Since the first two days were on a weekend and I was mostly outside I wanted to give some insight into a typical workday using the Buds.

My typical day for me consists of 3-4 hours of concentrating with constant music interrupted by 3-4 meetings that range from 30-45 minutes each. These meetings are either on the phone (taken on the computer), Zoom, or MS Teams.

Meeting audio

I haven’t nailed down why, but the audio quality coming out of a Zoom or MS Teams call using Bluetooth is not ideal. Switching back to a wired headset returns the call quality back to normal. Listening to music though YouTube or Soundcloud seems to be completely fine though.

I’ve played with every Bluetooth setting suggested on various “How to increase Bluetooth audio quality on a mac” page I could find with no permanent solution. Enabling AAC, forcing aptX or upping the bitpool didn’t provide a permanent solution either. Resetting Bluetooth, disconnecting and reconnecting the Buds seemed to help a little though.

I did land on, and end up paying for, the ToothFairy app, which makes it really easy to connect and disconnect Bluetooth devices.

Audio quality without using the mic

Every site I visited talking about the audio quality on a Mac said to avoid using the Bluetooth mic if you’re concerned about audio quality. I found this to be 100% the case.

Only listening in on meetings or music with the Buds and using a separate mic made everything crystal clear.

The ToothFairy app (above) even has a setting to “Improve sound quality by using the internal mic by default”.

Long term use

After two days of music and meetings, I don’t know how or why anyone would want to wear in-ear headphones all day. It’s not that they hurt in any specific way but they just become uncomfortable after 2-3 hours. I guess if you don’t have any other options they will do, but I found myself switching back to the over the ear headphones for longer stretches because they are just so much more comfortable long-term.

Battery life

So far they have really held up to being usable when I need them. I haven’t run into a situation when they were dead or drained and not being able to use them. When they are out of my ears they are in their case (and charging). I found it felt weird to have them laying around on the desk or table. Perhaps their size or them still being connected to the phone/computer while out or that a dog or kid would get them.

The only time I could see battery being an issue is on a really long bike ride, walk or run.

It is helpful if one of the Buds gets below 15% battery it makes an audible sound that sounds like it is powering down. It definitely makes you feel like it is running out of battery.

Truly hands free Google Assistant

I long for a truly hands-free Assistant, it does a good job at most things, but not everything. I really wish there was a clear way to ask to have all unread notifications read out loud as if you were holding your finger on the Bud. There has to be some magic word combination to do it, I have yet to find it though.

I have found though that I can ask to “Open Pocketcasts” then ask it to “Play” and it will pick up where I had left off, which is nice.

My dream would be that you could open any app, get items read to you on-screen and be able to navigate and activate anything on screen as if you’re using a screen reader.

Remembering a connection

I typically have my phone next to my computer all day. If I walk far enough away from the Macbook and it disconnects, as soon as I get close enough again, the Buds default to connecting back to the computer. It is great they recognize the last device they were connected to and not always fall back to the phone as a default.

Connection in/out of a car

My car (2009) is typically paired with my phone. When having the Buds paired with my phone while listening to a podcast, I got in the car and turned it on, the car picked up the Bluetooth and the podcast started playing inside.

Looked at the Bluetooth settings, it said two devices were connected. After turning off the car the podcast paused, Bluetooth disconnected from the car but noticed the Buds were still connected and I couldn’t tap them to unpause. It was like they were in some sort of sleep mode.

I couldn’t control anything on the phone or unpause the podcast until I took one out of the Buds then put it back in. That seemed to have reactivated them as the primary media output. After that, they worked like normal.

Hear surroundings while running

Feeling safe while running and hearing surroundings is a must. So far so good on this front. I haven’t had any issues hearing cars or bikes coming behind me that I wouldn’t have otherwise with the USB-C pixel earbuds (which are not in-ear).

Overall

I think I’ll stick to using the Buds primarily while running, walking, and around the house. I can’t see myself using these as my primary headphones all day. I just can’t see myself keeping them in my ears all day without them feeling uncomfortable. Perhaps I’m so used to over the ear headphones, but I have found myself switching to them a bit during the day and it is nice to have the flexibility of not being stuck to a desk with a cord.

