Lempicka is melodramatic swagger, backed up by superb shading of colored areas (chiaroscuro?); it reminds me of Georgia O’Keefe’s landscapes yet the complete opposite. Look at the heart shape in the draping of her lover’s dress, it’s phenomenal. https://artondemand.famsf.org/…/artist/tamara+de+lempicka has all her best paintings, but they feel silly when they’re not life-size. Go see the show, it’s excellent with many pure pleasure pictures.
This item from her wall bio cracked me up
Her homelife is stormy; Tadeusz grows intolerant of his wife’s affairs, cocaine use, late nights spent at clubs followed by valerian-induced sleep, and long work sessions listening to Richard Wagner at full volume
I blogged about EV scam company Mullen Automotive and its bat-sh*t insane stock price shenanigans: a single $MULN share that today costs $3.64 was theoretically worth $1.926 billion dollars 12 years ago! There are other joke companies that are still riding the EV wave despite no prospect of ever making a profit, or even 100 vehicles…
Faraday Future fakery
An earlier scam I followed with grim fascination was Faraday Future. Billionaire Chinese entrepreneur Jia Yueting “YT” wants to build his own revolutionary EV, so he hires top-notch talent from BMW and Silicon Valley. Except he only has a billion, and it’s not enough due to spage’s law (#4). Furthermore, the company wasted time, resources, and money on a ridiculous FFZERO1 single-seat concept hypercar, on helping out on YT’s Le’Eco car for the Chinese market, and a billion-dollar gigafactory in Nevada that never happened. The Verge had a series of masterful reports on the chicanery. Jia Yueting eventually filed for personal bankruptcy. Faraday Future did manage to make a prototype of its expensive ($309,000!) fast FF91 SUV, but that’s not impressive because as Elon Musk has repeatedly said and tweeted “Prototypes are easy, production is hard” (also “Production with positive cash flow is extremely hard,” his succinct summary of spage’s law #4).
Faraday Future showed this pointless useless waste of time (how do you even get in?)…
… and eventually made a few of this BIG handsome enough EV for $309,000
But $FFIE is still going! It merged with a SPAC, a sure sign that its stock was overvalued garbage. It has delivered a handful of the FF91s, but only to company friends and dealers. By not making more than a handful of cars, it can keep going for years, just like Mullen.
Nikola (not-Tesla) Motors, the name alone is suspicious
Next up is Nikola Motors
Utah scammer Trevor Milton (“it’s OK to scam non-believers for the greater glory of the Mormon church) pivoted from cheating his partners on a gas-turbine truck to making a hydrogen fuel cell truck. The chicken-and-egg problem with hydrogen is there are no hydrogen fuel stations, so nobody buys the vehicle, so there’s no demand for hydrogen fuel stations. (Unlike BEVs, which enjoyed an immediate market of millions of people who drive short distances and have an electrical socket in their garage.) Trevor Milton solved this with an audacious plan to build 600 truck stops each producing green hydrogen to refuel the Nikola fuel cell semi truck, and Nikola would include the cost of the truck and the fuel and servicing in a fixed-price lease; “Nikola plans to bill customers for its vehicles a flat rate of $0.95/mile over the life of the 7-year, 700,000 mile lease.” Brilliant, audacious, and requiring both billions of dollars and deep engineering skills. Nikola had neither.
because when you’re trying to build a hydrogen truck and its infrastructure, the most important thing is to announce a bunch of CGI renders of lifestyle vehicles.
Nikola built a fuel cell truck prototype and Milton claimed “this thing fully functions and works…this is a real truck”, but it quickly pivoted to a bunch of joke renders of hydrogen lifestyle vehicles from its Powersports division: the WAV watercraft, the NZT off-highway adventure vehicle, and the Reckless “military grade fully-electric tactical OHV.” Then it announced a fuel-cell pickup truck and in September 2020 a huge deal with GM where GM would supply hydrogen fuel cell tech, engineer and build the pickup truck, and get $2 billion in newly-issued $NKLA stock (a great deal for GM who had given up on hydrogen fuel cell cars and hoped to sell its fuel cell tech to anyone with a checkbook). But then Hindenburg Research (great name!) wrote the War & Peace of financial investigative reporting, Nikola: How to Parlay An Ocean of Lies Into a Partnership With the Largest Auto OEM in America, that revealed so much fail:
the Nikola One prototype wasn’t operational
the parts in front of the truck were pilfered from the truck
Nikola claimed proprietary technology but had none. Some of the parts it claimed it built in-house parts were commercial parts with black tape over the manufacturer’s name
Nikola’s video of it driving along a road was filmed on the longest straight continuous downhill road in Utah (they even bent a sign to preserve the illusion the road was flat)
Nikola’s VP of hydrogen production was Trevor’s brother who had previously been paving driveways in Hawaii, and its head of building out the 700 hydrogen station network was formerly manager of a golf club
Nikola had never made a single kg of hydrogen. It didn’t even have solar panels on its facilities.
