Monthly Archives: July 2019

Signing Up for Uber Eats in Another Country

Just want to mention my UX ordeal here – I basically had to hack my way through an app to order food.

I’m soggy and rained on (torrential pour today) and don’t want to leave the Airbnb, so I decided to sign up for Uber Eats, which I’ve never used before, and have food delivered. I’m in Mexico City but I live in Portland, Oregon.

I signed up using the web app because I wanna look at food pics on a big screen. I used my Google Voice number because I could validate it via text-to-email (I don’t get reliable phone service here on my network – Ting). Filled the cart with a huge order, entered my credit card, and when I clicked “place order” I got an alert that my phone number is not valid for ordering and I have to edit my account and add a valid phone number. The web app doesn’t let you edit your phone number. So I installed the mobile app and signed in. THAT let me edit my phone number and luck of all luck the validation text went through. I went back to the web app on my PC. Logged out and back in and my phone number showed up. Order was still in my cart. THEN I was able to order some food.

And now I’m getting Uber’s marketing emails in Spanish.

So yeah, sign up for your apps BEFORE you leave the country.

First Impressions of Mexico City

This was my first visit to Mexico. It’s also my first time traveling with a passport. I’ve been to Canada dozens of times – it happens when you grow up in Michigan – but I didn’t have a passport until a few weeks ago.

At the airport, catching a taxi was easy. I prepaid at a counter in the airport and had an uneventful if somewhat traffic-filled journey to Jalapa street in Roma Norte where we were staying (I traveled with my girlfriend Cheri and her daughter). This impression is VERY influenced by the fact that we were staying and hanging out in a gentrified area.

It was a challenge getting international calling and roaming enabled for my phone. Not because it was hard to do – but I had to login to the Ting (my phone service) website and turn it on and wait for it to take effect, using the spotty airport WiFi. From what I had read that was something that should have been on automatically, but I guess it wasn’t. The FAQ wasn’t too clear.

The apartment we were staying in had entry through a courtyard barred by a heavy iron gate, which seems pretty standard based on what I’ve seen so far. It was decorated in Danish Modern style and looked really nice.

View of the AirBnB courtyard.

The most notable thing about the buildings so far is the total difference between inside and outside. The sidewalks are mostly rough and broken, with cracks and dips and unevenness. I think that might be a combination of how earthquake-prone the area is and the fact that the city has sunk 32 feet in the last 60 years due to groundwater pumping (and that’s been accelerating – one article I saw had it dropping 3.2 feet per year).

Mexico City AirBnB Dining Room.

The building facades are mostly stucco or crumbling concrete, usually barred and gated. Graffiti is pretty common, but not much more common than some U.S. cities. Chicago comes to mind.

The city is much more American than I would have expected. Domino’s, Starbucks, Circle K, Chili’s, 7-11, and Krispy Kreme are all familiar. Far more people than I would expect speak English, but people are generally really patient and kind in dealing with my terrible broken Spanish. Many signs are printed in both Spanish and English and it’s not too hard to get by. And the music – I’ve heard more American than Mexican so far, things like John Lennon and MGMT.

It’s also really quiet and peaceful, and not crowded at all, which is not what I expected. From what I hear that’s unique to the Roma and Condesa areas with the rest of the city being a lot louder and busier.

The air is surprisingly clean too. I heard that it was about as polluted and smog-filled as Los Angeles (the only place I’ve ever choked on the air), but it’s much better. Once in a while an old smoke-spewing diesel truck will roll by, but for the most part people drive modern American cars and the traffic doesn’t look notably different than what you’d see in California.

It’s also pretty clean. I’m comparing to Portland, Oregon, but only a couple times have I caught that distinctive sewer smell and not once have I smelled piss. Entire sections of Portland smell that way – old town, for example.

I expected it to be warmer, 80s and humid, but July is the rainy season. It’s cool during the day, starting in the low 60s and reaching the mid-70s, and then it rains starting around 5pm.

