Following its history-making, back-to-back Emmy Award wins for its freshman and sophomore seasons, Apple TV+ today revealed that season three of its global phenomenon “Ted Lasso,” will premiere around the world with the first episode on Wednesday, March 15, followed by new episodes weekly, every Wednesday. Moving to its new weekly Wednesday premiere, “Ted Lasso” marks the first Apple TV+ series to launch midweek.
First of all, 🥳⚽️🟦🤩!
Second, I’m glad to see Apple try a new premiere night. Fridays are really full already, and it makes it more difficult to choose what to watch. I mean, I would have chosen to watch Ted Lasso first anyway, but now TV+ can own my Wednesday night watching for a while and I’ll still check out what’s new on Fridays.
Thirdly, I notice that the press release didn’t mention anything about this season being the series finale, as it did with Servant. Could mean nothing, but I’m choosing to be optimistic that Apple, Jason Sudeikis, and Co. are leaving the door open for more in the Ted Lasso universe.
TL;DR: You can now subscribe to HeyDingus posts by email to receive my blog posts in your inbox. I’m using Feedrabbit, and you can subscribe right here.
Tired: Getting emails via RSS.
Wired: Getting RSS via email.
Since starting HeyDingus, I’ve wanted folks to have the option to subscribe to my blog posts via email. Personally, I think RSS is the best way to keep up with a website’s updates, but not everyone is down to finding a feed reader or even knows what RSS is. Especially after considering blog posts as emails to the internet, it seemed appropriate that people should be able to receive my writing through that medium.
The bummer is that neither Squarespace nor Blot offers email delivery as a “free” feature. When I put the question to the Blot forum, I got recommendations for Buttondown. I’ve explored their newsletter platform before and both it looks great and features an RSS slurping mechanism to make it dead simple to get your content in without having to copy and paste or recreate it.
That all looked promising, and I might consider Buttondown more seriously if I decide to supplement HeyDingus with a premium newsletter. But for now, I didn’t think that adding another full-blown host for my writing was a complexity that I wanted to take on. And their free plan only allows for 100 subscribers. I don’t know how popular getting blog posts as emails will be, but I didn’t want to have to start paying for additional subscribers if it took off. Luckily, I found a free tool that requires no extra effort on my end.
Feedrabbit does exactly what I wanted. Give it an RSS feed plus your email address, and you’ll start getting every new entry as an email. It’s a consumer product, so all of the power is in each user’s hands. I have nothing to manage on my end. I can’t adjust formatting, nor the speed of delivery, and — like RSS — I have no idea of who or how many people subscribe using Feedrabbit. And their basic plan is completely free for everyone.
If Blot adds a native email subscription feature, I’ll probably switch to that. But until then, I’ll point readers to Feedrabbit if they want an email delivery option. And even if/when I do switch, Feedrabbit should continue to work for anyone subscribed in that way.
(For other bloggers, you can make it easy for readers to subscribe by entering your RSS feed into Feedrabbit’s search box, hitting ‘Subscribe’, and then copying and using the resulting URL which will point to your feed. Then readers only have to enter their email address to subscribe to your site. They won’t have to root around for your RSS feed.)
No extra work, no extra hassle. If you’ve wanted to have my writing (or any other site with an RSS feed) delivered straight to you by email, I recommend giving Feedrabbit a shot.
P.S. Blockquote formatted text gets rendered a little funny in Spark, but looks better (though not perfect) in Apple Mail. I sent feedback about it along to Feedrabbit, but you’re welcome to also let them know if you want.
P.P.S. I fed this article to ChatGPT and asked it to summarize it:
The author of the HeyDingus blog wanted to offer email subscriptions to their posts, but their website platforms didn’t have this feature. They received recommendations to use Buttondown, a newsletter platform, but it was not ideal due to its pricing and complexity. Instead, they found Feedrabbit, a free tool that delivers new blog entries to subscribers via email using RSS feeds. The author recommends it to other bloggers as a hassle-free way to offer email subscriptions to readers.
👍👍
P.P.P.S. I should have mentioned that you can find the email subscription link in the footer of any page on this site:
A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ Here’s a solid piece on Birchtree comparing touch/tap targets on a MacBook Pro and an iPad mini. There’s not as big of a difference in target size as you might expect. [🔗 Matt Bircher // birchtree.me]
4️⃣ David Smith found a fantastic use for ChatGPT. He’s speeding up language localization for his apps. It’s neither perfect nor all-encompassing, but it’s certainly a useful tool to ease getting from 0 to 1. [🔗 @_DavidSmith // mastodon.social]
5️⃣ Speaking of handy tools, simpleicons.org is another free one that I think I’m going to get a ton of use out of down the road. [🔗 simpleicons.org]
6️⃣ If you’re from my neck of the woods and are into playing outside in the winter, the Adirondack Community Avalanche Project is something that should be on your radar. It just got onto mine. [🔗 adkavy.org]
7️⃣ And here’s a fun one. My wife turned me onto these bird feeders that are basically reverse bay windows that get the birds into your house for observation! So I guess we’ll be building one of those when we own a home. [🎥 Jesica Kia // tiktok.com]
And so that is the advice I now pass on to those of you who, like me, can feel overwhelmed by the resolutions and the intentions and the mantras, those of you who feel the pressure to make big promises to yourself that you may or may not be able to keep.
It’s okay. Keep going.
Because with a little grace and a little time and perspective you will see that you are not the same person you were at 13 or 30 or on January 1st of the previous year.
I’ll admit that the clickbaity title got me, but I’m glad I read Liz’s article. It reinforces that yearly themes > New Year’s resolutions.