etc., etc.
There is some justice that Trevor Milton was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to four years in prison (he’s still appealing the sentence). But the people who were in on the con took over.
Nikola managed to convert Iveco’s European S-Way truck into the battery-electric Tre, and unlike most of the zombie EV wannabes, it actually did make hundreds of trucks and “sold” them to dealers (who parked them in front of their premises to look green). Alas, four batteries caught fire, so all the trucks were recalled and parked in the desert. It never did build the hydrogen truck stops or make any hydrogen, instead it has a “HYLA” subsidiary which sets up staffed hydrogen refueling locations by simply parking a truck trailer tank full of hydrogen that it ordered from… someone and having an full-time attendant operate the refueling. It has managed to make dozens of the fuel cell version of the Tre, but for those it has to provide hydrogen, so every truck that actually enters service represents huge losses. Unlike Mullen and Canoo Nikola has substantial cash, so it can probably make a hundred or so more trucks before it runs out of money.
Canoo, SOP lies are standard operating practice
Canoo was founded by executives who fled from Faraday Future’s insanity. They had a neat idea for a pill- (suppository?-) shaped EV on a platform that could easily support a commercial van design, a recreational van, a pickup truck. Not terrible, but almost every EV shares this “skateboard chassis” concept.
Promised (SOP) start of production in 2022, then 2023, then… never. And Canoo just announced a reverse stock split.
No cash no cars
These clown EV companies pretend that they can somehow produce cars despite having pathetically little cash, and suckers believe them. At June 30 2024 Canoo (GOEV) only had $4.5M in cash and cash equivalents, Workhorse only $5.3M, and the king[*] of scam reverse stock split hell (a single MULN share has “lost” $2 billion in value!)Mullen Automotive only $3.5M.
But FFIE takes the cake. Its Q2 2024 press release doesn’t mention cash at all, but I found its 10-Q: it went from having $17M in cash in June 2023 to just $793,000!!
Actual car makers like Rivian and Lucid can survive losing $50,000+ on each car they make because they have billion-dollar cash cushions. Now imagine what FFIE would lose making a $300,000 EV in tiny quantities. If it makes three cars it would immediately go bankrupt.
[*] I lied, one share of Top Ships Inc (TOPS) has lost $1.014 trillion dollars from its theoretical peak pre-splits. So FFIE could keep this scam going for years.
spage’s law #4
EV startups can lose $millions a month promising to enter volume production “soon,” or they can actually start cranking out vehicles and immediately lose $100M+ a quarter. Aptera, Canoo, Einride, ElectraMeccanica, Faraday Future, Mullen (total scammers), Nikola (back to promising HFC production after the battery Tre fiasco), Phoenix Motors, REE, XOS, etc. are all in this zombie state. Lucid and Rivian exited it, but they had $billions in cash. Fisker tried to avoid it by paying Magna to build cars but that didn’t work. RIP Arcimoto, Arrival, Bollinger, Coda (I have a long memory!), Electric Last Mile Solutions, Lightning eMotors, Lightyear, Lordstown Motors, Proterra, Smith Electric, Sono, Volta, Workhorse Group, etc.; all bankrupt or have abandoned electric vehicle manufacturing, and of those I think only Proterra and Smith Electric manufactured hundreds of vehicles.