There also haven’t been many beggars and no visibly homeless people. By contrast, Portland is stuffed to the gills with hollowed-out derelict drug addicts living on the streets and begging for heroin money. You can’t walk more than half a dozen blocks in PDX without being accosted by someone with a clearly broken brain. And the Portland mayor, Ted Wheeler, is thoroughly incompetent and useless at doing anything to improve the city. He’s too busy making sure the police are protecting out-of-town white supremacists that show up to terrorize residents.

I shouldn’t be surprised that Roma has so many Italian restaurants, but I am. I’ve been here a day and a half and haven’t really eaten any authentic Mexican food. It’s been Italian twice, Venzuelan, and Swiss. That’s not really intentional and I’m sure plenty of local fare will be consumed (and the second half of the trip will be in Tulum).

None of us has had any trouble with sickness, but we’ve also been taking Travelan and being fairly cautious with our consumption (me less so than my wiser companions).

Chapultepec Park is amazing. They have a castle, multiple museums, a great botanical garden, sculptures – it’s huge and beautiful and they have tiny lizards on the trees and super-friendly squirrels that run up and take food right from your hand. Definitely recommend.

WbSrch Offline Again

I put the WbSrch search engine back online in March of 2018.

I spent a lot of time improving it over the 16 months, but it’s the sort of thing that always manages to demand more time and energy. It’s time to stop giving it either — though it’s grown and improved a lot, it’s not something I could ever imagine doing full-time. The money isn’t there and the fun isn’t there anymore.

So I’ve taken it down. This time probably for good.

I’ll be focusing on my music software, electronic music, and acoustic guitar music instead.

Thanks for reading, and if you’re reading this you quite possibly participated in the experiment that was the WbSrch search engine. Thank you.

AlgoRhythmia Now Available for OSX

AlgoRhythmia was my first “complex” desktop app. By complex I mean difficult to build and with a deep interface that could be explored and tinkered with extensively.

It’s a drum machine that can generate random beats. It can also “mutate” existing beats and cause them to change over time.

This is the windows version, but the macOS version looks identical.

It started as a Windows app. It used DirectX, a very Windows-centric audio engine. Because of this, I never tried to build a version for another operating system. Well, now I have. And it is available for OSX.

You can get it here.

DrumPads Released for OSX

DrumPads is an app with 12 virtual drum pads that lets you use the keyboard, mouse, touchscreen, or an external MIDI device to play any of 100 high-quality drum sounds.

DrumPads for Windows. Looks identical on OSX.

It started as a webOS app. It was later ported to Ubuntu and sold via the Ubuntu Store. Then ported to Windows and ended up becoming my most popular app with 330,000 downloads of the free version. I spent some time porting it to OSX a while back, but never had a version in the App Store.

Now I do.

You can get it here.

Proxima Controller Released for macOS via the App Store

I just released my virtual MIDI controller app Proxima Controller for macOS via the App Store. It’s something that I ported to OSX a while ago but never posted to the app store.

It lets you use your mouse, touchscreen, or keyboard keys to play a virtual MIDI controller that can be used to control external devices such as drum machines, synthesizers, or samplers.

You can get it here.

And if you want the Windows version you can get it here.

SpaceTheremin and MIDIPlayer Available for macOS Again

Over the years I’ve struggled mightily with OSX development. It’s just hard if you want to do things your way. It’s far easier if you use Apple’s choice of tools and languages.

Since most of what I’ve worked on for Apple computers has been apps ported from Windows or Linux, there really hasn’t been the option of starting with their way of doing things in mind at the beginning.

Last time I was working on building things for the App Store, I had eight apps I was trying to publish. I only ended up getting two released before I gave up in frustration. Those two were SpaceTheremin and MIDIPlayer.

Well, given my lack of enthusiasm, it’s no surprise that I let my developer subscription lapse. A lot of people wonder what happens when you let your subscription expire but then renew it later (around two years later in my case). Well, your apps disappear from the app store but stay installed wherever people already have them. And when you renew, they magically reappear like they never disappeared without needing to be reviewed again, and any apps in progress will be exactly as you left them.

