A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.

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1️⃣ I might have found my next backpacking stove system in the MSR Switch! [▶️ youtube.com]

2️⃣ I really enjoyed this thread where prominent creators pass the “blame” of discovering and recommending a cool tech product which led to it getting back ordered. 🤣 [🦣 mastodon.social]

3️⃣ Sara Bareilles continues to impress with this powerful performance of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”. [▶️ youtube.com]

4️⃣ I can’t decide which is more impressive in this Wicked performance for NPR Tiny Desk: the absolute vocal control of the singers, or the effortlessly dancing fingers of the pianist. Both are astounding and captivating! [▶️ youtube.com]

5️⃣ @rafa showed off some really cool stuff he’s made with his 3D printer in this thread. I particularly like the custom magnetic weekly calendar for his kid. [🦣 mastodon.design]

6️⃣ Vidit Bhargava is doing some astounding work on ambient computers for his thesis. Check out these threads for jaw-dropping examples. [🦣 mastodon.social]

7️⃣ Tim Hardwick shared a handy tip about using Siri with ChatGPT to generate images with DALL•E. You can even refine them in the Siri interface. It’s like Image Playground with better results! [🔗 macrumors.com]

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🔗 Take a Chance

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Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

7 Things

I wanted to check out a mobile video editor to cut up some videos to share. So I searched the App Store, found one called Splice that looked pretty good, downloaded it, and got to work. Adding music was a Pro plan feature, so I needed to subscribe in order to finish the export. Pretty standard stuff so far.

The cheapest plan the app presented was $9.99 per week, or I could do $119.99 per year. Both options are too steep for my budget and benign use case, but luckily it had a weeklong free trial. I subscribed, and then before even exporting the video, I headed to the App Store’s subscriptions managment page to cancel the free trial. I do this for almost every subscription I sign up for because it allows you to continue to run out the current plan — including free trials! — but then it won’t auto-renew. I don’t want to forget to cancel if I don’t like an app. And if I do like it, I’ll just resubscribe.

That might be a handy tip on its own, but here’s the game changer: Make sure you hit the ‘See All Plans’ button on the subscription page.

In it, you’ll find every pricing option that the app offers. Sometimes it’s just the usual suspects like singular monthly, yearly, and lifetime prices. But sometimes there are way more choices there. In Splice’s case, there were dozens of weekly, monthly, and yearly options at price levels ranging from $3.99 per week to $199.99 per year! And guess what. You can choose to subscribe to any of the choices on that screen.

Why are all of plans here but not in the app? Because app developers have the ability to run different pricing schemes to A/B test them amongst their users. Thankfully, Apple recognizes that it’s inherently unfair that you might just get randomly placed into a group that’s only offered the higher prices. So, outside the app, in that subscription management page, you get to choose from any plan that’s currently being offered to any customers.

I exported my edited video to make sure that the app indeed worked as advertised, and when I was happy with the result, I went looking for a more affordable plan. About halfway down the screen, I found the cheapest yearly option, coming in at $10.99 per year. Just $1 more than the weekly option that I would have been relegated to had I not gone looking for something less expensive. Or, put another way, I just saved $508.49 (if paid weekly) or $109 (if paid yearly) off the in-app subscription plans.

And guess what, I’m still probably going to cancel that plan once it kicks in following the free trial so that I can reevaluate next February if I want to continue paying for a second year.

Tips Apps

A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.

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1️⃣ Apparently champagne sales are dropping, presumably because people don’t feel like celebrating. Rings true for me. [🔗 edition.cnn.com] (Via Paul Kafasis)

2️⃣ I might need some of these Goodnight Moon stamps when they come out. I loved that book as a small child. [🔗 kottke.org]

3️⃣ I’ve been following Noah Kalina’s work for probably a decade, but it’s still hard to believe that he’s been doing the Everyday project for 25 years now! [🔗 noahkalina.substack.com] (Via Jason Kottke)

4️⃣ OK Go’s latest music video is a marvel of logistics. It’s displayed across a grid full of iPhones, and each video was shot, practically, in one take each. The behind-the-scenes video is super cool too. [▶️ youtube.com]

5️⃣ That OK Go video reminds me strongly of Jacob Collier’s music video rendition of “Moon River” which is likewise a multi-cam spectacle. [▶️ youtube.com]

6️⃣ You can now get the Bionic Reading font, design to be quick to read, to use anywhere and everywhere. [🔗 bionic-reading.com]

7️⃣ Siri is very bad at telling you the correct winning team of each Super Bowl. [🔗 onefoottsunami.com]

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🔗 Take a Chance

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Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

7 Things

A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.