Continued at: “A typical workday with the Pixel Buds 2“

Unsponsored review by an average person.

Wireless headphones have never been my thing. I’ve had numerous wired headphones though, from the Apple in-ear to Sony in-ear to the Pixel USB-C earbuds. For me it’s all about how secure they are in my ear while on a long run.

The appeal of the Pixel Buds came from using assistant with the USB-C earbuds, it’s just so convenient. For context, I’ve never tried the original Pixel Buds or any other wireless headphones.

Fit

Decided on the smallest pads. The medium size seemed fine, but after having them in for more than an hour at a time, I found the smallest ones were the best mix of fit and ability to hear talking when audio is paused.

They are seriously light though, it hardly feels like there is anything in your ears.

Audio volume

At first, they felt pretty quiet, but after some adjusting, they seem only slightly on the quiet side. There is definitely something odd about the volume controls though. At times it felt like there were two volume controls while connected to a Mac. The output volume works like normal, but then there seems to be a separate Buds volume that is controlled through swiping. Sometimes they update in sequence, but with the Mac volume all the way up, I can still turn up the Buds by swiping until they top out. Not ideal, and probably a bug, but it may be why some people feel they are quieter than they should be.

Swiping and touch controls

These feel completely natural and work really well. On two occasions though while running and trying to turn the volume up it thought I long-pressed and read me the time and all my notifications. This could have been due to sweat, but it was unexpected.

Battery life

To be honest these (or any in-ear headphones) are not something I would want to wear all day long. I am on calls for 3-4 hours per workday, but I haven’t yet had the chance to see how long I would keep them in.

Spend the second day doing a ton of yard work and had them in ~40% of the day. Feels natural to put them back into their case when not in my ears and the longest amount of time wearing them only reduced the battery to 40%.

They come fully charged out of the box and after 48 hours the case is still at 38%. Even if I traveled a lot and wasn’t able to get to a charger each night, the amount of battery seems on par for what is reasonable and I likely wouldn’t spend more for a higher capacity battery.

Adaptive sound

So far so good on this front. It is nice to hear conversations around me without have to take the Buds out. While running next to a loud road the sound did turn up automatically and then back down when it got quieter. While mowing the lawn it did the same. I would say the feature is pretty helpful but found myself still adjusting the volume between podcasts and wish the adaptive sound would equalize the output audio instead of assuming all audio is already equalized.

Microphone

I’m used to recording audio on my computer with a podcasting mic. This one was a bit weird for me to wrap my head around. While connected to the Pixel 3 XL and making a call outside in a windy environment the person I was talking to said I sounded normal and they couldn’t hear any wind at all, which was great.

I make a lot of calls from my computer though, a 2017 Macbook Pro 13″ with Touch Bar. This is where things get complicated. I tried to record the mic and got some really horrible results similar to Tech FireSide. But realized it was only because Mac OS was doing some sort of downsampling only while recording, the actual call quality was really good.

After listening to someone else talk on them from the Mac or phone I can say the mic really is high quality and on-par with a wired microphone.

A real world test after a full work day will be telling though.

Connection quality

Connected to the Pixel 3 XL the connection has been great, I was able to walk a good ~30 feet away inside and ~100 feet outside with no regression in the audio quality. Connected to the Mac though I was surprised the range was only about 15 feet at best. Apparently the 2017 Macbook Pro only has Bluetooth 4.2, which severely limits the range.

When moving from the Pixel to the Mac and back and forth multiple time the speed was fantastic. Only two or so seconds to disconnect and reconnect.

Some people have reported one or both Buds cutting out with head or body movement. I’ve run multiple miles with my phone in a SPIbelt and cut the lawn with my phone in the pocket with no cutting out from either earbud.

Google Assistant

Something I’ve struggled with is going truly voice based for all interactions. With the USB-C pixel earbuds I was able to hear all notifications and they were read to me. I could prompt this by holding the mic button and it would read the time and then all unread messages.