That’s the case with SpaceTheremin and MIDIPlayer, which are now both available for macOS again.

Here’s SpaceTheremin.

Here’s MIDIPlayer.

I also have some things that have made it farther than before that you should expect to be released in the near future.

Menu Bar with Quit for a wxDialog or wxFrame-based app on OSX

I have some apps that I’ve tried porting to OSX off an on over the years, but some of them have never been quite right.

They’re written with wxWidgets, which is a multiplatform application development toolkit. However, documentation and fine details for macOS specifics is generally lacking.

For instance, I had an ongoing problem with making the “Quit” function in a menu work in a single-dialog application based on the wxDialog class. I originally asked the question on the forums back in 2011:

I have a wxDialog-based application on OSX that shows a single modal dialog window.

My understanding is that a dialog-based app cannot have a menu bar. However, I do get the default system menu bar on the app.

The Cmd-Q option (Quit) shows up on the default system menu bar, but it is grayed out. How can I modify my app to bind to that Cmd-Q option so I can treat it the same as clicking the red button at the top right of my dialog (which exits the app)?

The original post is here.

The answer from Tierra about switching to a wxFrame instead of a wxDialog was a part of the puzzle (thank you!), but the quit item still didn’t work. Once I had a wxFrame I could then attach the default menu items (in the constructor where all the dialog controls are being created):

wxMenu* helpMenu = new wxMenu();
helpMenu->Append(wxID_HELP);
helpMenu->Append(wxID_ABOUT);
wxMenuBar* menuBar = new wxMenuBar();
menuBar->Append( helpMenu, "&Help" );
SetMenuBar(menuBar);

I also had to connect those buttons to my functions in the event table (my dialog class is called wxKeyboard):

EVT_MENU( wxID_EXIT, wxKeyboard::OnExit )
EVT_MENU( wxID_ABOUT, wxKeyboard::OnInfo )
EVT_MENU( wxID_HELP, wxKeyboard::OnHelp )

Once that was done, I had an about menu item, a help menu item, and the quit item magically appeared and worked as intended. In addition, the “About” menu entry appeared under the application menu and not the help menu, but I had to add it to a menu in order for it to show up.

Silica Gel Packet Websites (Plus Favorite Packets)

For ages I’ve run websites that are image galleries of silica gel packets. You could say that I’m a pioneer in the field of silica gel packet collecting. It all started when a coworker gave me a silica gel packet with the word “candy” written on it.

In 2009, I bought the domain do-not-eat.com [Archive.org September 2010]. It was just a simple photo gallery with a dozen or so packets, but it managed to get some organic traffic. I sold the domain for something like $30 and the new owner kept the site up for a year or two.

In 2012, I bought the domain silica-gel.org. I built a Django site and added a bunch of packets, also linked by ink color, language, and manufacturer. I ad a packet now and then as I discover new and different ones.

Silica-Gel.org Website Logo

 

 

 

These are my favorite packets.

This one has a nice transparent blue flower that lets you see the silica gel balls.

This one has a phenomenal amount of text and has nice fonts and imagery.

I like this one just because it is orange. There are a few nice orange packets, especially ones from Topcod.

This is another nice orange packet and I enjoy the skull and crossbones.

That’s it for the highlights of my silica gel packet collection.

If you’d like to download a copy of the silica-gel.org website (including archived images), it’s available as open source on GitHub.

Vintage Live Dr. Kilpatient Recordings

I posted two Dr. Kilpatient live albums recorded in 2001 on YouTube.

The first is And The Key of Love, from the largest live lineup we ever head. With a larger lineup, we evolved from our industrial circus rock sound to more of an electronic funk band.

The second is Fuck Jason Champion, an album titled as a goodbye tribute to me because I was moving to New York City. I came back 4 months later. That place wasn’t my style.

Enjoy this glimpse into the history of Midwestern circus rock.