This isn’t a novel thing to say, but I’m a big fan of AirPods. I’ve named them as my most transformational tech product in the past, and I spend multiple hours every day with them in my ears. I’ve tried every generation of AirPods, save for AirPods Pro (2nd gen), and have more audio products scattered throughout my home than I’d like to admit.¹ My daily drivers are AirPods (2nd gen). Suffice it to say, I have opinions about AirPods.

With rumors ramping up about next the generation of AirPods non-Pro, I wanted to take a moment to lay out what I’d like to see come in their next version.

In order of importance:

1. Improved fit
2. Tap-to-control
3. Noise cancellation magic
4. Improved audio quality
5. Fitness features
6. The rest

Improved fit

You saw above that I’m still rocking the AirPods (2nd gen) that debuted in 2019, but whose design is unchanged from the original AirPods introduced in 2016 along with the iPhone 7. Why? Because they’re the design that fit in my ears. As far as a first-generation product goes, Apple truly knocked it out of the park with AirPods. They said they studied thousands of ears to come up with the best shape to fit the most ears, and I believe them.

That said, they also made the same claim about the third-generation AirPods, the ones that gained an elongated “head” to nearly match the style of AirPods Pro, and those didn’t fit my ear holes at all. I was so disappointed that they fell out with any sort of activity or chewing motion. The same goes for AirPods Pro. I’ve tried every ear tip size, third-party foam tips, and every imaginable orientation to try to get them to fit. They just don’t and the combination of discomfort and worry that they’d fall out at any moment prevented me from ever getting lost in the music or conversation getting piped through them. In-ear tips are not the answer for me, and there are plenty of us out there that I think there needs to be a non-canal-obstructing option.

And so I’ve stuck with the second-generation version which Apple has mercifully kept available for sale, I assume, because they know that the two fits cover a wider breadth of customers than if they only sold the third-generations. But I can’t imagine Apple wants to keep that original design around forever, and so I’m optimistic that the next design will fit me as well as the 1st/2nd gens do.

Tap-to-control

Here’s another thing I want to see brought forward from the second-generation AirPods to the fourth: the imprecise tapping mechanism to control media playback. For the first two generations of AirPods, a simple double-tap with your finger on the outside of the head of the earbud would play/pause the media, and a triple-tap would skip tracks. And they were configurable to summon Siri.

For the third-generation design, the stem of the earbud shrunk in size but grew in capability. Play/pause/skip was moved to a pinching gesture on the stem, as measured by a new force sensor. AirPods Pro brought volume control to the stem as well, allowing you to drag a finger up and down it to adjust volume. In my experience, the volume control is awesome and something obviously missing from prior models. But the pinching gesture is a swing and a miss.

John Siracusa did a, predictably, good job at articulating why the pinching mechanism is a regression back when it was introduced, and you should listen to his rant about it on the Accidental Tech Podcast. The tl;dl version is that you need to be more precise to grab and pinch, you run the risk of pulling the AirPod out of your ears when you grip the stem (as opposed to pushing them in with the tapping gesture), and it is a difficult gesture to accomplish with gloved or otherwise covered (dirty, soapy, etc.) hand. Oh, and it’s likewise difficult to do when the AirPods are covered by a hat like mine often are here in the northeast.

I’m sure that plenty of people have gotten used to the new gestures, so I don’t necessarily think that the pinch gesture should be removed, but bringing back “tap-to-control” and introducing volume control to the non-Pro model would be big wins in my book.

Noise cancellation magic

Now we’re getting to the nice-to-haves. Apple is doing such interesting work in the noise cancellation field with AirPods Pro, that I’m, frankly, a bit jealous. I’d like to be able to tune back outside noises with cancellation, boost conversations with conversation mode, or let the AirPods do all the decision-making and just keep them on Adaptive Audio. I recognize that these features would suffer from the lack of an in-ear tip to provide passive noise cancellation along with the active version. But I also think Apple can make some headway here. And you could always turn it off if you don’t like the effect.