Without the cord and with my hands dirty I’m looking for a way to do the same but with only my voice. I’ve tried the recommended “read my messages” with mixed results. I have checked my app notification settings and all the relevant ones are on.

I still haven’t found a consistent voice command to have Google read me all my unread notifications without touching the physical buds.

Firmware update

It took a few times of taking the Buds in and out of their case and then leaving them alone for them to update then report their new version. There was no audible sound or notification to let me know they were being updated or that the update was complete.

Hissing

I have not experienced hissing when connected to the Pixel 3XL, even when listening to audio at the lowest volume. As soon as they are paired with the Macbook Pro though there is a noticeable hiss when in-between apps/music but it seems to silence itself after a second or two. Definitely not noticeable or a dealbreaker and feels like it is coming from the computer instead of the Buds.

Overall

The first two days have been wonderful. I don’t have a lot of context to other wireless headphones but compared to the wired ones I’m used to the Pixel Buds are great. I’ve found myself leaving them in my ears more than their wired counterparts.

I mostly listen to books and podcasts but the overall sound quality is great although if I really wanted to listen to rich music I would opt for over the ear headphones any day.

For me, the largest sell is the ability to access the Assistant and everything on my phone with voice.

Next in the series: “A typical workday with the Pixel Buds 2“

There is a difference in how Sequel Pro and TablePlus SSH connection settings work.

Sequel Pro connection settings

Using the SSH tunnel we are able to authenticate with the ‘vagrant’ user and ~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key.

TablePlus connection settings

TablePlus uses a more specific connection to Vagrant. Using port 2222 and instead of using the generic key, it requires the private key that is in the specific vagrant box directory:

~/{dir to box}/.vagrant/machines/{box name}/virtualbox/private_key

• Replace {dir to box} with the directory for the Vagrant machine
• Replace {box name} with the name of the box

To make this easier, add the configuration to the ~/.ssh/config file by running the following command:

cd ~/{dir to box}
echo "" >> ~/.ssh/config
vagrant ssh-config >> ~/.ssh/config

It will look something like this:

Host box-name
  HostName 127.0.0.1
  User vagrant
  Port 2222
  UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
  StrictHostKeyChecking no
  PasswordAuthentication no
  IdentityFile /{dir to box}/.vagrant/machines/box-name/virtualbox/private_key
  IdentitiesOnly yes
  LogLevel FATAL
  ForwardAgent yes

This allows the config of TablePlus to use the “Use SSH key” and will look in the ~/.ssh/config file for it.

While writing a few Cypress.io tests I ran into a problem of manipulating text in a CKEditor window.

Without diving completely into how CKEditor implements the editable iframe, my first thought was to use the native textarea field and skip adding content to the WYSIWYG all together.

Using the native type() function

// The underlying `textarea`

cy.get("#html_body")
.type("<p>HTML body</p>");

Cypress doesn’t like typing into hidden input element elements.

Adding the force:true config doesn’t fare much better. With Javascript turned on, CKEditor overwrites the textarea on submit and that value is lost.

Cypress interacting with an iFrame

Next stop is to search “cypress type in ckeditor” which leads to the issue Cannot target elements inside of an iframe #136.

Reading through the working examples lead to something like this:

// Find the `contenteditable` element within the iframe and type

cy.get("#html_body")
  .then(function ($iframe) {
    const $body = $iframe.contents().find("body");

    cy.wrap($body[0])
      .type("<p>HTML body</p>");
  });

This does find the DOM element and says that it was typed, but it doesn’t actually result in the words being visible in the CKEditor or submitted with the form.

Interacting with JS page objects

Last ditch effort is to break outside of Cypress and set the data in CKEditor natively then try to make the same call from within the Cypress test.

CKEditor has setData() and getData() functions for getting contents in and out of the editor window.

// Set the contents of the CKEditor natively on the page

CKEDITOR.instances["html_body"].setData("<p>HTML body</p>");

Now to call that from within Cypress, led to a search for “cypress get page JS objects” and then to this issue: How can I execute a JavaScript command #897 and the .window() function.

