A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ Pika is another new blogging platform that looks really nice for anyone who just wants to get straight to writing. Not too fiddly, but beautiful out of the box. Like Scribbles, I think I’ll be recommending it a lot. [🔗 pika.page]
2️⃣ Manton Reece shared his measured view on the value that a failed Apple product could bring to the company. [🔗 manton.org]
3️⃣ I tossed more than a few minutes down the rabbit hole by reliving some fun internet memes and moments in this excellent Internet Artifacts site from Neal. [🔗 neal.fun]
4️⃣ You wanna learn a little about making music with beats and loops? This is a fun place to start. [🔗 learningmusic.ableton.com]
5️⃣ I’m a sucker for a good optical illusion, so this collection of ones made with a diffusion model so that they’re multiple illusions in one really piqued my interest. [🔗 dangeng.github.io]
6️⃣ I am absolutely no good at this game where you guess where a photo was taken in a hotter/colder fashion. [🔗 pudding.cool]
7️⃣ There are definitely some brands on this list of fictional ones from books and movies and such that I thought were real. [🔗 fictionalbrandsarchive.com]
Us The Duo is a special artist to me and my wife. I love their story (husband and wife performing team) and how they’ve captured it over the years. I think Public Record - EP is the album that I discovered them by, and even though it’s not my favorite or theirs (I’m sure that one will make an appearance later in this project), it’s a very good introduction to their style. Plus, how and why it was made is pretty cool. Each song was written to tell the story of one of their fans. The “I’m Me” track is hilarious, while “One Last Dance” is achingly beautiful.
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.
2️⃣ Speaking of Lynn Fisher, you really owe it to yourself to peruse through her site. It’s one of the most incredible works of art I’ve seen. She has an archive of all the old designs (she redoes it every year), and a plethora of super creative projects. I particularly like the ‘A Single Div’ project where she creates amazing art exclusively with CSS. [🔗 Lynn Fischer // lynnandtonic.com]
4️⃣ I think simple web tools are just the coolest. This one lets you clean up any recipe webpage into an ingredients list (with adjustable portioning), and easy-to-follow instructions that can be (optionally) be saved to an account — just by prepending cooked.wiki/ in front of the recipe’s URL. Here’s an example. [🔗 Cooked // cooked.wiki]
6️⃣ If you ever feel nostalgic for those old animated buttons that folks would add to their webpage, well, here’s a collection of over 4500 of them. [🔗 The 88x31 GIF Collection // cyber.dabamos.de]
7️⃣ I started learning a bit of Morse Code with this tool. Game? Either way, it’s pretty fun and effective hands-on education! [🔗 Learn Morse Code // perry.qa]
If you asked me about my favorite artist at any time in the past 10 years or so, I’d probably say The Avett Brothers. So it’s terribly difficult to pick the first album of theirs to share here. I ended up going with the one that I’ve loved/favorited the most songs in. While their style has changed over the years, I consider The Carpenter to be quintessential Avett Brothers: Twangy, bouncy music accompanying strong lyrical duets.
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.
What is dead may never die, so it’s so nice to see Christina and Simone together on a Relay podcast in this mini Rocket reunion episode. I can’t wait to dig in!
Mikah Sargent: Do you use widgets on your smartphone, and if you do, which ones?
You know, I didn’t think I was a heavy widgets user, but now that I study my phone, I think I might be! My home screens are generally set up around specific functions. I have my core Home Screen — the first one — with my core widgets. They’re the ones that I use every day to reference things and get things done. They include a medium-sized widget stack with Fantastical, CARROT Weather, and Things. I also have a small widget stack mostly for fuzzy feelings from photos. It has widgets for the Photos app, and for Locket — a delightful app that allows you to send a single photo at a time to your friend’s or loved one’s Home Screen. But that stack is also a Smart Stack, so it’ll occasionally surface a widget that it thinks is relevant for that moment. Right now, for instance,
I’ve got a Music widget in the stack. I’ve also parked the widget for a podcast app called Airshow that I’m testing.
