I discovered Bight Gear last year when attempting a summit of Mount Rainer with the RMI Expeditions guiding company. RMI is closely affiliated with Bight Gear, so Bight’s technical clothing was prominently featured in their marketing materials and packing list suggestions. I decided to try out their Solstice sun hoody on the expedition, and am so glad I did. Not only did it perform wonderfully on the trip, but it’s been one of my favorite pieces of clothing ever since and I wear it all the time. I love that it keeps up with wicking away sweat on strenuous backpacking days, and it keeps me warm when it’s chilly out while also magically cooling me down on hot, sunny days.
With that good experience to go off of, I returned often to the Bight Gear website to lust after their other products. And then, just a few weeks ago, I got an email from them with bittersweet news: Bight Gear is getting acquired by Black Diamond. Black Diamond makes quality equipment for outdoor adventurers like me, and I’ve used their rock climbing goods for years. In fact, I recently met a few members from the very highest levels of their executive team — good guys! — and was assured that they’re getting back to their roots of chasing ever-higher standards for their gear.
So while I’m a little disappointed to see the Bight Gear brand go away — I loved that little bight of rope logo that proudly stated I’m a climber — I’m excited that their expertise is joining such a prominent team at Black Diamond. I’ll be on the lookout for the BD successor to the Solstice Hoody.
The Solstice Hoody works equally in the hot rainforest… ⌘
…as it does on a chilly glacier. (Seen here next to a Black Diamond sun hoody, its future cousin.) ⌘
With Bight Gear shutting down, they’re offering all remaining products at 30% off. I picked up a few spare Solstice Hoodies, and their Alpha Ascender Vest that I’ve been eyeing. My one-sentence review so far: It fits well and feels great!
I wonder if we should consider Apple’s experiment with ludicrously-priced gold Apple Watches as ultimately a success. Perhaps the goal was never to continue to sell solid gold watches, but instead was to guide our first impression of the product into one of luxury and desire. A brute-force method into a mindshare category that was a cut above the Fitbits and Garmins. And even though the precious metal version didn’t last past the “Series 0” family, that mindshare extended to down the ~$300 price point watches and into subsequent Series. “Get a luxury-caliber watch at a fraction of the price! It does all the same stuff!”
Getting them onto celebrities’ wrists right from the start was a stroke of genius. Maybe the fancy gold was simply the price of admission. I wouldn’t blame them if the entire production budget for the Edition watches that year was lumped under Marketing.
A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ What a wonderful home page. 😊 (Or should I say web house?) But don’t stop there, the experimentation on Anh’s site is divine. [🔗 Anh // anhvn.com (via @sod)]
2️⃣ Google opened a new visitor center at its Mountain View campus. It’s hard not to draw comparisons to an Apple Store or the Apple Park Visitor Center. One thing that stuck out to me while watching this news coverage is that the Googlers talking about it almost seemed like they were making up the buzzwords as they went along. Apple execs use buzzwords, but their talking points are always well-rehearsed. [🔗ABC7 News Bay Area // youtube.com] (via Michael Steeber)
4️⃣ This is one Christmas special that I’m pretty excited for! Hannah Waddingham’s singing as Rebecca in Ted Lasso was always a highlight of each season. Now she’ll have a whole show to show off her impressive pipes! [🔗 Apple TV+ // apple.com]
5️⃣ Libraries are awesome. Check out these ‘Binge Boxes’, each with a handful of themed movies for a fun movie night. Clever groupings, too. [🔗 austin.bibliocommons.com] (via Greg Pierce)
7️⃣ I’m not much of a gamer, but I appreciate and respect their value, and the care that goes into that art form. Zach Gage and the team at the new Puzzmo group lays out a strong case for games in their manifesto. [🔗 puzzmo.com]
I recently wrote about my discovery of the ‘Speak Selection’ feature in Accessibility settings. The ability to select the text of an article in Reeder, or anywhere else in the system, and have it read out loud to me while dynamically highlighting the sentence and word as they’re spoken was groundbreaking. It was the final dot to be connected to allow me to build an ideal reading workflow. I could use my preferred RSS sync service (Feedly) and reader app (Reeder), save items for later using my preferred service (Pocket1), read those saved items anywhere (Reeder on Apple devices, the Pocket website on
Windows machines, my Kobo e-reader when disconnected or focused), and listen to the articles with a passable voice engine.