Success!

// Call out to the page window and use the CKEDITOR object

cy.window()
  .then(win => {
    win.CKEDITOR.instances["html_body"].setData("<p>HTML body</p>");
  });

Turning the solution into a reusable command

// Define the command

Cypress.Commands.add("type_ckeditor", (element, content) => {
  cy.window()
    .then(win => {
      win.CKEDITOR.instances[element].setData(content);
    });
});

// Use the command

cy.type_ckeditor("html_body", "<p>HTML body</p>");

With this approach it is possible to use any of the CKEDITOR.editor object functions.

A university is filled with people doing incredible things. I’ve work in and around higher education professionals for 15 years. I’m constantly amazed by their ingenuity and willingness to share their lessons learned.

Ideas are just ideas without the support of others

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” ~ Abraham Lincoln

Taking the time to shop an idea around before it is presented is required for success. Getting not only feedback from the primary audience but also anyone who will be living with its implementation.

At a college or university, enrollment initiatives can take years before results start rolling in. Because of this campuses are notoriously skeptical of ideas without legs.

Relying on outside experts can give ideas a boost. Organizations like Helix Education are in a unique spot, they interact with numerous institutions with similar goals and have been able to test and prove strategies.

Playing the game

Helix Education knows the key to success is partnerships. They know higher education so well, they created a game that speaks volumes.

They took their playbook and the struggles they’ve seen across institutions and brought it to life in a digital world you can play.

The game is really well done and even includes a secret if you’re enough of an explorer.

This is a must play for any higher education professional or anyone working at an institution that requires partnerships for an idea to be successful.

Do you have what it takes to level up your partnerships?

Play the Enrollment Growth Hero game and see if you have what it takes!

With this knowledge, your ideas can grow legs and allow you to run with them. Here’s to building support for your next idea!

Last year I purged as many incoming requests for my attention as possible. Medium has become something I’ve adopted, enjoy and think it’s worth giving it a shot to stick around.

Video games or watching too many movies wasn’t the problem, to be honest I’ve never done much of either. It was the little things that stole my attention without even realizing it. The small things that I did habitually on a daily, hours or immediate basis that forced me to become deliberate about my time.

Things I’ve purged checking daily

• Instagram, Twitter, Facebook timelines
• HTML email newsletters
• Push notification for basically anything on my phone

Things that have stood the test of time

• Email marked as Primary
• Nuzzle email digest
• Quora email digest
• Medium digest
• Podcasts while driving/running

Medium is for stories, how to’s and personality

Personal stories, interviews and experiences define how opinions are shaped and Medium sets the perfect environment for these stories.

I’ve tried Pocket, Instapaper, and various other tools to strip away the cruft from sites to create the ideal reading environment. Medium accomplishes this without requiring me to leave the site.

Content curation on the Medium homepage and email have been spot on and they promise to make it better. For me it’s the combination of recommendations by friends, popular items from topics I follow and a few off the wall stories that I wouldn’t have searched out myself. This mix has made it feel far less like typical sites that focus on a descending list of popular articles, but more like a personalized newsletter.

Writing/cross promoting content on Medium

Many OG blogger, including myself, believe my content isn’t safe long term on Medium. They are profiting from me and if they shut down tomorrow all my content and following go *poof* without a way to redirect.

I still maintain my own domain, blog, and email list for content ownership but like others, attention and discovery are slim. The few articles I have posted to Medium include the standard “Originally posted at…” final line to let people know I am more than Medium articles.

This fear is something that Medium should embrace, it means people are putting hard work into the content they produce here. They don’t consider it throw away content and are conscious about their investment.

Hope for the future

I have hope that Medium will do the right thing and embrace content creators and consumers genuinely to squash these fears. I’m giving Medium a chance to succeed and you should too. It will be pretty clear in a few months with how many people vote with their feet (dollars).

edUi is a conference for web professionals working at institutions of learning—colleges, universities, libraries, and museums.

