Book Review: Darth Plagueis


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Star Wars content below. You’ve been warned.

I’ll never forget the first time I discovered the fact people were writing books about Star Wars. I was sitting at a rusted bench in the break area behind the Jungle Cruise when one of my fellow skippers pulled out Timothy Zahn’sThrawn trilogy. I quickly found and read them, and loved every minute of it. This was years after the original trilogy and years before the prequels. While this was a great first step, over time I soured on the expanded universe Star Wars books. They seemed to really stretch things and a lot of them felt like they were written on a bet.

Recently, when I appeared on the Technical Difficulties podcast, Gabe Weatherhead, knowing my affection toward the original Star Wars trilogy and animosity toward the prequels, recommended I read Darth Plagueis, an expanded universe novel about Emperor Palpatine’s Sith master and the origin story of Emperor Palpatine. Gabe said, “It almost saves the prequels.” He said that. I wrote it down. Well if it is good enough for Gabe, I was going to read it.

So I went and purchased the Darth Plagueis audio book and just finished a few days ago. This book follows the journey of Darth Plagueis (a Muun Sith master from the banking clan…banking clan…eye roll) as he gains power and attempts to bend the universe to the Sith way. About halfway through, the story increasingly moves to his apprentice, Palpatine.

Like a lot of Star Wars stories, these two spend some time together, get connected, and then separate for a good portion of the book to tackle their own challenges. In Darth Plagueis’s case, he becomes obsessed with conquering death and Palpatine, as you can probably guess, goes to Coruscant to focus on amassing political power.

Palpatine’s story is really the best part of this book. While even as a youngster, he is not very likable, I can see how he gets from point A to point B. Moreover, the way in which he becomes increasingly adept at subtle manipulations and wielding political power are interesting and show a progression that leads nicely to the prequels.

Does this book save the prequels? No.

There is still a lot of talk of treaties, negotiations, and political machinations. I don’t think the author, James Luceno, had any choice as the book is intended to lead directly into the prequels. While I think having read this book could give me more insight to the prequels (if I ever watch them again), it also further damns the prequels. If Palpatine was so adept at pushing the universe around, maybe they should have included some of that. Rather than give us this dorky story of how Anakin was never very heroic and one day decided to go to the dark side and kill everyone he knew, maybe we could have seen how Palpatine was secretly pushing all of Anakin’s buttons.

For example, I never understood why the Sand People took Anakin’s mother or what the heck they were doing with her in Episode II. Regardless, it was a key moment in the story and the event that turned Anakin into a ruthless killer. What if we had the Palpatine from this book making his mother’s abduction happen. That would at least give me some greater understanding.

If I hadn’t seen the prequels, I think I may have enjoyed the book more because I’ve got such a chip on my shoulder that I kept wondering how this story could have been used to make that story better. All of this said, it was fun going back into the Star Wars universe again and I will recommend this book. Just don’t hold your breath on it (or any other object in the known universe) fixing the prequels.

If you do decide to read it, I’d recommend the Audible book. It’s a good production and goes beyond most audio books. When they are on a ship, you hear the ship in the background. When they fight, you hear two lightsabers clashing. When a droid speaks, it gets a little extra tin-foil processing. This definitely improved the experience.

Cars and Tech

Yesterday Apple announced the launch of CarPlay, a new protocol where your iOS device will power your car’s in-dash system. Because I’m a nerd, I’ve always had a fascination with in-car technology. My current car, a Ford, has the Microsoft Sync system which is nice when it works, but flakey. As an example, I was driving through Los Angeles recently, relying on Sync for directions when it decided to unilaterally look for updates and reset. As a result, I often find it easier to ask my phone to give me directions than the Sync system.

Another issue I have with most in-car technology is that the user interface feels as if it were designed with blindfolds and dart boards. I think it is a great idea to let our cars offload this task to Apple (and even Google). I’m looking forward to see how CarPlay works when it gets in the wild.

WiFi Explorer


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Lately I’ve been spending time troubleshooting the Sparks family WiFi. Specifically, I’ve been trying to tweak the placement of our various Wi-Fi paraphernalia so as to get a better signal in my daughter’s room in a far corner of the house. I needed a good diagnostic tool to give me an idea of how the Wi-Fi signal strength was doing in various points of my house.

The first thing I tried was the expanded WiFi data built into OS X. You can get this by Option-Clicking on the Airport icon in the menu bar. It gives a lot more data about your active WiFi signal than the standard click.