On my second Home Screen, my “active” Home Screen, I have two stacks of medium-sized widgets. On top, I’ve got widgets to track my workout stats: Fitness, Tempo, and Strava. Below it, an audio stack: Longplay, and Overcast.
My third Home Screen is for social, writing, and entertainment. In the center of the screen, I use another medium-sized stack with two widgets for Shortcuts (with four shortcuts each related to Micro.blog and blogging), one for Drafts (my most recent notes in the ‘HeyDingus’ workspace, usually blog post ideas).
My final Home Screen is my ‘Marcos Tanaka’ tribute. It only includes widgets. One large one for Play, which shows my most recently saved YouTube videos. And the other is a medium-sized one for MusicBox, which shows my most recently saved albums to listen to.
If we’re getting technical, I also have several widgets on my Today view screen — or Home Screen -1. There I have a bunch of widgets for Shortcuts, one for the Home app, for Day One, for Tally, for Music, for Batteries, and even the OG interactive calculator widget for PCalc.
If we’re getting really technical, I also have Lock Screen widgets. My standard Lock Screen has a widget from LockFlow that acts as a quick launcher into Drafts, one for CARROT Weather because I love the snark, and one for Overcast, which starts playing a show from my go-to playlist.
Like I said, it turns out I use a lot of widgets.
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Simone De Rochefort: Have you been following the discussion around the so-called “ripoff” of Pokémon by Palworld, and what do you think about it?
Honestly, I had not even heard about this controversy until Simone brought it up here on the show. Since then, I’ve picked up a little more, but no, I haven’t been following the story.
With a cursory glance over their artwork and game mechanics, I’m inclined to agree that it seems like a rip-off, but that’s more for lawyers to decide. I’m sure if The Pokemon Company feels that their IP is getting infringed upon, and it sounds like they’re looking into it, they will get involved.
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Dan Moren: Apple released iOS 17.3 this week which adds the Stolen Device Protection feature. Have you enabled this, and do you take any other device security precautions?
Oh yeah, I enabled it as soon as I had the new OS version installed. It seems like there are very few downsides, and will largely negate any chance of the severe repercussions possible if someone gets ahold of your device and its passcode.
I’d encourage everyone to switch it on, and I hope that Apple guides users toward enabling it in future updates.
As for other security precautions, I’m fairly vanilla. I store passwords and passkeys in iCloud Passwords (with a fallback to my 1Password database every so often), and I’m contentious about putting my phone into “passcode-required” mode in situations where I don’t have direct possession of it (read: airport security or traffic stops).
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Christina Warren: Are you still willing to pay an increased amount of money to streaming services to not get ads, or will you pay for an ad-supported option?
You know the old saying, “Once you go no-ads, you can’t go back?” Okay, I might be mixing that up with another phrase, but the sentiment stands. I now look back at my time growing up with ad after ad after ad blasted into our living room for hours every day as madness. Those ads were manipulative media that I didn’t want or need that interrupted what I did want to watch, and that stole my attention and brain space. If I can, I will continue to choose ad-free options for any streaming services.
I’m not happy about fee increases coming to ad-free plans as these services realize that they can get money both ways from the same customer (access charge plus ad revenue), but I’m still willing to pay for it. However, it has made me more seriously consider designating certain months as our “Max month”, “Prime month”, or “Netflix month” and do more of a pay-as-you-go model with them rather than pay for all the services every month.
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Bonus Topic: What was your favorite cartoon as an elementary-aged child?
That’s a tough choice between Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh. Probably Pokémon has had the longest-lasting influence on me, but Yu-Gi-Oh still has a special place in my heart. That was certainly a creative series.
My dark horse show, though, was Static Shock. It was a really interesting superhero show that it seems like no one has heard of.
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Overtime Topic: What is the secret to the Mac’s longevity, and do you have any Mac memories to share?
It’s hard to think of another tech product that has been so firmly planted in people’s hearts and minds for over four decades. I think the secret to its longevity is that it has been at the center of the tech hub for most of its life. It’s the most capable platform that spans many form factors and enables the development of all other kinds of tech. But I also think something that has helped people’s adoration for the Mac is its nickname. It’s so much easier to love something called “Mac” than “a PC”.