I care about the environment, so I care about transportation, so I care about EVs (or better yet, not carting your sorry ass and a laptop and/or a few kilos of groceries around in a 2-ton manufactured product), so I care about new car companies that might move us off fossil fuels. But a lot of those car companies have turned into outright stock scams preying on clueless investors hoping to make a fortune on “the next Tesla.” Some day I’ll blog about Faraday Future’s doorless race car debacle, Canoo re-wrapping the same handful of prototypes with different potential customer’s logos, and Nikola (not-Tesla) Motors’ 600-station hydrogen trucking fantasy (update: I did, read “cars: more EV fiascos at Faraday, Nikola, and Canoo“).
Enter Mullen
These EV companies circling the drain pale next to Mullen Automotive, the most extreme and audacious con going. Here is the stock price history for $MULN. It is bat-sh*t insane!
Don’t glaze over! Look at the line starting 3.64 USD. That says the price of one share of Mullen today is $3.64. Then in red, it says that one share has dropped in price from $1.926 billion dollars (for one share!!), a loss of 100%.
The chicanery of reverse stock splits
Except one single share of this junk EV wannabe maker was obviously never worth $2 billion dollars. To remain listed on a “reputable” exchange like the NASDAQ, your stock has to trade for more than a dollar, otherwise it’s a penny stock. So Mullen repeatedly has reverse stock splits. This isn’t Nvidia saying “Our stock price has risen a lot but we want one share to cost around $200, so we’ll turn each share you own into 10 shares; you’re welcome” and after this 10→1 stock split the price of one Nvidia share drops to 1/10 what it was. Instead Mullen says “You thought you owned 500 shares in us each only worth pennies, but ha-ha sucker, now you only own 20 shares” so in theory after this 25→1 reverse stock split each share is worth 25 times more and the share price briefly rises to a few dollars before continuing its decline. Both kinds of stock splits don’t change the size of the slice of the company that you own, but one direction hides the fact that you’re holding a slice of a s**t sandwich.
Printing money shares soon to be worthless
Mullen has done this six times (100 shares→1, 100 shares→1, 9 shares→1, 25 shares→1, 10 shares→1, and the original 10 shares →1 back in 2016). As :100, 1:100. As financial sites like CompaniesMarketCap point out (caution: they get confused and run out of digits), “One MULN share bought prior to May 25th, 2016 would equal to 4.4444444444444E-9 MULN shares today” One share shrank to 4 billionths of a share. But at the same time Mullen is doing reverse splits over and over to keep its stock price up, it also issues millions of new shares to pay its corrupt CEO David Michery money and pay a few bills. Insanely, enough investors fall for this that the scam has continued for 10 years.
Ignoring the stock price graph, how is Mullen Automotive doing? In its financial results for the quarter ending June 2024 it reported that it only has $4M cash in the bank, only made a measly $65,000 in revenue, unsurprisingly lost $91M on that pathetic revenue, yet it paid its CEO $47M in 2023. It keeps cranking out press releases touting orders for its EVs coming in from around the world and new dealers and overseas partners… and it’s all fake. In three months it got paid for one imported Chinese EV van.
spage’s law #4 and Elon Musk’s wisdom
People somehow get caught up in magical thinking. “I like the prototype, as do lots of other people, the company says they have thousands of orders/reservations/letters of intent… just make the cars and the money will roll in.” So why doesn’t Mullen actually make and sell some electric vehicles?
You can let Elon Musk explain it. He’s said and tweeted: “Prototypes are easy, production is hard”, also “Production with positive cash flow is extremely hard.” But people refuse to grasp the import of the latter seven words. As I’ve started posting when people gush over some cool prototype from a struggling EV maker,
spage’s law: EV startups can lose $millions a month promising to enter volume production “soon,” or they can actually start cranking out vehicles and immediately lose $100M+ a quarter. Aptera, Canoo, Einride, ElectraMeccanica, Faraday Future, Mullen (total scammers), Nikola (back to promising HFC production after the battery Tre fiasco), Phoenix Motors, REE, XOS, etc. are all in this zombie state. Lucid and Rivian exited it, but they had $billions in cash. Fisker tried to avoid it by paying Magna to build cars but that didn’t work. RIP Arcimoto, Arrival, Bollinger, Coda (I have a long memory!), Electric Last Mile Solutions, Lightning eMotors, Lightyear, Lordstown Motors, Proterra, Smith Electric, Sono, Volta, Workhorse Group, etc.; all bankrupt or have abandoned electric vehicle manufacturing, and of those I think only Proterra and Smith Electric manufactured hundreds of vehicles.