That wasn’t good enough for me though. I wanted more details about speed and I wanted to see how the channels were lining up with my neighbors. If you and your neighbors are all fighting over the same sliver of bandwidth, trouble ensues no matter what you do. All of this led me to the Mac App store, where I purchased a $3 app, WiFi Explorer.

WiFi Explorer provides the mother lode of WiFi data. The app sports a top pane that lists every available wireless network. The second pane presents a graphical representation of the selected networks. There are four potential displays: Network Details, Signal Strength, 2.4 Ghz Channels, and 5Ghz Channels. You can also filter the list between open, secure, ad hoc, and preferred networks. The below screenshots demonstrate the interface.

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I’m getting tons of information with this app on my network and my neighbors’ networks. Using this I’m able to optimize my network with both placement of my mobile base stations and channel selection to avoid crashing in to other networks in the area.

If you are going to be studying this data over time, you can export your WiFi Explorer data to a .csv file and open it in Numbers or Excel. Because I’m a nerd, I’ve done this and plan to keep a running history of what works (and doesn’t work) with the home WiFi. Also, if things ever slow down again, I can go back and study prior data to determine what went wrong.

Sponsor: Rocket Matter Turns 6



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Rocket Matter, the premier web-based law practice management application, just turned 6. Rather than sitting around and eating cake, the Rocket Matter engineers have been hard at work. 

Rocket Matter has just announced a seriously upgraded search, called “Galactic Interdimensional Search”, which is a pretty awesome name.

To further celebrate, Rocket Matter is giving away a free ebook to MacSparky readers, The Law Firm of Tomorrow, that does a pretty good job of describing the cloud-based service business for just about anyone of tomorrow. Check it out.

Thanks Rocket Matter for supporting MacSparky.com, and happy birthday.

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MPU 179: Calendar Management

This week’s episode of the Mac Power Users is a deep dive on calendar applications and how we use them. Towards the end I explained some of the specific tricks I use to keep my calendar in check that (I think at least) are pretty helpful. Check it out.

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Home Screens – Chase Reeves


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This week’s home screen features Chase Reeves (website) (Twitter). Chase is a designer and educator. Chase has a great sense of humor that helps get his message across. So Chase, show us your home screen.


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What are some of favorite apps?

Drafts

Everyday I use this sucker to write something no one will see online at one of the blogs (read: i’m a big time internet guy) I run. Also used for quick note capture and jokes I think are funny while I’m drunk but then aren’t funny when I read them the next day.

In all seriousness, though, I’ve started writing more and more in Drafts on my phone. Capturing things in bite sized lines, a kind of shorthand, has helped me put together pieces like this, this and this (warning: that last one’s a bit heavy… and I really did write it in Drafts).

This app is one of those great bits of technology that, most of the time, makes me more human. Note it’s placement for optimal left-hand thumb thumb velocity… i’m serious about Drafts, you guys.

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How else am I gonna make my boring life look special?

Note: the camera is there upper right as per a tip I heard somewhere (was it Gruber?) about putting the camera app where the lens for the camera is so you don’t fire it up and miss your son’s first steps because your finger was over the lens… ya’ turkey!

Sonos

Fk’n sonos, man. This + rdio has put the music I lost when I had a family back in my life. I just make a bunch of playlists in Rdio for different moods and throw one on ever dinner time… then I can’t hear the way some people chew their food with their mouths open… animals.

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This is where I share all those VSCO’d pictures. It’s also where I subscribe to a bunch of great image blogs… perfect for brain dead moments after writing about how cool your phone’s home screen is.

I put this app in a folder, but I shouldn’t. I use this app frequently, and rarely use the others in the folder… though I occasionally open up the Alien Blue app to stay up to date on… erm… “human form art.”

Due

Damn fk’n right I’m not gonna forget to pickup my kid from school… cuz I set a timer. My wife doesn’t set timers because she’s a wife and wives have a whole section of brain matter that dads don’t have. So I set timers using Due.

One oft-used timer is the 26m power nap timer. I’ll admit it, I nap.

Rowmote Pro

I use it to control my media center, a vintage Mac Pro running plex and safari and a whole bunch of “content” acquired in a “perfectly reasonable” way. I’ve got a logitech remote, but running netflix is just a lot easier with this app.

