This year my husband an I designed our Halloween stuff around being Pandemic Proof! Children are fun to scare, but they're also covered in germs and diseases. We needed a way to keep them far away from us!
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I feel so bad for all of the kids that have been cooped up for the whole year. I have ADHD, and bored very easily as a child, so I can't imagine how unbearable this must be. We weren't about to let the pandemic stop us from terrifying our neighbor's kids! It's the reason for the season!
If you search for Tim Webb on the site you get very few relevant results, despite my name appearing on every single post in the by-line. I've been doing some behind the scenes tweaking of the site's search function and it is kind of weird that none of my videos are results when you search for my name.
In-between coding and weird search algorithm experiments, I took some time to play with Skaka this week!
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Klevgränd's new Shaked Percussion app Skaka is not quite a percussion app. I try to respect it in its native habitat, before taking it off into some weird directions! I do this with the help of Yuri Turov's new not quite a reverb app, Velvet Machine.
If you've enjoyed this series please consider supporting it by becoming a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/discchord If you'd prefer to help on a monthly basis, instead of per video, there is a monthly Patreon campaign: https://www.patreon.com/discchord_com Or you can support me on Timmeon if you don't like Patreon: https://discchord.com/supporters#timmeon (Patrons of these campaigns get the same benefits, including Ad Free viewing on the site!)
In a move that is sure to be greeted rationally, Apple is all-in on 5G. Today's Apple event included the phrase more frequently than the number of people who can actually use 5G in their area. In addition to its well-documented implications for the downfall of humanity, 5G includes some real limitations many people may be unaware of and Apple didn't mention.
Even if 5G is available in your area, there is a big difference between 5G and the ultrawide-band that Apple and Verizon were promoting today. Regular 5G low-band is only marginally faster than 4G/LTE. In fact, in a recent test AT&T and T-Mobile users had slower speeds on 5G than 4G.
Today's event hyped up the faster millimeter Wave (mmWave) 5G ultra-band signal. They failed to mention that it has an absurdly limited range; requiring line-of-sight to an enabled tower, without any obstructions. mmWave cannot even penetrate glass. This is why the only example they showed of it working was at a stadium! If you're outside in an entirely open field you'll still only be able to experience 5G mmWave if you're within 500 meters of a tower. There's also a 5G mid-band that offers wider coverage, and faster than 4G speeds, but is unlikely to penetrate inside of buildings.
This technology is intended to be a replacement to your home Internet, with a fixed antenna on your roof. Putting it in a phone is a nearly pointless exercise in technological brinksmanship! The amount of attention given to it in this event is an embarrassing example of how meaningless marketing is dictating the path at Apple. They did have some impressive technology to show off. Instead of focusing on their 5nm manufacturing, or insanely powerful Neural Engine, or the fact that this is a phone with 6 CPUs, they tried to cram in a 5G mention wherever they could. Even the fucking camera demo included 5G nonsense!
Well if Apple doesn't think any that's worth exploring, I guess I won't either. This 5G year's 5G iPhones 5G include 5G a mini 5G iPhone, with 5G the 5G same 5G specs 5G as 5G iPhone 5G 12 5G under 5G a 5G smaller 5G 5.4" 5G screen. The iPhone 12 mini and Pros can be preordered on November 6th, and they will ship out starting on the 13th. The iPhone 12 will be shipping on the 23rd of October, with preorders starting this Friday.
And one more thing... all that 5G tech costs an extra $100 over last year's models. They did a good job of obscuring that in this graphic. The mini iPhone is $699, the regular iPhone 12 starts at $800!
I love apeSoft but the last two apps did not excite me. I reported Accordion Vintage as a crime against humanity, and frankly ignored Electric Vintage. I just don't like Accordions or Fender Rhodes. I was planning on doing something with an effects app this week and needed a sound source. I saw Electric Vintage in my unused app list and decided to give it a shot. I was completely blown away.
Electric Vintage is capable of so much more than just a boring emulation of the classic Rhodes!
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This is an unexpected Let's Play for me, because I hate the Fender Rhodes Piano sound. Fortunately, and surprisingly, apeSoft's Electric Vintage lets us go far beyond the classic into insane new territory!
If you've enjoyed this series please consider supporting it by becoming a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/discchord If you'd prefer to help on a monthly basis, instead of per video, there is a monthly Patreon campaign: https://www.patreon.com/discchord_com Or you can support me on Timmeon if you don't like Patreon: https://discchord.com/supporters#timmeon (Patrons of these campaigns get the same benefits, including Ad Free viewing on the site!)
Today was Apple's second post-apocalypse keynote delivered from their billionaire-bugout spaceship. I started watching this one with low expectations for anything interesting. Those expectations were shattered at the end of the presentation when they made the 2020 iPad Pro, released six-months ago, obsolete.
Apple Watch 6
The 6th Apple watch was announced today. This is the 6th time Apple has tried to sell a watch to a world that stopped wearing watches decades ago. Undaunted by the purposelessness of the device, Apple continues to push faster processing into this year's model.
Instead of presenting a "killer app", or any reason at all for these things to be a thing, Apple tried to position this as a fitness tool. The watch will be pivotal to tracking your activity with a new subscription service, Fitness+.
Fitness is important, so I won't give them too much shit for this. I will say though that an iPad or iPhone is a much better investment if you're looking for something to keep you entertained doing boring activities like treadmills or stationary bikes. Play a game that keeps your mind occupied and you can keep going for ages. This has been my own trick for years, and I'm still hitting the treadmill every single day; often 2-3 times per day.
iPad Air 4
Today was the day my shiny iPad Air 3 was scheduled for obsolescence. This is something every customer has to come to terms with and accept. Which I did. No one was prepared for the iPad Pro from just six-months ago to also become obsolete today.
The new iPad Air 4 is only 10.9", so the iPad Pro still has 0.1" on it and supports Face ID. Beyond that the new iPad Air 4 is crushing the Pro on specs. The new iPad Air even gets all the Pro features: USB-C, Apple Pencil 2, and even Smart Keyboard support.
The iPad Pro released in March sports an A12Z processor, which I noted was an incremental improvement from the previous Pro's A12X. The new iPad Air comes with an A14 manufactured at 5nm. This lets them pack a hell of a lot of transistors into a tiny, energy efficient, space. The A12Z includes 8 CPU cores, but only 4 of those are full-tier CPUs, while the other half are "efficient cores" according to Apple's marketing department. The A14 includes 2 high-performance CPUs, and 4 efficient cores.
We don't yet know the speed of the CPUs in the A14. They could be faster than the A12Z thanks to the 5nm manufacturing process. Perhaps the 2 extra CPUs in the iPad Pro are superior to the A14's offerings, but calculating the price:performance ratio has gotten complicated. The new Air is $100 more than the previous model. The price gap between a top-tier 256GB iPad Air and a bottom-tier 128GB iPad Pro is now only $50!
The new iPad Air 4 arrives next month in a variety of color options, as $600 64GB and $750 256GB models.
Correction: This article listed the 64GB iPad Air 4 as $700. Thanks to zaubrer for pointing out this typo.
The Verge condensed the whole presentation down to just 12 minutes!
