Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Evanston: in 60; article added; AirPod Pros; once too many

Why I Sail’ has been added to the articles page.

http://inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/Why_I_sail.html

I also added to the page of photos of the old sailor the image now on the home page of the site.

http://inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/webb.html

 In doing so I glanced at the other photos, including the only one extant of me taken before 1974,  It was copied by someone else from our high school yearbook.  So from this



To this in sixty years.  Or by other measurement, one butterfly cough.



The white things hanging from my ears are AirPod Pros which arrived a few days ago and are called by some revolutionary.

I kept coming across superlative reviews of them and in my ongoing quest to make things ever simpler and smaller I ordered some.  I am impressed and pleased.

The Pros are new and differ from the original AirPods in several ways.  They are said to have better sound.  Not having ever used the originals, I personally cannot say, but the sound is very good.  Remember again that this is coming from an old man who needs hearing aids, but it is also the almost universal opinion of tech reviewers.  The stems on the Pros are shorter.  And perhaps most significantly the Pros have noise reduction.

Here is a link to a useful review.


With the latest IOS update you can run a test to determine if the pods are seated properly and you can switch noise reduction and what Apple calls ‘transparency’ on and off.  You can also do this by squeezing the pod stems, but I find this awkward.

AirPod Pros cost $249.  That is not cheap, but it is cheap when compared to my hearing aids which cost ten times more.  In switching from my hearing aids to the AirPod Pros and back again the thought came to me that in the near future Apple will add outside sound amplification to the AirPod Pros and take over the hearing aid industry.  That will be fine with me.


Carol and I finished watching THE IRISHMAN last evening.  With a length of three and a half hours,  the film warrants an intermission.

THE IRISHMAN is well done, acting—especially Joe Pesci, writing, directing; but both Carol and I came away with the sense that this was one trip to the well too many.  Scorsese’s GOODFELLAS and  CASINO and THE GODFATHER trilogy and others have covered this territory and perhaps exhausted it.