Improved audio quality

I think this is pretty much a gimme that Apple would tout their audio processing prowess, along with an improved physical speaker system for any new set of AirPods. But it’s fourth on my list because I’m not dissatisfied with how even my second-generation models sound. I don’t have particularly discerning hearing, so any slight change that could made in earbuds so small would likely get lost on me.² But better is better, so let’s always keep moving sound quality forward.

Fitness features

Alright, now I’m just throwing pasta at the wall. There have been whispers of fitness tracking features coming to AirPods, and that sounds cool, I guess? If having a sensor inside my ears helps my Apple Watch to better track my heart rate or other health metrics, sure, let’s go for it! But it probably wouldn’t be a selling point for me, just an extra cool thing.

The rest

Finally, let’s not regress from any other improvements AirPods have enjoyed along their journey. USB-C should be the physical port on the charging case. The buds should have some water resistance to guard against sweat or rain when out on a run. Current battery life is plenty, but could always be improved (provided the case doesn’t have to get bigger — in fact, the smaller the case the better). Their Bluetooth standard should meet the latest specs, or maybe even adapt to use ultra wideband for a more stable and dedicated connection with larger data bandwidth. Improved microphones for phone calls and voice assistants. In short, the usual suspects when bumping up a generation.

AirPods are the gold standard in the wireless headphone industry, and they could stand on their own as a titan in the tech industry if broke out from the rest of Apple’s business. They’re a wearable product, which comes with distinct challenges regarding fit and durability. And they’re deeply personal. Most people I talk to would feel as out of place without their AirPods as they would without their keys or wallet. So a lot rides on each new generation, but I’m hopeful that the next ones will be the best yet.

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1. Although, I really should do a full write-up of my audio journey one of these days.↩︎

2. I’m honestly not sure why I even have the higher bitrate setting in Apple Music turned on. I should experiment if I can even tell the difference there, or if I can save storage and bandwidth by dropping back to the default setting for sound quality.↩︎

I got a nasty surprise when I purchased an “ebook” version of a climbing manual this week.

I thought it was going to be great. I could load it up, along with other guidebooks and reference books, onto my Kobo, and have them all at my disposal on a small, lightweight, and waterproof device that’s easy-to-read in the sun. I’d toss that in my climbing pack any day! But nope, it turns out I purchased a license to read the book through an app, and not even a good one at that. Sure, I can read it on my iPad and iPhone, but it’s not the DRM-free version that I’d been expecting. I suppose I’ll do some digging for a version I can load onto my Kobo, but it left a sour taste in my mouth — like I’d been duped.

This isn’t the outcome I was expecting from this experience, but more and more I’m wondering if I should have just stuck with the Kindle ecosystem. It simply has access to more books, which is the whole point. Ugh.

Taking a page out of Maique’s book and trying a more bite-sized /now update.

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🏋️‍♀️ A weight has been lifted off my shoulders after discussing my Leap Year plans with my wife. I wanted to have more of it figured out before I came to her and made “the pitch”, but I needn’t have waited. She gave me her full support, because of course she did. 🥲 There’s still much to research and line up before it’s a go. But her having my back was the proverbial starting line and I’m so excited/terrified. 😁

⌛🧗‍♂️ Counting down to my Red Rocks climbing trip. It’ll be my first time climbing in Las Vegas — actually my first time in Vegas at all, unless you count a flight layover (I don’t). My buddy and I are looking to rack up some vertical mileage on easy-to-moderate multipitch climbs, and Red Rocks has some of the best of them. Can’t wait!

⛑ It’s apparently professional development season for Jarrod. My first aid and CPR certifications expire soon, so I’ve signed up for a Wilderness First Aid course next months with some new friends I made climbing last week. And in early April, I’m attending the New York State Outdoor Guide’s Association conference. I’ve never been to one, but the sessions look interesting, and I hoping to meet more folks in the industry and learn as much as I can from them. Finally, I pulled the trigger and signed up for an American Mountain Guides Association (AMGA) Single Pitch Instructor (SPI) course in early May. AMGA is the professional instructor certification body in the USA for mountain guides. Since my long-term goal is to become an internationally-certified guide in all the mountain disciplines, the SPI course is the first step along that journey. (I actually took this same course back in 2016, but never got around to signing up for the exam. I won’t make the same mistake this time ’round.)

