The Swanson Pyramid of Greatness shirt. Get it. Or don’t. This is America, so I can’t tell you what to do.
James questions if blogs should change with the seasons:
[C]ould a website be different as time passes? Could a website adapt to nighttime so that readers have an easier experience perusing information? In this same vein: how, more broadly, could a website adapt to the passage of time? How could a website adapt to the seasons?
This has me pondering. I go through different seasons of writing, for sure. During parts of the year, I’m perfectly happy to be parked in front of my computer, typing away. At other times, my interest wanders elsewhere. Perhaps the design should reflect that somehow.
From Make Something Wonderful, published by the Steve Jobs Archive:
Six Pixar films won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature during this third act of Steve’s life. And when he resigned from Apple, six weeks before his death from pancreatic cancer in 2011, his beloved company, with its sixty thousand employees, seasoned leadership team, and clear mission guiding its future, was the most valuable in the world.
I sometimes forget the role that Steve played at Pixar. That third act of his life was really something. 📚
🆕📝 A passage from Ratika Deshpande’s ‘The Sky Zine’
She shipped it!
🔗
I think I’d be accepting the nine months of severance and taking my talents elsewhere. This whole WordPress thing is smelling more rotten by the day.
A cute bear, a window tiling tip, impressive iPhone audio, those glasses, an iPod with a camera, Lonely Island is back, and a must-see talk.
Jason Snell, sixcolors.com:
On the one hand, the fact that you can get noise cancellation on base AirPods is amazing. Their hard plastic body means that they can’t make a soft seal like the silicone tips on the AirPods Pro can, so there’s more outside audio leakage to compensate for. However, there’s a huge advantage there: If you can’t stand silicone ear tips sticking into your ears, maybe the AirPods 4 will let you finally use ANC AirPods for the first time.
That’s me! Tried the AirPods Pro a few times but they didn’t work for my ears. I love the AirPods 4 and their ANC is plenty for me.
Jay Peters, theverge.com:
Amazon has discontinued the Kindle Oasis, which was the only Kindle still available with physical page-turn buttons. The company announced a new Kindle lineup earlier today, but Amazon confirmed to The Verge that it’s moving on from the Oasis.
The old non-metal version of the Kindle Oasis is my favorite e-reader size and design of all-time, and it’s the one my wife still uses every day. I’ve since settled into my Kobo Libra 2, but I miss the incredible thinness and featherweight of the Oasis, not to mention its svelte leather battery cover. Pour one out…
🆕📝 Chief People Officer Left the Chat
I was rooting for her, but Carol Surface apparently wasn’t meant to last at Apple.
I’ll have more to say about this soon, but I’m thrilled to finally reveal that my big leap this year is to start up my own guiding service. I’m nervous and excited, but most of all I’m eager to share more outdoor adventures in this beautiful place. Coming soon to an Adirondack Park near you. Onward!
Cory Doctorow, pluralistic.net:
Did you know that, by default, your email sends information to mailing list platforms about your reading activity? The platform gets to know if you opened the message, and often how far along you’ve read in it. On top of that, they get all the private information your browser or app leaks about you, including your location. This is unbelievably gross, and you get to bypass all of it, just by reading in RSS.
I think I’m down to just one newsletter delivered via email (from someone I trust!). All the rest come in through RSS, and it’s the way to go for sure.
🆕📝 ‘Call me, maybe’: Neatnik’s New Phone Support
Of course Adam is doing this. He can’t help but do right by his customers.
Annie Mueller wrote up some excellent (and timely) advice on being more confident:
Mess it up badly.
I mean, just fuck it up completely. Do irreparable damage. Leave things a total mess, preferably bloody. Look back on your prior crashing-and-burning with a certain fondness. How petty it seems in comparison to the absolute destruction you’re standing in now. How easy it was, in retrospect, to recover. How small a mess, really.
Fighting with Amazon Customer Support was not what I planned for today. Even over email, I’m pretty sure it’s an LLM responding using the prompt, “Keep asking for the same information until he gives up.”
I’ve even tried to set up a phone call, but it won’t give me the field to enter my number. 😤
Currently reading: Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills by The Mountaineers 📚
It’s about time I got to “the bible” of climbing tombs.
Tom Jones, sherwood.news:
We’re often told with virtual and augmented reality that the possibilities are almost endless. On the $3,499 Apple Vision Pro headset, however, the amount of new experiences for users to explore seems to have already slowed to a near standstill.
According to data from Appfigures, cited recently in The Wall Street Journal, there were 300 new apps released for the Vision Pro in February, its official US launch month. In September, there were 10.
If Apple put out AVP early for a head start on AR apps, they’ve got a lot of work to do. (Via @amerpie)
My keyboard’s modifiers suddenly went haywire—Command-A (⌘A) gave me å instead of Select All. No tab switching, no copy/paste. Yikes! I reset it, checked settings, searched online, even asked ChatGPT. Then I remembered — it’s got a physical switch for Windows mode! Flipped it back. Problem solved. 🤦♂️
Consumer Affairs has some data on smartphone use and ownership in the United States that’s interesting, and SellCell has some good data on how often people around the world upgrade their phone. While the most common upgrade cycle is 2-3 years (40%), and a similar amount (39%) upgrade in 4 or more year cycles, a full 21% of people upgrade their phone at least once per year. Given an estimated 316 million smartphone owners in the US today, that’s 66 million Americans who buy a new phone every year.
The “nobody does this” rhetoric bugs me too, but wow, 20% is more than I expected.
Nick Heer on Tesla’s recent We, Robot event:
Public transit, which is available today, is the very definition of democratized transportation, especially if it has been carefully considered for the needs of people with disabilities. It is inexpensive, requires less space per person than any car, and has a beneficial feedback loop of safety and usage. I am not arguing the two cannot coexist; perhaps some of this stuff makes sense in low-density sprawl. But I have little confidence the future will look like Musk’s vision, or that Tesla will be delivering it. Why would anyone still believe this too-rich carnival barker who lies all the time?
📚 Finished reading: Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words by Steve Jobs 👍👍
What a uniquely remarkable person.
I would watch the heck out of any show with this music. song.link/i/1454371…
I like to go back to Walt Mossberg’s rememberance of Steve Jobs from time-to-time. Surely I read it through rose-tinted glasses these days, but he really was one-of-a-kind:
But I can honestly say that, in my many conversations with him, the dominant tone he struck was optimism and certainty […]
At times in our conversations, when I would criticize the decisions of record labels or phone carriers, he’d surprise me by forcefully disagreeing, explaining how the world looked from their point of view, how hard their jobs were in a time of digital disruption, and how they would come around.