2017 location

September 25-27
Charlottesville, VA at 3 venues on the scenic pedestrian mall in downtown

One half-day workshop is included with every edUi registration at no additional charge. Everyone who wants a workshop at edUi gets a workshop. When registration opens up in April you’ll have your pick of one of three fantastic, in-depth, hands-on workshops including the following.

Analytics workshop

At edUi 2017 Nick DeNardis will lead a half-day workshop on how to get the most out of your analytics.

Using web analytics, Google Tag Manager, and A/B Testing, you’ll learn how to optimize your digital channels to understand what’s working and what’s not. This comprehensive, hands-on workshop will cover the basics of creating and implementing an analytics and digital measurement strategy.

Call for proposals

The call for proposals is open now through March 22, 2017

• Everyone who submits a proposal gets a 10% discount on their registration.
• Accepted speakers will receive a complimentary registration.

Registration

Registration for edUi 2017 will open in April.

Ticket prices

• Early Bird: $550
• Standard: $675

Follow additional updates:

Facebook | Twitter | Blog

Starting something new begins with shipping the first version. I’ve been working on a social media campaign tracking app for a while now. It started early 2015 when helping the Detroit Grand Prix track their social activity leading up to and through race weekend. Although that initial version was launched, it left much to be desired in the codebase, which was thrown together in a weekend and hard coded for a single purpose.

The perfect storm

Over the past year I’ve taken over the Laravel Detroit meetup group and in my spare time continued to re-write the app, multiple times, to learn and use it for various other events. Late last year Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel, announced Spark, an addition that would make it easy to stand up a Saas app in Laravel. Jumping on board with the alpha, beta and now final release got me up to speed with Vue.js and gave me some time to think about the intended audience for this social tracking app.

Shipping

Creator’s ship. This week I was traveling a bit with some more down time than expected, it gave me the excuse to write this up and ship the initial version of the app, version 0.1.

Audience

Down to the core, RT Reach is for small business and groups who run multiple events throughout the year and need to report the success and metrics of multi-channel social media campaigns. It tracks account posts, views, reach and most influential accounts per campaign on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube initially. Sums it all up with clear at a glance charts and daily summary emails.

Sound like you?

Initially I’ll be offering concierge onboarding to work with a first set of customers and walk in their shoes to refine the product for a wider audience.

Sign up for early access at https://rtreach.com/

Analytics

• College Web Editor – Why #highered should get excited about Universal Analytics & Google Tag Manager
• Here Comes Universal Analytics
• Higher Ed Analytics – Google Analytics A/B Test Worksheet for #highered: Fill in the Blanks to Optimize Your College?s Web Pages

Design

• 20 Web Designs That Look Like Animated Infographics
• A Guide to Social Logins
• The experience is the product
• The Pattern Library: A Great New Resource For Designers (And Wannabes)
• Amount of snow to cancel school

Food

• Delicious Dishes You Didn’t Know You Could Make in a Slow Cooker

Freelance

•  Rachel Andrew on the Business of Web Dev: Making Time for Side Projects
• Five Career Mistakes You Might Not Know You’re Making

Great Offices

• New Feature: Collections – Browse Offices by Room
• Inside BFG Communications’ Skate Park-themed Office

Highered

• 6 Technologies Will Change Colleges in Coming Years, Experts Say
• mStoner blog – Forks in the Road
• CKSyme.com – The Ultimate Social Media Engagement Tool: Free Tuition
• 5 proven, mind-blowing ways to get people to read your blog
• British University to Accept Bitcoin as Payment for Some Courses
• 3 branding game-changers and how #highered must adapt

Inspiration

• Why You Can Never Finish Anything And How to Finally Change It
• I Became an Entity: How I’m on the Knowledge Graph
• See All The Spots From Super Bowl XLVIII
• Release quality sets expectations
• Lessons learned from my first semester of teaching
• Stamping Dollar Bills With Evidence That They’ve Been Used For Good
• 4 Soft Skills That You Need To Learn
• The person you could be hiring
• The answer to, “is that the best you can do…”
• Shipping as a beginning, not an end
• “The problem is that we don’t have the right words to talk about this stuff.”
• Six Life Lessons I’ve Learned from Programming
• Giving Back: Preservation Detroit
• I Suck! And So Do You!
• “But what if I fail?”