❄ The weather here in the Northeast has been throwing me for a loop. We got a warm spell for a few weeks that demolished our snow and got me psyched for rock climbing season. But now winter is making a return with new snowfall. I got out skiing a few more times, and I might be able to get in a little more ice climbing if I wasn’t headed to Nevada next week. Who knows what season it’ll be here when I get back! 🤷‍♂️

📺 I tend to only have a couple of TV shows going at any given time. My wife and I have been getting into Foundation as our serious show, and we’re doing a rewatch of New Girl for our lighthearted one. Both are excellent. We’re almost through the first season of Foundation and I’m so glad we’ll be able jump right into the second.

🍿 Have you seen the Elemental movie? What a strange film. Inventive, as always from Pixar, but it sort of missed the mark for me. Not a huge fan of the relationship between Ember and her father. But her love story with Wade in the second half almost pulled it back into the good zone. Still thinking about it, which is something, I suppose. The Taylor Swift: Eras Tour movie has been staring at me from the ‘Up Next’ queue. I’ll probably break down and watch that again soon.

🧘‍♂️ My 30-day yoga journey has turned into more of a 30-to-60-day yoga journey. I haven’t been very consistent about doing it every morning before work, but I’m still seeing some benefits and enjoy it when I drag my ass out of bed to the mat.

📌 I continue to save more blog posts and internet articles than I could ever read.

🫶 The best part of this week, except for item number one at the top, has been the response to kicking off the One a Month Club. Obviously, I believe its a good model, but having other people get excited about it too has been heartwarming. I’ve had people emailing me every day about the project, and it’s already sparked some great conversations. The club itself has nearly 30 members and continues to evolve. You’ll notice short descriptions for each site start to pop up there (if you’re a member and can send me your preferred one-sentence description, please do!). I hope you’ll browse through the awesome sites there and find at least one to support. On a more personal note, I’m blown away to now have six(!) supporters of, as Maique puts it, my dingus.club “shenanigans”. I’m touched.

🤖 Finally, I’m exploring how I can make my /now page a bit more dynamic so that there’s new stuff here even when I don’t get around to writing a full update.

Now

“Being a PenPal with someone in Kyrgyzstan” is not something that I would have had on my Bingo card a couple of years ago. Which is my way of saying that I’ve got a new exchange with Valerie up on our PenPal conversation page.

This time we chatted about studying abroad, Valerie’s experience as a teacher in Kyrgyzstan, and some cultural differences between the States and there. Val made an astute observation about how language impacts how a whole group of people can experience the world around them, while I prattled on some more about climbing and recreation in the mountains. I hope Val get the opportunity to look into some adult clubs!

We also talked a bit about what brought each of us to Micro.blog, which is where we met.

Blogging is just the best.

Read the whole conversation →

PenPals

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

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1️⃣ Apple is moving steadily toward their sustainability goals, this time updating packaging on some charging accessories to no longer use plastic bits and to implore customers to recycle the boxes. (iOS’s ‘Translate this page’ feature came in handy!) [🔗 macotakara.jp] (Via Michael Steeber)

2️⃣ James isn’t just writing about what you can do with a blog, he’s pushing the envelope with his own. Such as allowing you to navigate his site using a penguin. Yes, you read that right. [🔗 jamesg.blog]

3️⃣ Downhill ice skating is not a thing I knew existed. [🔗 @smallaxefarmvermont // instagram.com] (Via Jason Kottke)

4️⃣ Some design trends to look for in 2024. Pretty slick site, too. (I’ll peg highlighting text, karaoke-style as a trend too.) [🔗 designtrends.click] (Via Matt Birchler)

5️⃣ I don’t think I need this app, but I commend Iconfactory for their creative solution to the “what’s going on with my iOS device” problem. They made device memory/network stats into a movie that can be watched picture-in-picture while you do things in other apps. [🔗 Craig Hockenberry // blog.iconfactory.com]

6️⃣ I didn’t know I needed this human-sized dog bed. Now I know. [🔗 Nena Farrell // wired.com] (Via Paul Kafasis)

7️⃣ A friend reminded me of this list of things that Skippy is no longer allowed to do in the US Army. A staple of comedy in my formative years. [🔗 skippyslist.com]

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52 Albums Project

Screen Violence by CHVRCHES (2021) — #11/52

I discovered CHVRCHES through Merlin Mann and John Siracusa. I don’t know why I was surprised that this was the kind of music they liked too (ageism, I guess), but I’m so glad I took them up on the recommendation. They’re so up my alley with their clear lyrics, powerful beats, challenging topics, and high energy.