That “lose $100M” is real cold hard cash, not sequences of numbers in a financial report. You need to actually pay suppliers for the parts, and factory workers to screw them together into a vehicle, and someone to ship the vehicles to customers. If you don’t have cash to write those checks, you go bust. End of story. Yet company fans and the remaining abused stockholders continue to believe these zombie companies will sprout wings and fly: any day now they’ll put thousands of compelling vehicles into the hands of happy customers and start chasing Tesla, or at least Rivian. Nope. Not gonna happen!
Rubber-necking at a train wreck
The Tragic Downfall of Mullen Automotive is a grimly entertaining video on this ridiculous company. A plastic fake Ferrari, an ex-felon hawking a magic box with wires poking out that “increases range 60%!”, repeated failures to ever ship a car then getting sued by the latest Chinese partner that was going to build them, etc. It’s easy to laugh. But real people really did invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into the company because they liked the idea of EVs, and now have one share worth less than a Big Mac.
Edit: Top Ships lost a trillion quadrillion dollars per share
Apparently this insanity isn’t limited to wannabe EV companies. One share in Top Ships, “an international owner and operator of tanker vessels,” has “lost” $500 trillion since inception, and was briefly “worth” $1 quadrillion per share compared with its current stock price of $9.05. Spoiler: the entire company was never worth even a millionth of that much money, let alone a single share. Top Ships had so many reverse stock splits in 2017 they overlap on every historical graph that shows them.
CompaniesMarketCap has a table of its stock splits. If you had one share of Top Ships at the start of March 2008, you would theoretically have 22 quadrillionths of a share now. If your holding in $TOPS back then was equivalent to a kilogram of beef, you would own much less than a single muscle cell now. But the company survives and has even made a profit in two of the last 15 years.
Date
Split
Multiple
Cumulative multiple
2023-09-29
1:12
x0.083333333333333
x2.2045855379189E-14
2022-09-23
1:20
x0.05
x2.6455026455026E-13
2020-08-10
1:25
x0.04
x5.2910052910053E-12
2019-08-22
1:20
x0.05
x1.3227513227513E-10
2018-03-26
1:10
x0.1
x2.6455026455026E-9
2017-10-06
1:2
x0.5
x2.6455026455026E-8
2017-08-03
1:30
x0.033333333333333
x5.2910052910053E-8
2017-06-23
1:15
x0.066666666666667
x1.5873015873016E-6
2017-05-11
1:20
x0.05
x2.3809523809524E-5
2016-02-22
1:10
x0.1
x0.00047619047619048
2014-04-21
1:7
x0.14285714285714
x0.0047619047619048
2011-06-24
1:10
x0.1
x0.033333333333333
2008-03-20
1:3
x0.33333333333333
x0.33333333333333
Edit #2: apparently $CEI/CEIN is another crazy stock.
I blog a lot about music. I want you to be able to play the songs I write about. You probably pay for a music streaming service that has millions of songs on it including the ones I discuss; you might even have a downloaded .mp3 file of the song on your computer. But I can’t put a “Listen to this track” link on a web page 😢😠.
The obvious thing to do is have a standard music intent on web pages: ⏵click to listen to “the song ‘I’m Mandy Fly Me’ from the Japanese 2008 reissue of the 10cc album How Dare You” and the song starts playing in your music system of choice. The same way I can put a tel:+1-212-555-1234 link in a web page and if you click it your smartphone offers to make the telephone call.
But there’s no such thing. The best I can do is embed a YouTube player featuring some rendition of the song that I found on YouTube. In cases where the artist doesn’t have an official presence on YouTube, I’ll link to a popular video uploaded by some random fan, that doesn’t have too pointless a “video” display of album covers and random pictures, and hope that their video remains online.
Considerations
As my example suggests, I might want to feature a very specific instance of the recording. YouTube Music irritatingly seems to pick the most recent version of the track, often from a compilation, that has been remastered (damn loudness war). It would be nice if your music streamer could say “I don’t have the particular version, but I have an edited version from the 1970s Go Pop compilation”.
I need to be able to control the playback, to say “Listen to the harmonies at 1:28 in ‘I’m Mandy, Fly Me’.” (This shades into the issue that videos and web pages are poor multimedia experiences, which I blogged about.)