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1️⃣ Jamie Thingelstad is getting more into the Shortcuts game with tools for a Micro.blog feature that he really enjoys: Collections. His latest shortcut provides an export option in case one ever moves away from Micro.blog. It builds out a JSON object with each Collection and the photos they hold. [🔗 thingelstad.com]

2️⃣ This collection of photos that Devin S. shot of public transit stations are stunning. They make me want to visit every single spot. [🔗 glass.photo] (Via Nick Heer)

3️⃣ I’m so happy for Simon Støvring and the success of his Festivitas app. He’s even had a business reach out for a custom version to hang their logo on their work Macs’ desktops. [🦣 mastodon.social]

4️⃣ Curious what the various beeps and boops mean when they’re emitting from your AirPods? This site’s got you covered. [🔊 airpodnoises.net] (Via (and inspired by) ATP)

5️⃣ I never play our current Switch, but Nintendo’s reveal video for the Switch 2 is so good that it’s left me wanting. I love a good hardware reveal. [▶️ youtube.com]

6️⃣ I’m on a Severance kick, so I have to recommend this interview with Adam Scott and Ben Stiller about the launch into Season 2 by Shiite Basu on Apple News In Conversation. You can tell she loves the show and guided the conversation very well. [🎙️ overcast.fm]

7️⃣ Our dog has a tendency to shut himself in the bathroom and then freak out because he’s stuck. We tried a weighted bean bag to hold the door open, but he just pushed it out of the way. But these doorstops have been perfect. Easy to install and easy to use, I highly recommend them if you have a similar issue. [🛍️ amazon.com]

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🔗 Take a Chance

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Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

7 Things

I’m usually only tangentially interested in the Consumer Electronics Show. It seems like so much of the stuff there will never reach customers and exists only to raise hype to woo investors. The year, however, I found myself getting excited for a number of cool gizmos and gadgets that don’t seem too outlandish to be brought to market. A bunch are in the smart home category, but there’s other neat stuff too. Here’s what stuck out to me each day.

Monday

Nvidia’s Project Digits. This tiny personal supercomputer packs in a lot of power at $3000, and looks good doing it. [Link]

Satechi’s Mac Mini M4 Stand & Hub. This continues to be a smart, streamlined solution for more ports and external storage. And provides easier access to the power bottom. [Link]

Dell 32 Plus 4K QD-OLED. Dell put beamforming speakers in its new monitor so you get the best audio no matter where you position your head. [Link]

Belkin’s Stage PowerGrip. This magnetic grip for your phone provides a big battery bank and a camera-like form factor with a physical shutter butter in your hand. [Link]

Brisk It’s Zelos 450. This smart wood pellet grill will supposedly provide AI cooking assistance in a $400 package. [Link]

Schlage’s Sense Pro Smart Deadbolt. This smart lock packs in ultra-wideband, NFC, Thread, and a keypad into a svelte package — but no physical key slot. [Link]

Lutron’s Caséta Smart Shades. These automatic window shades are Caséta-compatible and look great, but come in at $400 each. [Link]

Samsung’s Frame Pro TV. It makes some notable improvements in color accuracy and brightness over the non-Pro, and ditches the display cable. All video signal is sent wirelessly. [Link]

Aqara’s Doorbell Camera Hub G410. Our house has no doorbell at all, and our dog barks at any outside noise, which means I get up from the couch to check for front door visitors a surprising amount. So this battery-powered, HomeKit Secure Video-compatible, and Matter-enabled video doorbell really catches my eye. [Link]

Aquara’s Touchscreen Dial V1. We’re finally getting to see what I think is the holy grail of smart home switches. Ones that integrate a small touchscreen to easily select the device to control, plus physical controls — in this case, a dial with haptic feedback. Its only downside is that it doesn’t work with Matter. The Touchscreen Switch S100 US with buttons does though, so I might give that a shot this year. [Link]