And people do love their Mac.
My favorite Mac memory is of unwrapping my first one, a hand-me-down gift from my friend Robert. That sleek metal frame of the MacBook Pro, and booting it up to see my name on the login screen — oh, that’s hard to top.
This episode went places I certainly was not expecting! But it’s been a delight, as always. Until next week!
You’ve been around for a decade longer than I’ve been alive, and yet I feel a kinship in age. Maybe it’s that decade you lost, wandering the lands of Performa and Quadra. Like good wine, you’ve only gotten better with age. We once feared for your longevity and you’ve certainly had your rough patches, but now it seems you are again in it for the long haul with your best days ahead of you. Though there are more options than ever with phones, tablets, and voice and spatial computers surrounding me to express creativity and get shit done, it is to you that I most readily turn. You are the tool — dare I say friend? — that best helps me to make the dreams in my head into reality.
To you, and all the people who have made you what you are over the last 40 years, thank you.
Update: Oh, and since we’re all doing it, my first Mac was the first Intel MacBook Pro — perhaps the greatest gift I’ve ever received — as a hand-me-down from my best friend Robert. Before I got that laptop, which we fondly referred to as “Lappy”, I had been running Windows XP, which I fully customized to resemble Mac OS X’s Aqua interface. However, it couldn’t compare to the real deal, and I’ve never looked back.
Dan Moren: As part of the final Epic vs. Apple case decision, Apple is now allowing links to payments outside the App Store; I’m curious if you see this actively changing the state of how the App Store works, if it’ll stave off scrutiny from regulators, or do you think it’s just a sop?
I think Apple is asking too much of developers for any quantity of them to go through the hassle of getting the entitlement, tracking their users’ payments, paying the commission, and reporting back to Apple. I also don’t think that it’ll stave off any upcoming regulations. If anything, I think governments will loudly proclaim that Apple’s commission fee is too high, but then waffle about what they can do about it.
Apple is playing with fire here, and I can’t help but think they’re going to get burned.
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Jeff Carlson: Do you use, or have you ever used, the blood oxygen feature of the Apple Watch? Are there other health/wellness features that you do use?
Only in passing curiosity have I used the blood oxygen sensor of my Apple Watch. I think it’s a good feature to have available, and I’m frustrated that Apple has let the situation get so far that new watches are being sold without a major health/wellness-focused feature. But it’s also not a capability that I think about very often, and I don’t think its absence will have a notable impact on sales.
I would love for there to be a resolution though, so I could stop hearing about it.
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Jason Snell: Are you buying a Vision Pro; if so, why or why not? If not, what would make you consider one in the future?
I awoke early on Friday morning so that I could man the pre-order battle station that consisted of my Mac mini, iPad Pro, and iPhone all waiting patiently at store.apple.com. But I needn’t have worried about securing a unit on Day 1. Within five minutes of pre-orders going live at 8:00 am, I ordered a 512 GB Apple Vision Pro with the travel case and AppleCare.
The checkout process went quite smoothly for me, and I couldn’t be more excited about the prospect of spatial computing.
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Shelly Brisbin: When was the last time that you purchased a piece of physical media (like a TV show, movie, or music), and when that happened, did you do that because of some unavailability in the streaming world?
I make a concerted effort not to purchase stuff that will just sit on a shelf, so I really don’t remember the last time I intentionally bought a piece of physical media. I’ve been gifted a handful of paperback and hardcover books, but those weren’t my choice to receive.
Oh. Just kidding. I looked to my right and saw Michael Flarup’s The macOS App Icon Book copy that I had purchased on Kickstarter many, many months ago. I guess that and The iOS App Icon Book that came with it were certainly the most recent examples of my recent physical media pick-me-ups.
I’m looking forward to perusing them over time.
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Bonus Topic: Snow: Yay or Nay?