I’ve liked all of their albums, but Screen Violence is something special. It’s a banger from start to finish.

Follow along on the 52 Albums Project page where I’m making some playlists for you.

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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 52 Albums

When I build shortcuts, I like to think through all the usual ways that someone might want to use it. And then I try to think through the unusual ways someone might use it. To account for different preferences, many of my shortcuts now ask setup questions upon installation that propagate variables in my Setup Stuff™ area at the top.

But what should happen when a shortcut doesn’t get set up quite right on that first go? Or what if it’s designed to run actions on some bit of data passed into the shortcut, but nothing is passed to it?

My latest update to the ‘Publish to Micro.blog’ shortcut addresses some of these anomalies, and I want to share the techniques I use to mitigate them.

Import Questions Gone Wrong

Look, I get it. You don’t know exactly what a shortcut is going to ask you to set up when you tap that ‘Get Shortcut’ button. You might not have the necessary information at hand to answer all the questions in the moment. And while you can go back into the shortcut’s info screen → Setup and choose “Customize Shortcut…” to go through the import questions again, or just edit the actions in the editor view itself, I don’t know that everyone feels confident in doing those things.

This means that, despite your best effort, a user might not get their info into the variables needed to successfully execute the shortcut. Here’s how I worked around that eventuality this time.

In this case, the user was supposed to add their blog ID number during setup so that the shortcut can post to the right blog if they have multiple ones. Luckily, Micro.blog can still accept a POST web request even without an ID and it will just get posted to whatever blog was last used. But it requires sending the request to a differently-formatted URL.

So, instead of hard-coding the URL into the ‘Get Contents of URL’ action, I put an ‘If’ conditional block right before it and use it to evaluate if the ‘blog-id’ variable from the Setup Stuff has any value. If it does, that means the blog ID was entered, and we can send it to the URL that includes the ID. If it doesn’t have any value, it uses the default URL without extra appended parameters.

This approach provides an additional benefit that if the user has just one blog, they don’t need to worry about finding its ID. The shortcut will just handle sending it to the default one anyway.

Addressing a Lack of Input

Now back to the matter of the shortcut’s input. This one was designed to be the final publishing step in other shortcuts, and to accept text from them as input when run as a subroutine. That’s kind of an advanced technique though, and someone might download this shortcut expecting that they can run it from the Shortcuts app, type into its text box, and have that text get published to Micro.blog.

If someone runs it standalone, we basically have three options:

1. Fail silently
2. Check if there’s no input and throw up an error¹
3. Fallback gracefully with a way to get some text to publish

Until today, this shortcut resorted to option 1. It just didn’t work, and there was no notice sent to the user. Not great. But now it accommodates for just such an occasion.

Another ‘If’ conditional block checks to see if the special ‘Shortcut Input’ variable has any value. If it does, great, we’ll use the input. But if not, an ‘Ask for Input’ action solves the problem. I added some explainer text to the action’s prompt. And I saved the user from the need to paste in their clipboard, the most likely way they’ll add text, by setting the default answer to the clipboard’s contents. They’ll have the opportunity to edit or delete the text, or can stop the shortcut by tapping “Cancel” and trying again.

Now, you might wonder why I didn’t address the lack of input way at the top of the shortcut by using the built-in fallback-to-clipboard option:

It’s because I didn’t want to bypass the opportunity to tell the user what’s going on and allow them to edit the text. Sometimes, I need to use the clipboard in other ways first, and getting its contents right away can complicate things. The ‘If’ conditional makes it super clear what happens if there’s no input, and it allows me to address the problem in other ways than with just the clipboard. I could have strung together any number of actions in that ‘Other’ block if necessary.