There was just one major point of friction. Selecting an entire article in Reeder isn’t particularly easy. It’s a two-handed affair to scroll to the bottom of the page, select the final paragraph, and then tap the top of the screen to scroll back up while still holding the text selection. Then tap ‘Speak’ in the context menu. Oh, and then I also couldn’t switch away from Reeder or turn off the screen because the narration would stop.
Tonight, I solved all those problems with a very clever workaround. And by clever workaround, I mean I happened to try the very obvious toggle beneath the ‘Speak Selection’ option in Settings: the one called ‘Speak Screen’. 🤦♂️
Speak Screen is absolutely great. I guess I overlooked this option before because I incorrectly assumed it would start speaking out everything onscreen, such as button labels and other UI elements like it does for VoiceOver. But no, those are separate features for a reason. Speak Screen does (almost) exactly what I want it to do. With one gesture (a two-finger swipe down from the top of the screen), the system starts reading the primary content displayed.
In Reeder, where I use it primarily, it starts reading and highlighting the article, just as if I had selected it all manually. The voice is fairly smooth and conversational. I’ve chosen one of the Siri voices because I think they’ve had the most work put into them. Here’s an example:
It also pops up the ‘Speech Controller’ overlay which contains controls for play/pause, playback speed (I like 1.2-1.3x), and skipping sections. Crucially, the speech continues to play even if I switch away from the being-spoken content, the app, or even if I turn off the screen.
The Speech Controller overlay minimizes and fades out of the way but remains available to expand if you want to pause or skip around paragraphs. ⌘
Almost…
I hedged above saying it does “almost” exactly what I want because there are still a few quirks. For instance, the auto-scrolling screen sometimes jumps around or prevents scrolling the text manually. List items will inexplicably sometime be read out at 1x despite the speed being set to something faster. Also, in Drafts on my iPad, after reading out the current onscreen text draft, the system does continue to read the draft list and other UI stuff. But for 90% of my text-to-speech needs — RSS, webpages, email, and articles saved to Pocket — Speak Screen is pretty much perfect.
The landscape for human-like voice replication is changing rapidly with advances in AI/machine learning. I expect that Apple’s voice options, although already good when set to one of the modern Siri voices, will likewise improve in short order. Maybe — crosses fingers — it could even get as good as Omnivore’s Ultra Realistic Voices. Hell, with Personal Voice I could even have everything read back to me in my own voice!
Between the swipe gesture and being available system-wide, Speak Screen actually gets pretty close to matching Android’s ‘Reading Mode’ app, which I previously admired. But Reading Mode still has the upper hand with a more fully-featured and functional interface, including a scrub bar, a clean reading view, and showing the estimated reading time.
(Triple) Click Button to Read
Here’s a little peek behind the curtain here at HeyDingus HQ. I wrote this whole piece a couple of weeks ago. But I wanted to have some real time with the feature to make sure that it stuck and worked as well as I thought it would. I’m so glad that I waited because now I can share with you an extra improvement to this setup that has changed the game for me. You can kick off Speak Screen with a press of a physical button on your devices! Nope, this is not the Action Button that’s all the rage these days. It’s actually, like a lot of the coolest things I’m discovering these days, another accessibility feature called ‘Accessibility Shortcut’.
At the bottom of the Accessibility pane in the Settings app, the second-to-last item is the one we want. Tapping into this setting reveals this description:
Configure and then triple-click the Side Button to toggle accessibility features on or off.
Below that you’ll find a list of the common accessibility features that you might want to toggle on and off throughout the day.2 And what’s on that list but our newly beloved Speak Screen.3 Select that as the Accessibility Shortcut and you’re off the races.4
With that enabled, at any time I can triple-click the Side Button of my iPhone (or Top Button of my iPad) and it’ll start reading out whatever’s on screen using the settings I’ve set in Speak Screen. It does the same thing as that two-finger swipe down gesture, but it’s way easier to initiate! Rather than pulling down the Notification Center half the time when I’m trying to start a reading session, I can very easily hammer on the Side Button a few times and move on.
This button already turns on and off the device, launches Siri and Apple Wallet, and calls for emergencies…how about one more thing? 😅⌘
It’s so much better than using the two-finger swipe. I can do it one-handed! I’ve found this to be particularly handy when reading late into the night. In Reeder, I can reach over to my phone on the nightstand and make an imprecise swipe to the next article, triple-click the Side Button, and start listening. I can do it with my eyes closed.