A hefty, heartfelt “Yay!” from us over at Scotts Cobble Nordic Center. I love watching the snow, playing in it, and more. If the winter is going to be cold — and it is — we might as well have the snow to make it more fun.
I split my time pretty regularly between a 2020 11-inch iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard and a 6th-gen iPad mini. The bigger iPad comes with me to work and is my go-to for watching videos and anything I need to type out so that I can use the Magic Keyboard.
The iPad mini is mostly a home tablet for me. It’s where I do a whole bunch of reading because the size is much more conducive to holding for any length of time. It’s also my cellular version, so it makes most trips with me.
There are certainly some notable times coming Apple’s way this year. I hope they’re ready for scrutiny from customers about the Vision Pro as a new product line and from regulators trying to even the competitive landscape.
A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ The Bearded Teacher made an excellent video showing off the Apple Shortcuts app. He took requests for shortcuts folks wanted made, and then walked through step-by-step how to make each one. There were some great ideas here, and I immediately set up an automation to silence unknown callers from 7pm-7am. [▶️ Stephen Robles // youtube.com]
2️⃣ Devon Dundee made an incredible shortcut that talks directly to the Trakt and The Movie Database APIs to log things you watched in your Journaling app of choice. [🔗 @devondundee // mastodon.social]
3️⃣ The unstoppable Robb Knight made a Humonize! site for listeners of Connected who don’t want to give up the humming of the Rickies. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, I can’t blame you. [🔗 Robb Knight // hum.rknight.me]
5️⃣ Did you know there’s a QuickLook app for Windows (press the spacebar to preview files, like on macOS)? Me neither! But I guess there is! [🔗 QuickLook // apps.microsoft.com] (Via @techalter)
6️⃣ Feedle is an RSS search engine where every search is an RSS feed. Use it to discover blogs and podcasts, or keep up with a topic over time. [🔗 feedle.world] (Via Lou Plummer)
7️⃣ This may look hype-y, and it kind of is, but it’s also a fair and compelling look back at the Steve Jobs to Tim Cook transition at Apple, and beyond. [▶️ fpt. // youtube.com]
I like that he’s got a distinctive voice that cuts through the noise. I like that each song has a compelling story to tell. But most of all, I love how fun this album is. I’m sure there will be more Lukas Graham shared here, but his debut album is the place to start!
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.
Overcast, the podcast app by the internet’s Marco Arment, has long reigned supreme in the podcast nerd corner of the Apple-sphere. It’s a fast and reliable app, made by someone who cares a ton about audio quality, so it also helps your shows to sound their best. Maybe a year ago or more, I discovered something new in the app, which surprised me because I thought I knew everything there was to know about Overcast.
I’ve savedhundreds of hours with the app (not even getting into the thousands I’ve spent using it), exported dozens of episode clips, and made several shortcuts that take advantage of some of Overcast’s niche features. I’m what you might call a “podcast power user”. And still, this was new. I hadn’t seen anyone talk about it but was such a smart feature that I couldn’t believe it was flying under the radar. Even in the intervening year that this blog post has sat in my drafts folder, no one else seemed to notice it.
Okay, that’s enough lede. What is this thing? It’s a game. Within Overcast. Yep, now Marco is a game designer too. But it’s not just any game — it’s a watchOS game… which might explain why it’s gone essentially undiscovered. I don’t think many folks are spelunking through watchOS apps — the few that there are — these days.
So, why is there a game within Overcast? To keep up with the likes of James Thomson’s PCalc? Nope. While PCalc’s game-with-an-about-screen-gone-independent-app served to scratch a particular experimental development itch of James’s, Overcast’s game serves a more functional purpose: to distract you from the otherwise listless time necessary to download a podcast directly to the Apple Watch for offline listening.
You see, Marco has tried for years to optimize Overcast’s watchOS app to download podcast episodes in the background so that they’re always ready for you to listen to sans phone, say when you’re out for a run. But, from what he’s said many times on ATP, watchOS app development is often fraught, and getting background activity to work is even more challenging. So, despite his best efforts, sometimes the playlist of shows you’ve set to automatically download to the watch (you can choose one in the watch app’s settings) isn’t up-to-date. Sometimes you’ve got to manually hit the download button on a particular show, which means waiting with your wrist raised, lest the screen turn off and app activity paused, until the show finishes downloading. This is where Overcast’s breakout game comes in.