‘If’ Saves the Day

So if you haven’t done much with the ‘If’ action, here’s your encouragement to play with it some more. It vastly expands what your shortcuts can handle. In this case, it’s helped make mine way more user-friendly and accommodating outside of the intended use case.

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1. A ‘Show Alert’ action works well in this case, and you just disable the option to continue. Or follow it up with a ‘Stop This Shortcut’ action just to be sure.↩︎

Shortcuts Tips

I wrote the other night, after several hours of keyboard-mashing, mouse-clicking, and DNS-wrangling:

Too tired to write a proper introduction post, but I’m happy to say that oneamonth.club is now a thing that exists! It’s something I’ve wanted to put together since being inspired by @manuelmoreale.com. Please send me more sites to feature! And you can support my site for $1/month at dingus.club. 🫶

Well, I’m not much more mentally awake right now, but I am excited to tell you about the One a Month Club. It’s an idea, inspired by Manu Moreale, that kindness from internet strangers can be enough to support a small web project. And that tiered membership overly complicates things. And that it’s hard enough to convince someone to pay anything to support your work, so why would you want to gate any of those fans from seeing what you’ve worked so hard on for them?

We all want writers, code wranglers, and other web artists to be able to get the monetary support they deserve while reaching the widest audience they can.

It manifests like this. To join the One a Month Club, the asking price to support your work and gain access to all of it should be as little as $1 per month. It’s low enough that if someone has any budget at all to spend on extras, they can afford $1 per month. They can set it and forget it, as it shouldn’t make a meaningful impact on their budget. And, as they say, we’ll make it up in volume. Oh, and folks can choose to pay more if they want to. But that’s optional.

Really, you should go read Manu’s blog post about landing on $1+/month as the ideal singular tier for membership. It’s how I got here.

Anyway, ever since reading that post and following suit with my own $1/month supportership at dingus.club, I thought there should be a page that rounds up all the sites and projects that adhere to this framework. A page like nownownow.com or uses.tech. I kind of thought Manu would make one. Instead, it lived in my head and my to-do list rather than on the web for months.

With the introduction of Micro.blog’s single-page sites in January, I knew I could make it a reality. The perfect domain name was available and reasonably priced. I snapped it up as the last piece of the puzzle. (Since the initial idea wasn’t really mine and I see myself as more of a caretaker of it, I’d feel a little weird about hosting the project on my heydingus.net domain and site.)

With a few minutes spent setting up that single-page site in Micro.blog, a few more minutes searching around the web for more sites that meet the $1-for-everything criteria, and many more minutes tweaking the design while waiting for DNS to propagate, oneamonth.club was born.

The web travels fast

As far as I can tell, Manu doesn’t use social media, so I couldn’t adequately notify him with a mention in that initial announcement on my microblog. I intended to send him an email as a heads-up about putting the site together and to open the door for any suggestions, but I wanted to make sure I was happy and settled on its presentation first. Much to my surprise, the next day (yesterday) I already received a request to be added to the site. The inductee said they found it through Manu’s blog.

He’d already found the site and linked to it. Wow! 😅 Turns out, he had been considering putting a similar page together himself after all. I suppose we can both cross that item off our lists now.

Join the club

The club is open to anyone who wants to join.¹ As Manu put it in our brief email exchange about the project:

Honestly, I just want more people to jump on board because I’d love to support a bunch of different blogs. We need more of this to keep the web open and sustainable.

So open your tip jar (Ko-Fi and Buy Me a Coffee are pretty popular and easy to use), and send me links to it and your project. And take a look through the sites already listed there. Maybe you’ll find an awesome new site to help prop up. I have! Let’s keep working on that open and sustainable web together. 🙌

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1. I suppose I should be clear that I’m not going to link out to hateful garbage, so don’t even try if that’s what you’re asking support for. In short, no assholes.↩︎

I’ve not weighed in on Apple’s battle with the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act because, frankly, it seems out of my depth, and I’m not a citizen of the EU so I don’t think my opinion about it counts for much. But I feel compelled to share a few that thoughts solidified as I read Chance Miller’s summary for 9to5Mac of the latest changes to developer’s options over there:

Now, Apple has announced a few additional changes in response to feedback it’s received from developers so far. Most notably, Apple will launch a new Web Distribution feature later this spring that lets developers offer their apps for download directly from their website.