That’s a Wrap…For Now
I’m happy to have pieced together a reading system that lets me use the devices and apps that I love, without leaving behind any major features. I can save anything from RSS with a single swipe in Reeder, or elsewhere with the Pocket extension. I can flit between reading in Reeder, Pocket, the web, or my Kobo with all of them staying in sync. I can listen to my beloved auto-scrolling, highlighted, and versatile text-to-speech with the (triple) click of a button. Finally, my reading flow is feeling settled.
At least until the next app or challenge (👀) comes along. 😉
Yeah…that Instapaper experiment didn’t last very long. I valued having the option to read things on my Kobo too much to give up that integration with Pocket. But by using Pocket as the syncing service with Reeder as the frontend reading experience 99% of the time, I meet almost all of my ideal read-later service criteria. So now I’m still catching up on things that I saved in Readwise Reader and Instapaper, while all the current stuff goes into Pocket. It’s a whole thing.↩︎
Funnily enough, I actually used to use Accessibility Shortcut back in the day. Before system-wide dark mode was a thing, it was somewhat popular to use the ‘Invert Colors’ (now called ‘Classic Invert’) to flip the colors of the screen at night so that they’d be less blinding in dark environments. A quick triple-click flipped the colors so you wouldn’t have to go diving into the stark white Settings app to enable it.↩︎
One option missing from this list: good ol’ Shortcuts. If I could set a custom shortcut from the Shortcuts app as an Accessibility Shortcut (yes, I know how ridiculous this sentence sounds), I could create my very own pseudo-Action Button and keep my physical Mute Switch.↩︎
If you want, you can turn on multiple Accessibility features for the Accessibility Shortcut. When you have more than one enabled, the triple-click presents a menu for you to choose from.↩︎
I like collecting reactions to product announcements on Apple Event days. But today’s deluge of opinions about the new $79 USB-C Apple Pencil took me by surprise. The undisputed King of Hot Takes this time ’round is certainly Parker Ortolani, who seems to have taken personal offense at Apple’s strategy with this newest member of the Apple Pencil family.
As a side note, Threads was a way more entertaining stage to watch as the press release mania unfolded today than Micro.blog/Mastodon. You’ll notice in the makeup of the collection below. I can’t wait for Threads to implement ActivityPub so that I can see everything all in one place.
Alright, got your popcorn? Disregard the ‘Caution: Hot!’ sign, and let’s dive in.
(By the way, this absolutely seems to be the case as Apple updated apple.com with a new hero image of the iPad (10th gen) with the newest Pencil magnetically attached to the camera side. Also the iPad page calls it out specifically.)
After the FineWoven charging port snafu, now I’m wondering how many USB-C cables are not going to fit in that sliding cap-revealed channel of the new Apple Pencil. Or how many people will try a charging-only, no data cable and have issues with pairing. Going all USB-C will have its own pains.
We make fun of other companies’ poor product-naming choices, but are we really doing that much better over here in Apple-land?
This glorious paragraph had to be in a product announcement’s press release — in the main body text!
There’s THREE versions of the Apple Pencil??
Just realized…the Pencil got USB-C before Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and AirPods Max 🫠
Here’s a teaser of our first exchange, as summarized by ChatGPT:
Robert expresses surprise and flattery at being invited to participate in the project. He shares a glimpse of his background, including growing up in Michigan, working in technology, and returning to the education sector as a Technology Coordinator. Robert details his recent volunteer work for the Free Fair Association, managing wireless networks and playing a crucial role in the “World’s Largest Free Fair.” He includes images of the fair and signs off with a reference to his adventures in education and carnivals. In Jarrod’s response, he acknowledges the unusual dynamic of writing letters to a longtime friend and reminisces about their shared history. He expresses gratitude for Robert’s role in encouraging his interest in technology and reflects on their early communication methods. Jarrod discusses Robert’s inclination toward both big and small projects, seeking insights into the conscious or unconscious decision-making behind these choices. He shares his thoughts on potential
volunteer work, mentioning interest in becoming a Climbing Merit Badge counselor and exploring opportunities with local organizations. Jarrod encourages Robert to share more Free Fair escapades, memorable experiences, and future goals in subsequent letters.
If you’d like to be a penpal for this project, please reach out! I’d love to get you on the schedule.