Aquara’s Presence Multi-Sensor FP300. I bought a HomeKit motion sensor a little while back, but haven’t set it up yet. Now I’m hearing that these presence sensors are far more accurate, and they’re packing in other sensor like temperature and humidity. Now that there’s a battery-powered option, I’m intrigued to see what automations I could cook up with all those triggers. [Link]

Tuesday

Jackery’s Solar Roof & HomePower Energy System. I’m keeping my eye on this home backup battery solution. It looks like a solid alternative to Tesla’s Solar Roof and Powerwall batteries. Love Jackery’s orange accent, too. [Link]

Audio-Technica’s ATH-CKS50TW2 Earbuds. Although it wouldn’t be so helpful for me because I’m not a monster who puts loose earbuds in my pocket, it’ll help a bunch of you people that they magnetize together to turn off, save battery life, and make the earbuds harder to lose. [Link]

Nanoleaf’s Matter Smart Multicolor Floor Lamp. There’s something mystical about this minimal floor lamp. I don’t know that I’d care to set up its gradients all the time, but it sure looks cool. Fairly affordable at $100, too. [Link]

Anker’s SOLIX Solar Umbrella. I certainly don’t need 80 watts of power at the beach, but I commend them for the idea and execution for people who do. [Link]

E Ink’s InkPoster. I could be into this large digital e-ink poster thing. It’ll let you swap in thousands of designs, or your own photos. And it only needs to be charged once a year. As someone who despises the act of hanging things on the wall, it’s appealing to think I could do it once and reap the benefits of ever-changing designs for years to come. [Link]

Wednesday

Bosch’s 100 Series Matter-enabled Fridge. Its not imminent, but I’m on the lookout for what could be our next fridge. We don’t need a bunch of fancy features, but having it part of the smart home for open door notifications would be nice. [Link]

MOFT’s Find My-Enabled Stand & Wallet. I’ve been using a MOFT MagSafe wallet for years, and I love it. It’s all but eliminated my (historically frequent) habit of losing my wallet. But you know what would be even better? If I did leave my wallet around, having Find My in it to track it back down. MOFT’s managed to keep its great design with the built-in kickstand and add in a thin battery for Find My. That it can be recharged wirelessly is super cool too. This’ll be an insta-buy for me. [Link]

Ohsnap’s MCON MagSafe Game Controller. I’m not much of a gamer, but I have to admit that this pop-out game controller that attaches to your phone via MagSafe looks pretty sick. [Link]

Godox’s MA5R MagSafe Light Up Power Bank. I’m a big fan of MagSafe battery packs that double as other things. This one is also a lighting rig. Ostensibly for photography, it could also be nice as a back up flashlight and battery pack on hikes. [Link]

Some solid recap videos

Reading about all these gadgets is nice, but seeing them in action is even better. Here are a couple videos that I liked which showed off our technological future.

The solar-powered, über-aerodynamic car sounds like incredible engineering. “Our whole vehicle has better aerodynamics than the side mirrors on most pickup trucks.” Wow!

I expect 2025 will be the year of the smart glasses as other companies catch up to the Meta Ray-Bans. The ones Victoria Song demoed with a discreet screen looked quite appealing.

I liked a couple display things in this video. The VR-without-a-headset display was surprising, and I expect we’ll see that tech advance further in the next few years, but it doesn’t look like anything someone would be taking home soon. The rise-up projector TV looks so sleek and unobtrusive for a living room. I love how it can descend to show a short projected fireplace when not watching a show or movie.

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What got you excited from CES this year?

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P.S. If you’re interested, here’s the shortcut I used to build this post throughout the week, as well as the one to make a YouTube embed without cookie tracking.

Linked

A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.