What’s a suitable ID?
Wikidata Q number for a track?
Wikidata actually has an item for the song “I’m Mandy Fly Me,” Q12317871, which links to the song’s ID on Discogs, Freebase, and MusicBrainz. So maybe just have a play-music:Q12317871 intent and make streaming services look this up when the user’s browser starts it and hands it this URL. But I think Wikidata only covers songs that have an article on some Wikipedia, it doesn’t have items for all of the millions of songs uploaded every year. It seems (see “nerd alert” below) that Wikidata only has items for either 30,000 or 670,000 music tracks, a tiny amount . Maybe Bandcamp could take this on, but not all musicians are on Bandcamp.
ISRC?
Eventually Claude.ai suggested I look at ISRC (International Standard Recording Code). I don’t know how many codes this has, but a search for the song by 10cc returned 41 results, one of which might be the right one So maybe play-music:GBF087500011 is the right link (Wikidata doesn’t have any ISRC for “I’m Mandy Fly Me”).
Discogs or MusicBrainz ID?
Discogs and MusicBrainz also have IDs for lots of tracks. Discogs (a great resource for musician/producer/songwriter credits) seems more for collectors tracking down different physical recordings of a song; Wikidata says “I’m Mandy Fly me”’s Discogs “master ID” is 280200 which brings up 22 different versions of the 45 RPM single. I think MusicBrainz is for fingerprinting different versions of a track; Wikidata says the song’s MusicBrainz “work ID” is 9812b3a5-68f6-4c62-b5a9-72b55c5e062c and it brings up dozens of versions of the song from different compilation albums, with slightly different lengths.
Song information matters
Another benefit of a play-music:songTrackID intent/link is the site(s) that maintain the information for songTrackID independent of a particular streaming platform could also provide all the song credit information that is so sadly lacking when you just stream or click play on a song. If there isn’t a Wikipedia article about the song or album, how do you learn who sang the backing vocals or where it was recorded? (Macy Gray’s version of “Tuesday Heartbreak,” I’m looking at you!) Roon (not a streaming service, but excellent software for organizing and playing back your own digital music files) has fantastic metadata for millions of songs so you can explore other songs featuring the same drummer or produced by the same producer, but this information arguably should go with the song, not be dependent on a third party.
Wikidata has a whole data model for this, for example there’s a producer property and a performer property, as you can see for the track Imagine. Ignore the very dry data-centric presentation on the Wikidata site, and imagine this tuned specifically for information about a song. The data model does propose adding Amazon/Deezer/Melon/Shazam/Spotify/Tidal track IDs for tracks, but I don’t think this has happened yet. Wikidata doesn’t include lyrics, undoubtedly due to murky copyright considerations, but many streaming music players now show them so lyrics can be left to the user’s music player.
Also playlists
After you’ve read my words of wisdom, you might want to access a playlist of all the songs I’ve written about. This is especially important for long pieces or interviews that mention dozens of songs. But the best they can do is embed a Spotify or Apple Music songlist player, ignoring everyone paying for Amazon Music, Deezer, Qobuz, Tidal, YouTube Music, etc. Here’s what NPR does:
sucks to be you if you don’t pay for Spotify or Apple
Here’s the information, you figure out how to locate and play the songs
Third-party solutions abound
I DuckDuckGo’d and found web pages like “14 Best Music Smart Links in 2024” and “Your Ultimate Guide to Music Links: Accessing Key Music Resources.” From the former
Smart music links can be created using a music url generator, such as SoundLink, Linkfire, Linktree, ToneDen, Hypeddit, Soundplate, Songwhip, Feature.fm …, and many more. Users can use these services to create custom landing pages for their music, where they can choose which platforms to include and customize the page’s look and user experience.
The landing page these services provide looks something like this:
No, I want a playlist on my web site that works with the user’s music player
But this is the wrong approach. I don’t want to involve a third-party “music link platform” that provides a separate landing page that figures out links while also tracking my users; I want my reader’s computer to resolve a music intent link to play a song or load a playlist.
Tomahawk (archived site) got some press back in 2013 when it tried to come up with a standard player for music.