Evernote

Like many clowns on internet, I admire Merlin Mann too much. I always wanted to use the notational velocity… but I was hooked on Evernote from an early age for one reason: audio notes. Most of my ideas start either on the toilet in Drafts or in the car in an Evernote audio note.

Evernote is such a slow and cumbersome app, but i’ll {insert Allan Watts quote here} and assume it’s good to slow down a bit as I wait for search results in the app to show up.

Stanza

I read for about 20m every night. Lights off, dark room, white text on black background. There’s not a single app out there that gets as dark as Stanza. Which sucksbecause this app is old and is never slated for another update.

I’ve tried everything else, and really wanted Readmill to work because it looks sexy, like a designer made it, but they all shine way too bright in the night, it’s a fright… me no like.

Foursquare

I literally just started using this app. Have you guys heard of location-based check-in apps!? Terrific stuff!

A new friend encouraged me to check Foursquare out for a few reasons (he also got me on Path, but I haven’t found a way to care about that one yet). So far I’m liking it more than yelp for recommendations and tips. I live in Portland where we pride ourselves on the ungodly amounts of baristas and service workers we can employ… so the recommendations for this pork-fat-turkey-juice sandwich or that double-decker-beer-bus-handstand place come in handy.

Fantastical

I started with Fantastical, then went to Calendars 5, then threw up everywhere, then went back to fantastical, then went back to Calendars 5 and fell in love with it (for the week view) then went back to fantastical after I saw that it does week view when you turn the phone sideways then decided to unlock rotation on my phone for that one reason then got super stoked about seeing my week in fantastical (better week view than Calendars 5) then hated having my rotation unlocked because I read every night and it turns the apps sideways when I don’t want them to and now I’m too tired from thinking about calendar apps to schedule anything worthwhile to do in my life for a little while.

Others

Rdio is great. I love discovering music this way. I usually leave this app set to “Offline” so it doesn’t mess up my computer’s “Play Later” queue. I typically only listen to my workout playlist on the phone anyways.

Casts app is fine. Everyone’s bitching about podcast apps. I switched a few times, but they’re all basically the same. I subscribe, I want to listen to all of them in reverse chronological order at 1.5 speed. They all do this. I am satisfied. And this one looks a little better than the others. Here’s to hoping Marco shows me what I didn’t know was broken about podcast apps.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

I’ve never been a gamer besides that one time in college where the dorm room had Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 and I felt compelled to beat the game with every player because I’m an idiot. But I’ve just learned how to play candy crush (you gotta break the jellies!) and I dislike how often I want to play it but don’t because people will judge me.

What is the app you are still missing?

Audio notes app… I fire it up, it records, then it sends the audio file over to Evernote with an attempt to put the first 1m into text in the note. There are some Evernote audio apps but they’re buggy.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone/iPad?

When I walk or drive anywhere I’m listening to a podcast… could be Back to Work, Mac Power Users, Radiolab, my show (what? I listen so I can get better.), Bionic, ScriptNotes, WTF (this is the one that started
it all for me)… Every now and again I text my wife too.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

I like being able to take pictures quickly. Just upgraded from 4s to 5s and it’s much snappier. That and podcast. And being able to contact everyone around the world and write things when I’m pooping and making music too and that time I had it when I went to sushi with my friends and now I can remember that and then this timeand this time and when I made a website for a guy and then he saw it and send me this and then we became business partners eventually and then my very favorite time. There’s a few things I like about the iPhone… but mostly that.

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?

This is hard. I’m not a smart apple tech rumor guy. They make stuff that’s so fun to play with. I make all my money using their things. I just got a new MBP retina. Every time I look at anything written on that screen I shit my pants… feels like being on drugs. So it’s hard to get up in the air and see what they’re doing wrong. I hear Marco bitching a lot about developer relations stuff… I’d tell apple to fix that and be nicer to their friends. I’d say, “dude, I have about 30 firewire 800 drives… no FW on the new laptops, seriously?” I’d say that. I’d say, “I saw a collection of those Think Different posters recently and I cried… I literally cried.” And I’d say, “Tim Cook, I like that you’re gay (you’re gay, right?) and I applaud you and how come when my Mighty Mouse gets disconnected for a second I want to slam it so goddam hard and throw it across the room and can you make that not happen more?” And then I’d say, “thx for making me feel awesome.”

Anything else you’d like to share?

I write more here and hope you have a nice day, David!

Thanks Chase.