I often get so into the game that I forget that I’m waiting for a download to finish. ⌘
Actually, I should capitalize that as Overcast’s Breakout game. Because when you manually start to download an episode, what pops up but a bespoke version of Breakout. You know Breakout, that classic Atari arcade game in which you bounce around a little ball, aiming for tiles along the top of the screen by bouncing it off a paddle that you control along the bottom. When you hit a tile, it disappears. When all the tiles have been eliminated, you win that level and move on to a harder one with a smaller paddle and faster movement. I spent many many hours playing Breakout on my iPod nano, where it was called Brick.
In Overcast’s version, though, the tiles are made of the show artwork from your library of podcasts, which is a nice touch. All the while that you’re playing the game, operating the paddle by scrolling up and down with the Digital Crown, your podcast downloads in the background. There’s a loading bar along the bottom edge so that you can keep an eye on its progress. There’s no high score screen, game saves, or any way to share achievements. It’s just a nice time-filler that serves to keep you engaged with the app so that it can finish its job uninterrupted. It’s a workaround to a problem that Marco could have solved with a simple “Podcast downloading, please wait…” message. But because he’s respectful of his users and knows that’s not a great experience, he went all-out and built a whole goddamn game into his podcast app to make a loading screen fun.
I find that kind of indie developer whimsy so delightful.
Mikah Sargent: Tell me about the screens that you regularly use to watch content.
If we’re talking TV or movies, most of it happens on our main television in the living room. It’s a reasonably large (can’t remember the size) OLED screen from LG that my wife and I picked up in 2020, I think. We’ve loved it. It’s so much better than the old hand-me-down TV that we had before and that now serves as a workout screen for TV+ mostly.
But I do just as much, if not more, watching of YouTube videos, Instagram Reels, and occasional long-form content on my phone or iPad. It’s probably pretty even between the two. I tend to save up the good stuff to watch on our big TV, but Vision Pro might change all that soon.
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Zac Hall: It seems like this year is the year of bespoke AI hardware like the Humane Ai Pin, Rewind Pendant, and Rabbit R1. Is there an app on your phone that you’d actually carry around bespoke hardware for instead of using the app?
The Rabbit R1 is the most compelling AI hardware that I’ve seen so far. I think their ‘Large Action Model’ idea is huge and could inform the next set of big AI leaps. But I’d find it infinitely more compelling if it were built into the OS of the phone I already carry and that already has all my apps and info. So, conversely, I’d rather carry around the R1 as an app, rather than more apps as hardware.
But, in the spirit of the question, I think I’d too go back to a physical manifestation of the Music app, like an iPod nano that works with my Apple Music library.
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Dan Moren: Have you seen anything announced at this year’s CES that you’re genuinely interested in?
In short, no. But that’s not because they’re all stinkers this year. I just haven’t had the time to follow the coverage, so I don’t know much about the gizmos and gadgets introduced at this year’s show. The Rabbit R1 might be the only thing that I could identify as introduced last week and that sounded at least up my alley.
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Jason Howell: What is the absolute best way to point at things on a screen, and why do you feel that way?
In the debate between trackpad and mouse, I’ve been Team Mouse for many years. Trackpads are great on laptops or for the iPad’s Magic Keyboard, but given the opportunity to use a bigger screen, I’ll always go for the mouse. And which mouse, do you ask? The Magic Mouse is the best one I’ve ever used. People say it’s unergonomic, but my recent attempts to make it more ergonomic with a bigger profile have only led, ironically, to more pain in my wrist and forearm. I love its small and light form factor and its gestures so very much.
I do still have a trackpad sitting on the other side of my keyboard, but it rarely gets used, and only then just for broad gestures.