Tomahawk is a free multi-source and cross-platform music player. An application that can play not only your local files, but also stream from services like Spotify, Beats, SoundCloud, Google Music, YouTube and many others. You can even connect with your friends’ Tomahawks, share your musical gems or listen along with them. Let the music play!
but the startup went nowhere and the player hasn’t been updated for years. It’s a shame because “In short, given the name of a song and artist, Tomahawk will find the right source, for the right user at the right time” is close to what I want. This is implemented by Tomahawk’s separate resolver code (likewise code that hasn’t been updated for 6 years) which figures out how to locate the track on dozens of music services: “Given a tuple of Artist,Track (or a triple Artist,Album,Track) return a stream URL (and some metadata about it) so that one can play this track.” Great idea. Maybe a triple is better than a single ID for every track, although it doesn’t specify a particular version of the song. The resolver can also open an artist URL, an album URL, or a playlist. Tomahawk also came up with a bookmarklet that “can generate playlists from within web pages. So, if you’re browsing on a site like NPR’s All Songs Considered, and find a song you like, just click the bookmarklet and Tomahawk automatically searches for all the songs listed on the page.” But, again, why involve a third party? I should be able to have a service-independent playlist on my web page, and my reader’s computer should hand it to her chosen music streaming service. And Tomahawk’s demise shows how crazy it is to leave this functionality in the hands of a single third party.
Data Transfer Initiative’s playlist transfer
The Data Transfer Initiative works on policy and technology to empower users to transfer data from one online service to another. One specific example of this is a playlist transfer tool that “allows users of Apple Music and YouTube Music to transfer music streaming playlists between the two services.” Neat, but they don’t seem to be promoting a standard representation of a playlist that I can put into a web page that “just works” in my reader’s music player.
Nerd alert: how many tracks are on Wikidata?
I asked claude.ai to help me count the number of items that are “audio tracks” in Wikidata. It gave me the query to use
SELECT (COUNT(?item) AS ?count) WHERE {
?item wdt:P31 wd:Q7302866.
}
But when dealing with ontologies and knowledge graphs you’re in a maze of has parts and subclasses and such. I asked “Does this include subclasses of a track like a single or a song?” and Claude replied
That’s a great question. The query I provided earlier does not include subclasses of audio tracks. It only counts entities that are directly instances of “audio track” (Q7302866). To include subclasses like singles or songs, we need to modify our query. Let’s create an updated version that includes subclasses.
SELECT DISTINCT ?subclass ?subclassLabel WHERE {
?subclass wdt:P279* wd:Q7302866.
SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}
but that resulted in a list of 43 things related to an audio track, like “instrumental cover,” “bonus track,” “re-recording,” etc. Eventually Claude came up with a query that includes subclasses of “audio track”:
SELECT (COUNT(DISTINCT ?item) AS ?count) WHERE { ?item wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q7302866. }
and this returned count 31056. Then it suggested a query for Q2188189 (musical work):
SELECT (COUNT(DISTINCT ?item) AS ?count) WHERE {
?item wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q2188189.
}
which returned count 674057.Again, I suspect these are mostly items created from Wikipedia articles about significant musical works (I’m Mandy Fly Me has its own article). Considering that the big music streaming services each have over 100 million tracks on them, and 120,000 new tracks are uploaded to them every day (!!), Wikidata currently falls far short as a comprehensive repository of audio track information. It’s nothing that a bulk upload couldn’t fix.
I’m fortunate to have been a minor supporting character to some some ground-breaking software that failed in the marketplace: the PenPoint operating system from GO Corporation, the NeWS network/extensible window system from Sun Microsystems, ingenious forward quadratic texture mapping from Nvidia (when it was struggling), and the Shockwave interactive multimedia platform from Macromedia. The tragedy is these efforts preceded digital cameras, PDFs, .png screenshots, hardware emulators, and other affordances that make it easy to preserve these great software efforts. So the Wikipedia pages I linked above for those software projects are sorely lacking in screenshots of the software.
prototype GO pen computer hardware and EO 440 communicator photo by Ed DevinneyI wrote some of that SDK and made an early version of that class diagram in Aldus FreeHand! photo by Ed Devinney
With permission I added the photo of GO’s “Lombard” prototype 286 pen computer “slate” hardware (as in “after holding it for a while and trying to handprint flawless letters with a stylus, you feel like you’re holding up a solid piece of slate”) to Wikimedia Commons and added it to the English Wikipedia GO Corporation article.