Leadership

• 5 Steps to Reclaim Your Credibility After You Screw Up
• 8 Awesome Business & Entrepreneurial Podcasts
• Susan Talbert Evans Blog – Ready to Roll: Expanding your team.
• Employ the “Rule Of 3” for Daily, Weekly and Annual Productivity
• Why Coaching Matters
• Incorporate a Daily Prioritization Meeting into Your Morning Routine
• Conference call hygiene
• The Neuroscience Of Effective Leadership
• How To Combat A Ridiculous Work Schedule And Stop Feeling So Overwhelmed
• 5 Crucial Strategies For Making 2014 Your Most Innovative Year Yet
• Everyone does everything
• Conference organiser tips (from a speaker’s perspective)

Mobile

• Three Steps for Improving Mobile UX
• Sprint Unveils Free Cloud Storage Service
• Opinion- There Is No Mobile Internet
• The Mobile Content Mandate
• The Mobile Moment

Parenting

• The 4-Day Wait Rule Finds Food Your Baby is Allergic to
• Kickstarter Loves This Children’s Book That Gets Kids Excited About Coding

Social Media

• Should you hire a social media community manager?

Startup

• Do you love your customers?
• Why We Bootstrapped Our Company
• A (Nearly) Complete Online Toolkit For Startups

User Interface

• Contact from Dashag – UI Design Pattern
• 404 page from Mint – UI Design Pattern
• Why Her Will Dominate UI Design Even More Than Minority Report | Wired Design | Wired.com

User Experience

• Preference and Desirability Testing: Measuring Emotional Response to Guide Design
• Designing for Easy Interaction
• When Design Best Practices Become Performance Worst Practices
• User Experience is…
• Forks in the Road
• Your real competitors
• Killing Feature Creep
• Scrolling is easier than clicking
• Usability Tip: Don’t Make Me Search for Search
• How fast is fast enough?

Web Development

• International box-sizing Awareness Day
• Be the First to Attend the 2014 Build Right Workshops
• To Sass or Not to Sass? The Two Tims on The East Wing
• Boxes That Fill Height (Or More) (and Don’t Squish)
• You Might Not Need jQuery
• Thought Process of a Front End Problem
• A Dive Into Plain JavaScript
• Changing Between Spaces and Tabs in Sublime Text
• CSS Animation Tricks: State Jumping, Negative Delays, Animating Origin, and More
• Bulletproof Accessible Icon Fonts
• When To Use The Button Element

Web Tools

• Kimono Could Be The Gateway Drug To Finally Get You Coding
• 50 of the Best Online Courses and Resources for Learning Web Design
• 5 Tips for Pre-Launch Landing Pages
• SaveDeo Downloads Videos from Instagram, Flickr and Other Video Sites

Analytics

• Higher Ed Analytics – Google Analytics A/B Test Worksheet for #highered

Design

• Unorthodox Layouts: The Next Big Thing?

Inspiration

• Giving Back: Preservation Detroit
• I Suck! And So Do You!
• “But what if I fail?”
• Delight the weird

Leadership

• Conference organizer tips (from a speaker’s perspective)

Mobile

• Opinion- There Is No Mobile Internet
• The Mobile Content Mandate
• The Mobile Moment

UX

• The Five Pillars of a Great UX Project

Web Development

• Bulletproof Accessible Icon Fonts
• When To Use The Button Element
• The Technology Behind the NYTimes.com Redesign
• “A nicer color palette for the web.”
• Web Standards Killed The HTML Star
• Vagrant, Puppet, Docker?
• Why We Still Need Web-safe Fonts

Web Tools

• SaveDeo Downloads Videos from Instagram, Flickr and Other Video Sites
• Advanced Image Optimization Tricks

Writing

• The Intrinsic Value of Blogging