Back in July for the PenPals project, I was corresponding with Jason Becker, the instigator of this whole series of letters sent around the web. He sent me a reply months ago to round out our conversation. It was profound and has taken me a while to digest and find worthwhile words to respond. Here’s a breif summary of our final exchange by ChatGPT:
In Jason’s third letter, he responds to Jarrod’s suggestion of making his writing more personal and reflective, drawing parallels between writing and personal flourishing. Jason shares insights into his career journey from chemistry to policy to leading a development team at a software startup, relating it to finding his own patch of land. He acknowledges the challenge of balancing risk-taking in both short-term and long-term planning, expressing concerns about discovering and living the life he wants. Jason reflects on the difficulty of breaking routine and embracing new experiences due to a base level of complacency. In Jarrod’s reply, he commends Jason’s poetic expression and resonates with the fear of complacency. Jarrod discusses his own fears, emphasizing the importance of using fear as a tool for positive action rather than letting it lead to inaction. He shares insights from rock climbing experiences, emphasizing the need to move through fear and take action to become
more powerful and capable. Jarrod concludes by expressing gratitude for the conversation.
If you’d like to be a penpal for this project, please reach out! I’d love to get you on the schedule.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with manipulating your own photos. People have done it for a very long time. But Google’s tools put powerful photo manipulation features — the kinds of edits that were previously only available with some Photoshop knowledge and hours of work — into everyone’s hands and encourage them to be used on a wide scale, without any particular guardrails or consideration for what that might mean. Suddenly, almost any photo you take can be instantly turned into a fake.
…with these, well, safeguards described just a few paragraphs later:
Using Best Take does not add metadata to photos, Marconi says, but there are some restrictions on the feature that could prevent it from being used nefariously. Best Take does not generate new facial expressions, and it “uses an on-device face detection algorithm to match up a face across six photos taken within seconds of each other,” according to Marconi. It also can’t pull expressions from photos outside that timeframe; Marconi says the source images for Best Take “requires metadata that shows they were taken within a 10-second window.”
I’m as wary as the next person about this acceleration into AI-manipulated content — okay, I’m probably a little less wary than the next person as I think that the bumpy road will smooth out and people will adapt — but it feels a bit unfair to characterize Google as having given no forethought to the potential downsides of their technology. Their direct quotes demonstrate otherwise.
I’ve seen a number of posts from folks who, 8 years after its features were essentially duplicated by Apple Music, are still paying $25 a year for iTunes Match and wondering what would happen if they stopped. Would they lose cloud streaming access to all their locally ripped and matched tracks? Would it all continue to work seamlessly just through Apple Music? It’s never been quite clear.
I have a definitive answer on what would happen - straight from, uh sources. Match features are included in Apple Music. There is a slight difference in that with Match the files you can re-download are DRM free. With Apple Music they have DRM. So, after your Apple Music sub ends the downloads would no longer be playable. If you had Match your downloads would live on. But if you never end your AM subscription then there is no difference in features.
If, of course, you have a huge local library backed up or whatever then none of it matters. It’s only ‘cloud first’ folks that have deleted locally that might end up with issues cancelling. Or oddities like Match having replaced one track with another.
So it sounds like if you download a local copy of your music first, then you would have a DRM-free library just in case and could safely cancel iTunes Match. And you can still sign up for iTunes Match today — a fact I only just learned — if you change your mind.
Personally, I left iTunes Match behind long ago. I think even knowingly deleted the local copies of my ripped music. I could, even now, still download local DRM-free copies of my music purchased from the iTunes Store. But I decided that I didn’t want the mental overhead of managing an offline music library. I did the same with the movies I once spent hours ripping and converting. I grew tired of trying to make home media servers like iTunes Home Sharing or Plex work. I’m happy to rent access to the world’s music and media.
Update 2023-10-29: According to John Siracusa on ATP, via an article on iMore, you can download your matched and uploaded music DRM-free without being subscribed to iTunes Match. Apple Music-proper has allowed that since 2017. Another reason to save yourself $25 per year on that overlapping service.
Apple is planning a new system for its retail stores that will update the software on iPhones prior to sale. The company has developed a proprietary pad-like device that the store can place boxes of iPhones on top of. That system can then wirelessly turn on the iPhone, update its software and then power it back down — all without the phone’s packaging ever being opened. The company aims to begin rolling this out to its stores before the end of the year.
That would be super nice for customers to avoid dealing with a software update as their first experience with an exciting new gadget. But I can also see it being a huge headache for Backstage employees to pull all the inventory of unopened phones off the shelves, wait for them to finish their updating deal on that pad, and then restock them all. Especially with how frequent minor updates and security patches get rolled out these days, that’s a massive amount of new labor to add onto already-busy retail employees.
I’ll be interested to hear if Apple’s worked out a nifty system to streamline it all.