The software must be out there…
All this reminded me of the lack of pictures for this interesting footnote in personal computer history. Here are my notes on where pieces of the software and documentation are available online and where I can contribute (should I ever catch up on my other TODOs…).
The zip file Unpacked which is presumably all the floppies unpacked into a PENPOINT directory, but then that has a PENPOINT.ZIP in it that seems to have the same files but lowercase. The other difference is the top-level PENPOINT has a \_SERVICE directory which has DEBUG versions of the same system services in \SERVICE.
This is probably PenPoint 1.0a, because Unpacked.zip has \PENPOINT\BOOT\ENVIRON.INI with ## Version string used by Preferences Version=PenPoint|Version 1.0a|Copyright c 1992, GO Corporation|All Rights Reserved.
khnsky wrote qemu-penpointos, a step-by-step guide to running PenPoint in QEMU.
N.B. the code for this is in the default “penpoint” branch of https://github.com/khnsky/qemu-penpointos , but the source for the GitHub pages site (and the floppies) is in a separate “gh-pages” branch.egapFeds
khnsky’s gh-pages floppies includes “GOODIES.img” … I think this is probably PPSDK_9.ZIP from Bitsavers
Try to find PenPoint 1.01 SDK floppy set. I have the PenPoint SDK_1_01_PATCH2 file set for this and the floppies for various x86 hardware devices.
Upload the combined set of files to Internet Archive
Upload my floppies of some third-party software for PenPoint to Internet Archive
Try both the DOSBox and emulator image to run PenPoint, make notes on running them. Install the third-party software to it and create a more interesting software image.
Take lots of screenshots, especially of document embedding and the impressive third-party software!
There was a S-Shot accessory tool in the SDK described on p. 184 of the PenPoint Development Tools PDF, and/or there’s surely an easy way in DOSBox and QEMU to take a snapshot of the running software.
YouTube decided to feature a couple of overlong videos about the legendary drum fill in “In the Air Tonight.” (I’m not linking to them, because the same information is in its Wikipedia article, and just because YouTube pushes people to make 20-minute-long videos so it can cram in more advertisements, that is not a good enough reason for video creators to pad their videos. Your time and mine is valuable.)
What a drum fill! 1980s 4evar!
Anyway, a bunch of killjoys said “It’s not even a drum solo, it’s just a drum fill. There are plenty of drummers much better than Phil Collins.” Yes, yes, and yes, but it’s unarguably iconic and legendary. It’s not simply those eleven tom-tom hits, it’s the sound, the build-up in the song, the engineering that make it so.
Beyond the drum fill
That drum fill doesn’t make Phil Collins a great drummer. What ensures his greatness is another song on Face Value, “Behind the Lines.” I knew and loved it for decades as the irrepressibly funky R&B workout with Phil Collins nailing that disco-ish hi-hat plus finger snaps backbeat, with some explosive yet bouncy fills.
Then I learned from a YouTube comment that it’s a remake of a Genesis song off their Duke albume. WTH?? The original is pop-prog-rock: energetic yet lugubrious, and keyboard-centric. Still with great drumming.
The fact that it’s THE SAME DRUMMER makes Phil Collins one of the all-time greats. The fills, the timing, the way in the instrumental bridge of the song he hits a drum just as he closes the hi-hat, they’re different in the two songs, and it’s all masterful.
Which Brand X?
I liked the Genesis singles in the 1980s and “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight” in a beer ad, but I had a bad experience buying the Genesis album on the strength of the singles “That’s All” and the wistfully great “Taking It All Too Hard”; I was disappointed by the other songs, so I never bought Duke and most Genesis albums. Likewise I knew Phil Collins was in the well-reviewed 1970s jazz fusion band Brand X, but I never heard any of the songs on the radio and I certainly wasn’t going to take a chance buying an album.
Now that I can listen to almost any song for free, a few years ago I checked out Brand X’s albums, and some of the drumming is great, a third confident style from Phil Collins. But I can’t remember which songs I liked! They’re instrumentals so there’s nothing to tie them to a title. And when %$#@! YouTube Music shows me Brand X Top Songs or Brand X album tracks, it doesn’t indicate which ones I gave a thumbs up to.