There’s a bunch of stuff here that we would have celebrated Apple for introducing had it done them on their own. Instead, the DMA dragged into them it. Web distribution similar to the Mac? Wow! More linking out opportunities? Great! But knowing Apple hates having to do these so much that they didn’t even make it into the first go at compliance leaves it all feeling insincere and hollow.

As a user, I’d wary of all the new ways to download apps if they were available in the USA. Call me basic, but I value the simplicity of one place to download, update, and restore apps.

As someone sympathetic to developers who have been frustrated by Apple’s iron hand ruling of the App Store, I understand the desire for more options, and for real competition to push Apple to make a better distribution product.

As an Apple enthusiast, I wonder how differently the cards would have fell had Apple loosened their grip on their own, rather than have the European Commission do it for them. For one, I’m confident everything would have been settled before their announcement. The fits and starts of changes to the agreements and options are mightily confusing. And I’m sure the community would feel far more charitable toward Apple, rather than the tinge (and often much stronger) of resentment knowing they have no desire to build any of this.

Apple missed their opportunity to do a developer-friendlier App Store 2.0 on their own, and I’m disappointed that they seem too prideful and firm in their convictions to see how that would have paid off in the long run.

Hey, would you look at that? My first PenPal of 2024 is Valerie from Micro.blog!

Although we missed the first week of March, I’m happy to say that Valerie and I got things on track this weekend and kicked off our month of being PenPals. Valerie is living and working in Kyrgyzstan, which I’m eager to learn about (and hope I’ll be able to confidently spell by the end of March)!

Our first exchanges touch on — what else between strangers? — the weather, and also our interests in outdoor pursuits.

You can read along with our conversation this month here, and check out Valerie’s site here. (I see in her bio that she mentions harboring an interest in Pokémon… I’m excited to explore that!)

Read the whole conversation →

PenPals

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

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1️⃣ Some excellent examples of long-term running jokes. [🔗 Brendan // semi-rad.com]

2️⃣ Great, now I want a MacPad. It really seems like an ideal computer. Like a SurfaceBook, but with OSes I actually want to use. [🔗 Federico Viticci // macstories.net]

3️⃣ James gives us (another) 100 things we can do with our blogs. #61 is calling to me. [🔗 James // jamesg.blog]

4️⃣ I’ve been experimenting with the <details> element and this post has some great ideas for making it look better. [🔗 Ralph Mason // sitepoint.com]

5️⃣ Turns out leap days are still hard for computers. [🔗 Matt Johnson-Pint // codeofmatt.com]

6️⃣ Arun’s hand-drawn line art of cameras that he uses in blog posts is divine. It really boils down the physical object to its key characteristics. [🔗 Arun Venkatesan // arun.is]

7️⃣ My jaw hung open to the floor throughout this video of Tori Kelly and Jacob Collier recording runs for “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. Their vocal control is out of this world. [▶️ Jacob Collier // youtube.com]

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52 Albums Project

That’s Christmas To Me (Deluxe Version) by Pentatonix (2015) — #10/52

Speaking of Tori Kelly, she’s featured on one of my favorite songs (“Winter Wonderland / Don’t Worry Be Happy”) in this, one of my favorite Christmas albums. Pentatonix is in my heavy rotation of music throughout the year, but they certainly feature heaviest during the winter because I can listen to their many Christmas albums without fear of retorts from bystanders.

I was never really into acapella until Pentatonix broke into the mainstream back in my college years. I dig their arrangements, I did their chemistry, I did their choice of music to cover and write, I dig their music videos, but most of all I dig their voices. They’re really an A-tier performing group!

Seeing as we got a little snow today, I don’t feel bad about sharing a Christmas album in March.

Follow along on the 52 Albums Project page where I’m making some playlists for you.

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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 52 Albums