It’s not everyday that the core leadership team at Apple sees a change. Here’s Chance Miller, writing for 9to5Mac:
Apple has added a new face to its executive leadership team. The company has named Carol Surface its new Chief People Officer, who joins Apple after nearly a decade at the medical device company Medtronic. Surface is Apple’s first-ever Chief People Officer.
I’m a bit surprised to see Apple hire an “outsider” for this high-profile role. I thought they had learned their lesson last time. Hopefully, Surface fits within Apple’s culture better than other external hires.
As part of this change, Apple is realigning the role of Deirdre O’Brien, a 30-year Apple veteran who has been Apple’s senior vice president of Retail + People since 2019. Once Surface begins at Apple in March, Apple will remove the human resources responsibilities from O’Brien’s role, allowing her to focus full-time on retail.
It’s probably for the best that O’Brien has those duties split out. On one hand, Apple’s retail team makes up a huge part of their overall headcount, so having those roles aligned under one person makes sense. On the other, I can imagine that there are opposing incentives in trying to make the retail stores as successful and profitable as possible, and also have the happiest and most successful employees. For example, I often wonder how situations play out when retail employees are upset by one of O’Brien’s decrees. When your head of HR is also the retail boss, knowing where and how the buck stops — I imagine — gets murky. Having Surface as another person to balance out those debates will probably be beneficial for everyone.
As a side note, I’m curious about how Apple determines a “Chief ____ Officer” role versus a Senior Vice President or Vice President. If there’s a pattern to their Leadership page, I can’t see it. ‘People’ joins ‘Executive’, ‘Financial’, and ‘Operations’ as the only C-level positions after the Chief Design Officer role disappeared with John Ive’s departure. A fact that’s more relevant this week as Apple is, reportedly, planning to have their lead industrial designers all report to the Chief Operations Officer, rather than name a new head for the team after Evans Hankey, current vice president of industrial design, also exits.
Anyway, back to Surface as the new Chief People Officer.
Carol Surface joins Apple after a 10-year stint as an executive vice president in charge of human resources. Prior to that, she spent three and a half years in that same role at Best Buy as well as over a decade in human resources and personnel at PepsiCo. She received a Bachelor of arts in psychology from Castleton University and a Ph.D. in industrial and organizational psychology from Central Michigan University.
Surface certainly has the receipts to be successful in this role. Apple’s been dropping down the “best places to work” list, so they could use a change up in that regard. I wish Surface all the best, and hope we hear positive feedback from Apple employees about her tenure. I’m extra rooting for her since I see she earned her Ph.D. from Central Michigan University; it’s also my alma mater.
Apple TV+ today announced that its international Emmy Award-winning global espionage thriller “Tehran” has been renewed for a third season, and that multi-Emmy Award nominee Hugh Laurie (“House M.D.,” “The Night Manager,” “Roadkill”) is set to join the ensemble cast. Created by Moshe Zonder, Dana Eden and Maor Kohn, and directed by Daniel Syrkin, season three of “Tehran” is now in production.
Tehran is definitely one of those edge-of-your-seat sort of shows. I thoroughly enjoyed seasons one and two, even if I was thoroughly frustrated with some of the characters’ decisions.
As a huge Hugh Laurie fan, I’m excited to see his role in the show and where season three will go after the spicy end to season two.
The longer I look at it, the more I like this render by Jonas Daehnert. An iPhone Ultra in titanium, made with design cues from the Apple Watch Ultra? I think there’s something there.
A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ Fake meat product sales are on the decline, probably due to recession concerns. It’s a bummer, since I think they could make a big environmental impact. I always try the imitation meats when I see them on a menu. [Link - Megan Hernbroth // axios.com]
2️⃣ Stalwart Daring Fireball hardly needs a link from whippersnapper HeyDingus, but I did really enjoy Gruber’s piece on the feel of app quality. Bonus points were earned with the perfect, and titular, Steve Jobs quote which wraps it up. [Link - John Gruber // daringfireball.net]
And now begins some link vamping because I didn’t have seven things saved up this time… So here’s five things out of my Apple Archive storage!
3️⃣ Michael Steeber put together this guide for all the furniture in Apple Store Boardrooms. [Link]
4️⃣ Here’s an amazing working Dashboard replica. [Link]
“My whole day is managing crash notifications,” said Trina Dummer, interim director of Summit County’s emergency services, which received 185 such calls in the week from Jan. 13 to Jan. 22. (In winters past, the typical call volume on a busy day was roughly half that.) Ms. Dummer said that the onslaught was threatening to desensitize dispatchers and divert limited resources from true emergencies.
“Apple needs to put in their own call center if this is a feature they want,” she said.
I’ve seen a bunch of these anecdotes going around. I feel tension mounting against Crash Detection because of all the false positive calls, which is a shame because it can be life-saving in its intended environment. Apple’s going to have to do better here, and quickly, before all good will for the feature is spent.
For what it’s worth, I feel myself on high alert for that buzz and siren when I’m skiing, biking, or during any activity when my watch could misconstrue a normal jolt as a “hard fall”. I’d be mortified to place an unnecessary call to 911.
So, I’m stuck trying to pin down thoughts on sometimes ephemeral feelings provoked by an app. You can’t measure and compare feelings, but you know when they just don’t push your buttons.
Readwise Reader hasn’t pulled at my heartstrings either. There are bits that I love (auto narration, shortlist, blazing fast share extension, reading view, the ‘Archive and Next’ button), but it doesn’t feel as effortless to use as Reeder. I’ve always aspired to be an article highlighter, but even while I’ve had access to Readwise’s premier highlighting service, I haven’t used it. Plus, Pocket articles sync to my Kobo…so, while I had high hopes, I’m not sure what I’m going to do.
