Automatic shuts down service, asks customers to recycle adapter

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From Automatic:

We will be shutting down all operations at 11:59 pm, PT, on May 28, 2020, and, as a result, your service will end at that time. All features of your Automatic service will remain active up until the shutdown. At that time, all features of your Automatic service, including Crash Alert and Real-Time Location & Sharing, will stop. We ask that you please discard your adapter by following standard electronic recycling procedures. You do not need to send your adapter back to Automatic.

Automatic, if you aren’t familiar, makes a little car adapter that sends all sorts of into about your trip (MPG, distance travelled, fast starts/stops and more) to a web service so you can track how you’re driving over time. This could be especially useful for folks that travel for business or folks like me that have an older car that doesn’t display MPG data.

I’ve had one of these in my car for nearly a decade now, and at the end of the month, it’ll be useless. I can only assume the reason they’re just shutting it all down and asking folks to dispose of the adapter is that the IP is more valuable to the company’s parent (Sirius) than it would be to open source the website and APIs.

Just another reminder that most smart home and IOT hardware is just pre-trash: it’ll be eWaste as soon as the company can’t keep growing or turn a profit. It’s one of the reasons I’ve been looking more and more into IOT stuff that works with HomeKit and doesn’t require a web service to run.

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 list of favorites has ebbed and flowed over the years, and being stuck at home has given me more time to listen than ever.

I’ve used a ton of apps over the years as well, but lately I’ve started using Pocket Casts more instead of Overcast. The reasons are varied but ultimately despite the fact that I like the way that Pocket Casts looks and “feels”. Overcast works extremely well, is built by an indie developer (Marco Arment) who I love to support, and he’s been on the forefront of a lot of the best features in podcast players over the last few years. He nailed voice boosting, silence trimming and sharing way before the competition caught up (Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher etc haven’t even tried yet).

However, despite the fact that Pocket Casts is a little more fiddly than Overcast is, I love the little details like the way the UI subtly changes to match the podcast artwork, the way you can modify the up next queue, and the multiple of ways you can listen. Pocket Casts supports Chromecast, Sonos, has a web app, a desktop app, and is on nearly any platform under the sun. They’re also owned by NPR and a few other radio stations, so it’s not like it’s some evil company like Luminary or Stitcher.

I’m not 100% sure that I’ll switch away from Overcast full time as it’s familiar and more “set it and forget it”, but I am growing weary of the app’s design, lack of multi-platform strategy and slower pace of development.

2020 podcasts

2020 Podcasts

One of the neat things about Pocket Casts is that sharing what you’re listening to is pretty simple. There’s a built in interface that allows you to share some or all of the shows you listen to, which is a nice middle ground between the single-episode sharing in Overcast and some overly-aggressive sharing of everything you listen to.

I’ve been listening to mostly the same group of podcasts for years now. However, with additional downtime at home and more time doing things like yardwork, I’ve picked up a few new shows to augment my old favorites. I’m not a completionist by any stretch – I tend to look at the show notes and aggressively remove shows I’m not interested in.

You can find the full list here.

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.