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1️⃣ This artist makes drawing in 3D with Apple Vision Pro look spectacular and full of grace. [🔗 threads.net] (Via Frostbyte)

2️⃣ Oh boy, Finn Voorhees showed off a Bluetooth calculator keyboard (it’s exactly what you think it is) from 8BitDo and I want it exactly as much as I don’t need it — which is to say a whole heck of a lot! [🦣 mastodon.social]

3️⃣ I totally forgot that this amazing tool exists! Ever want to start a podcast over from its first episode and have new episodes appear in your player as if they are getting published in real time? rewind.website does just that. You can set it to have “new” episodes publish daily, weekly, monthly, or on custom days. I used it to listen to Hypercritical a couple years back, and I’m definitely going to be using this for a bunch of shows soon. [🔗 rewind.website]

4️⃣ Although I enjoy 99% Invisible, I’m not a regular listener. But I never miss their annual Mini Stories episode where their staff get to pack in multiple short stories about things that interested them in the year but couldn’t justify a full episode. The one this year features the fascination histories of snooze buttons, propaganda through neon signs, Japanese fire stickers, and Smell-O-Vision. [🔗 99percentinvisible.org]

5️⃣ This 60-second tour of MKBHD’s studio had me grinning from start to finish. It’s a far cry from the in-depth, 20-minute videos of old, but it was perfect for a quick update on what’s changed around. They sure do have a sweet setup. [▶️ youtube.com]

6️⃣ MacStories is a company with a strong moral compass. Good on them taking action by leaving Threads and Instagram following Meta’s policy changes that allow for more harm and harassment on its platforms. MacStories continues to lead the way for this community. [🔗 macstories.net]

7️⃣ I feel like I’ve linked to this project before, but it’s worth remembering. I love Alastair Humphreys’ project of exploring locally. He spent a year doing micro-adventure instead a 20km square grid near his home. It was one of the featured “big ideas” on the Dirtbag Diaries traditional episode to kick off each year. [🎙️ dirtbagdiaries.com]

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🔗 Take a Chance

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Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

7 Things

Today was a tough, yet constructive, day as a homeowner.

I awoke at 8am to a 50-degree house since our furnace had pooped out overnight (again). For a bonus surprise, a pipe in the basement had frozen and was lightly leaking. I quickly filled up some jugs with water, and then turned off the water supply and called the gas company and a plumber.

The furnace technician didn’t arrive until early afternoon, but the fix was very quick. We had air in the line again, and that caused the furnace to lock out. She showed me how to bleed the line so that I could handle it myself next time. The $150 feels expensive for the 15 minutes it took her, but the knowledge is invaluable.

The plumber had a fully booked day (another one never called me back), but shifted some less urgent jobs around to fit me in. He arrived at 6pm and, thankfully, the fix wasn’t too arduous either. We just bypassed the outdoor spigot line with a new section of pipe and will reconnect that in the spring.

The plumber was likewise generous with his knowledge, and I peppered him with questions during the hour it took him to complete the job. I learned helpful bits about our piping system, he helped me label a couple of things in my breaker box, and he shared some advice on dishwasher installation (an upcoming project) and on replacing our wood-burning stove with a propane one. His $400 charge stung more, but again, his expertise made it well worth the cost.

With the timing, I missed out on the Thursday night ice climbing get-together that I typically host for some locals. But the weather was particularly cold and I’m still getting over my sickness… so maybe that was for the best.

While waiting around for the repairs today, I…

• Put up extra coat hooks for my wide variety of outerwear
• Added hooks in the bathroom so my wife’s hair curler and straightener have better spots to live while they cool down than the toilet seat lid
• Installed a ski rack on the wall so our skis and poles won’t fall over in the corner of the entryway
• Took pictures of my Sonos Beam and One SL units to sell, and then got them out of my living room (I’m committing to the HomePod Home Theater setup)
• Cleaned out the kitchen drawers and cabinets (found some real treasures in there 😅)
• And I booked a few upcoming ice climbing trips with clients, which will help pay for the service calls today! 🙌

The day was stressful, but not overwhelmingly so. And I got a lot done — even if they weren’t the projects I had put on my to-do list last night.

The last things to get done tonight will be to go out and grab some dinner for when my wife gets home at 10pm, and then pack up my gear for another big client winter mountaineering excursion tomorrow. This will be our third attempt on this mountain range consisting of four peaks. We’ve gotten three done so far, and tomorrow (🤞) we’ll complete the fourth. That 3:30am wakeup call is going to come mighty quick, though.

I’d better log off and hop to it!

Journal

MacPaw’s newly-previewed Eney gives me strong Siri vibes. Here’s Michael Burkhardt at 9to5Mac on its capabilities:

In simple terms, Eney feels like magic. You’ll be able to talk to Eney, ask it to do a task for you, and it’ll just do it. MacPaw is in a unique position to develop this tool, since they’ve already established great relationships with many Mac app developers through Setapp.

