Category: Uncategorized

My 2020 Podcast Lineup

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Thought I’d give a quick update on something I’ve been spending a ton of time with in quarantine life. I’ve been a heavy podcast listener for a long time now – I can remember listening to podcasts even before it was part of the iTunes Store, using apps to side load mp3s into the app. My […]

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Why is my own data least important in search?

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From Tech Reflect:

I don’t know if this is a macOS or iOS specific thing, but it’s a trend on those platforms in recent years that is very frustrating. It’s hard enough finding things on the internet but once you find them, it should be easy to find them again.

The order in which iOS shows you Siri search results is indeed puzzling. I get there’s a privacy v. convenience tradeoff argument that can be made but it’s not that this data isn’t on your device in these instances. I feel the pain of this whenever I dabble with Apple Maps in particular. Addresses of people I’ve taken the time to create contact cards for or based on areas it knows I’ve been to should be prioritized and used in search results, yet it rarely is (Apple has a TON of information in my travels on my local device and seems to completely squander it).

Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting

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From Julio Vincent Gambuto:

Until then, get ready, my friends. What is about to be unleashed on American society will be the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again. It will come from brands, it will come from government, it will even come from each other, and it will come from the left and from the right. We will do anything, spend anything, believe anything, just so we can take away how horribly uncomfortable all of this feels. And on top of that, just to turn the screw that much more, will be the one effort that’s even greater: the all-out blitz to make you believe you never saw what you saw.

I’ve already started seeing some content like this on the web and on TV. I, like everyone else, want to get back to “normal”, whatever that is. However, I do hope we try to be a slightly better version of ourselves as well and not try to paper over it with frenzied consumer spending.

HomePod now runs on tvOS, here’s what that could mean

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Looks like there’s a move to unify HomePod and Apple TV under one OS to allow for older chip compatibility as well as (possibly) unifying for future hardware. I have guarded optimism that Apple is working on cleaning up their home strategy to compete with Amazon and Google in this space, but it could be nothing.

Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

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From Tom Dotan, The Information:

“Apple users are more valuable [to advertisers] based on demographics, being higher income, et cetera,” said Jason Kint, CEO of industry trade group Digital Content Next. He argues that Safari users have been “wrongly devalued” in the short term and says marketers just need to find better ways to reach them online. As an example, Kint points to ads that relate to the articles someone is reading—contextual advertising—as a format that doesn’t run afoul of privacy issues. He says the format is growing and credits Apple’s clampdown for one reason.

Amen. Targeted advertising, for me, has never really provided any amazing value over your more standard ad placement. As much as I love seeing ads on every page I visit for the thing I already bought on Amazon, I’d prefer to see ads the publishers stand by on some level.

A couple of small changes to the site

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Made a few small changes to the site today. First, link blog entry titles will now link out to the website I’m linking to. I also pulled in some Tumblr posts, sorry about the spam there. Since starting to try to write and link to content more, I’ve been working on ways to make it […]

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