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Bonus Topic: When you were young and you stayed home sick from school, which show do you remember watching on TV?
I think I watched most of How I Met Your Mother during sick days at home. Or at least that’s how I remember getting into the show. Price Is Right certainly was in the mix, but HIMYM was my go-to.
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Overtime Topic: What app are you forced to use, even though you dislike it, and why do you have to use it?
I’m going to choose to include web apps in the pool because there is no app that I dislike using more than Constant Contact.
<rant>I have to use it at work to send out our local shop’s email newsletter every week or so, and I hate every minute of it. The WYSIWYG tools feel like they haven’t been updated since about 2007, it’s slow, buggy, and very difficult to create anything that looks remotely good with it.
I’d much prefer to write everything in Markdown with a very simple layout, but that’s not an option. It takes me hours, and I hate it.</rant>
Can’t wait for next week, which, because of my delay in getting to last week’s show, is only a couple of days away!
I spent some time over the last week (and a lot today) reworking the Letters project into the PenPals project. I was inspired by Kev Quirk’s organization of his emails back and forth with readers (like yours truly!) on one page. Since the project really is about the conversation, it made sense to have all the letters live together and bring some cohesion to the project, rather than have them spread across many blog posts.
As for those old blog posts, I didn’t want to remove them from the site. Instead, I employed ChatGPT to help me write summaries for each partial exchange as teasers for the full conversation and updated each post with them. Here’s an example from one set of letters with Jason Becker. I’ll probably do the same thing going forward, that way each new update can still have a blog post announcing it in the feed and archive, but the conversation will reside on that specific person’s page. A living document, if you will.
Getting this all put together was a larger hurdle than I expected. First, I experimented with the CSS, which is heavily inspired by Kev’s design on his site. Then I had to go back through each blog post, copy and paste each email into its own <div>, generate and edit the summaries, update all the links from letters → penpals, write up a little blurb about each correspondent, and then, finally, check each one. Hopefully, I didn’t make any goofs.
But now I’m all caught up and am really pleased with how they turned out. Here’s Robert Silvernail’s page. And now that I’ve got templates made, each future exchange should be much easier to manage.
Speaking of which, I’m wide open for 2024 if you’d like to be my penpal for a month. You can read the guidelines and all the previous letters right here at /penpals to get an idea of what it’s like. I’d love to talk with you!
Oh, and why “PenPals” project? I think the term describes what’s happening here a little better than “Letters” project. And because I’m a sucker for alliteration.
A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ MrMobile (and the rest of the team at Clicks) made a physical keyboard case for the iPhone and it looks… well, it actually looks quite cool! There’s no version for my beloved Mini, and I doubt I’d enjoy having a longer, heavier phone, but I can absolutely see the benefit to smartphone power typists and content creators. The whole launch video is excellent. 🔗 clicks.tech]
2️⃣ I’m going to go ahead and say there’s a lot of AI automation that goes unreviewed before items are put on sale on Amazon. 🤦♂️ [🔗 Elizabeth Lopatto // theverge.com]
3️⃣ With a domain name like buttsdotlol.tumblr.com, are you really expecting anything else? 🤣 [🔗 buttsdotlol.tumblr.com] (Thanks Robb)
4️⃣ I’ve been wondering how many immersive environments will come with the Vision Pro, and how many separate apps you’d have to download if you wanted more of them. Looks like with Flowriter, you could generate an effectively infinite number of them. [🔗 flowriter.ink]
5️⃣ This Instagram redesign concept video is comprehensive while being entertaining, and I’d be hard-pressed to find one of its suggestions that I don’t agree with. [🔗 Juxtopposed // youtube.com]
6️⃣ There’s a page to see the most popular pages on Wikipedia per specified timeframe. I wasn’t surprised by 2023’s top page, but there were others on that list that I wouldn’t have guessed. [🔗 pageviews.wmcloud.org]
This album got me through most of middle school — it was perhaps the first “edgy” music I started listening to. Certainly, it helped me process my young teenage angst. Still, I turn to it when I need to release some inner turmoil.
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.