Eney will have many capabilities, but some of the top ones include:

• Sending emails for you
• Converting a file format
• Uninstalling apps
• Writing notes
• Cleaning your Mac for you
• Quickly trimming videos
• Downloading videos for you
• Helping you sort through unread emails
• Extracting audio from a video
• And more!

With third-party integrations and background processes, it sounds really good. But it’ll be coming to market in the tailwind of an Apple Intelligence-enhanced Siri with personal context and that can take action for the user enabled by the App Intents framework (think Shortcuts actions).

I’m sure MacPaw is all too aware of Apple’s first-party advantage looming over them, and yet they’re undeterred. Maybe the stilted launch of Apple Intelligence and its lukewarm reception have given them confidence that there will be plenty of space for another on-device agent to tackle computery tasks.

I think competition from Eney will be good for Siri, even if Siri never thinks of Eney at all.

Linked

[TL;DR: Enable the menu bar icon, and it’ll start working again. And yes, I timed it.]

If you, like me, were wondering why the ChatGPT app on macOS had its global keyboard shortcut mysteriously stop working, you’ve found the right place. I love the shortcut — mine is set to ⌥Space — to quickly bring up a temporary mini chat window (they call it the Chat Bar) no mattery where I am in the system. No need to open the full ChatGPT app.¹

Anyway, a couple of months ago, I noticed the shortcut would work unless I had the full app’s window open. Keeping the app running in the background with the window closed, hidden, or even minimized wouldn’t work; it had to be open. Which sort of defeats the whole point of the Chat Bar. I never could figure it out, decided it must be a bug, and resigned myself to keep the window open in a separate space until the bug was fixed.

Well… several months and multiple app updates later and the issue still wasn’t resolved. Furthermore, I never remembered to keep the window open and became re-frustrated every time I punched in the shortcut and nothing happened. Today, I finally did what I should have done long ago and typed “chatgpt app keyboard shortcut stopped working” into my search engine. 1.05 seconds later and, yet again, the top result — a post vencislav.popov on the OpenAI Community forum — had the fix:

Ok, I figured it out. Earlier today I disabled the menubar icon because I never use it and it is just visual clutter. Turns out the chat bar shortcut functionality is tied to the menubar icon and it doesn’t work unless the icon is active.

— vencislav.popov

Well, I’ll be! I, too, had turned off the (supposedly) unnecessary menu bar icon to reduce visual clutter. I popped open the ChatGPT app, hit ⌘, to bring up its preferences, and added it back to the menu bar. It took all of five seconds.

I guess that setting is more important than it looks. Although, this reliance on the menu bar icon really should either be changed or made more clear in the settings panel.

Now I’m back to pulling up the Chat Bar left and right — well, just at the bottom, I guess — to check little bits and bobs like the correct punctuation for “Well, I’ll be!” and the right capitilization for “menu bar” from Apple’s style guide. And I don’t even have to see the ChatGPT icon up there thanks to Bartender. Yippee!

Thanks, vencislav.popov!

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1. If Type to Siri offered any sort of history, I might use that more. But for now, ChatGPT works great for me.↩︎

Tips

I expect I’ll have more to say about this before long, but I recently bought a secondhand 1st-gen HomePod from eBay and paired it with my original one. I’ve been using them as my home theater system instead of my old Sonos Beam + 2x Sonos One SL setup.

I wasn’t convinced at first, but now I love it. The HomePods setup has solved my latency issues, provides way more bass, and there are no surround sound hiccups when we rearrange the room for holidays and such. Best of all, the volume control on my Apple TV remote finally works as intended. The Sonos system was so squirrelly when it came to volume adjustment. The only downside is there’s not quite as much “surround” to the sound. But I don’t mind.

All TV audio gets routed through the HomePods via the Apple TV and eARC, and my wife hasn’t noticed anything awry when playing the PlayStation or Switch. So far, so good! (And 1st-gen HomePods are pretty affordable on eBay!)

I haven’t disassembled my Sonos stuff yet, but they might be headed to the For Sale page sooner rather than later.

Gear Reviews