Painfully liked music
When you give a thumbs up to a song on YouTube Music it adds it to your “Liked Music” auto-playlist. So I should be able to download the list (currently 1,872 songs that I liked) and search it for BrandX songs. I just viewed my “Liked Music” playlist and clicked 🡳 download… and the fans on this laptop quickly turned on. YouTube Music seems to be downloading an image for every single song in that list. It’s been going for 25 minutes at 130% of my CPU! I think it’s actually downloading all the songs… somewhere. Eventually Firefox hung and I had to restart it. ??! I guess I’ll never know which Brand X songs I liked.
A Frank Zappa connection
One comment claimed that Chester Thompson’s repeated drum fill on Frank Zappa’s “More Trouble Every Day” on Roxy & Elsewhere was the inspiration for the “In the Air Tonight” fill. It certainly sounds similar but then another commenter said no, Phil Collins reused that drum fill on the live version of the Genesis song “Afterglow” (and the Wikipedia article agrees).
We have electric radiant floor heating and electric domestic hot water (after an expensive failed Rube Goldberg attempt years ago at solar thermal tubes with air-water heat pump backup that I still need to blog about), and an excellent Mitsubishi ductless mini-split to heat or cool most of our second floor. But we still have the bad (un)”natural” gas supply for our gas cooktop and a gas dryer. Let’s kick it to the curb! How hard can it be?
Noble aim, expensive statement
A gas cooktop is so bad!
The harmful effects of gas stoves on health are now undeniable, maybe that will encourage even knuckle-dragging global warming deniers to switch to better induction cooktops. Plus the ease of cleaning a single tempered sheet of glass. If you remodel or build new and hook up a gas supply, you’re crazy.
We tried to get an estimate of how much it would cost to switch to an induction cooktop, and the appliance installers couldn’t even figure out how to remove our Miele gas cooktop, and weren’t sure if we would need an additional 240 Volt 40 amp outlet (we already have an electric oven) and/or an electric panel upgrade. All that on top of the cost of Consumer Reports’ recommended Bosch NIT8660UC induction cooktop.
Occasionally drying clothes
We would have similar problems ditching our gas clothes dryer for an electric or heat pump dryer. (We mostly air dry for a few minutes to collect lint then hang clothes inside, and sometimes point a fan at them to dry quicker, which also cools the house.) We’d need a new electric outlet, the new dryer wouldn’t fit next to our 20-year-old unbreakable Kenmore Elite HE3t washer, and wouldn’t stack on our existing pedestal to provide a shelf in the utility room.
A perfect fit is hard to find
Making a statement while barely making a dent
Much as I’d love to tell PG&E to rip out our gas connection, spending $4,000+ for the satisfaction of telling the (un)”natural” gas company to f*** off, when we use less than 1 therm a month for $5, is a pretty expensive performative statement!
Jhane Barnes‘ legendary shirts are just too beautiful to hide in a closet. I need a glassed-in mobile of shifting shirts that move close and recede. Failing that, after I wear one I leave it out to catch my eye and enjoy. (Now that she has has walked away from her canvas of the human form I don’t want to wear out my preciouses by over-laundering them.)
Insanely great, to touch to feel is to love
These are some of the artist’s more elaborate woven shirts. After seeing from a distance, these textiles are amazing to examine close-up and touch (ask first, her fans are usually happy to share); levels of detail tuned to your distance from the lucky wearer. The variations in the patterns evoke the imperfection in Agnes Martin’s hand-drawn pencil abstractions, but here they arise from being constructed in 3-D in the real world by Japanese master fabric weavers.
detail of Falling Blue by Agnes Martin, 1963
They give delight and hurt not (The Tempest)
These are less elaborate textiles, with no loss of artistry. Again, the closer you look, the more you see. When Cézanne saw the shirt at the bottom of this photo, he said “That’s it, I’m out,” and took up snail racing instead.
Seated Man by Paul Cézanne, 1905-1906
I have 35 more of her artworks. (A fraction of her œuvre, she created four to six collections a year of multiple shirt designs for decades.) Jhane Barnes is simply the greatest abstract geometric artist and although she’s still making great designs for carpeting and signage in textiles and resin, there’s something magic when the art is something you wear about in the world.
