2026-02-06 00:00:23
Computers and sports—two things that should never be appreciated together, if you accept the high-school stereotypes about jocks versus nerds. Today we live in a post-Moneyball world where nerds with computers have quantified every aspect of athletic performance. But back in 1984, who would have expected that the big winner of the Super Bowl would be… Apple Computer?
But it’s true: Apple and the Super Bowl have been making milestones for decades. It’s a nerds-and-jocks love story for the ages, except these days it’s more about musicians than jocks. Let’s look at Apple’s long history with the Super Bowl!
2026-02-05 23:39:40
The Verge’s Terrence O’Brien details Spotify’s solution for helping you jump between audio and print books:
Point your camera at a page, and the Spotify app uses computer vision to match text with audio. If you have to jump behind the wheel for a long drive, but didn’t want to put down The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, you can just snap a pic to jump to the spot in the audiobook where you left off in the physical book.
It works in reverse too, apparently. Point your camera at your physical book and it’ll tell you whether to flip back or forth to reach the spot you left off in your audiobook. (Spotify also today announced that it will partner with Bookshop.org to sell physical copies of its audiobooks.)
It’s a clever workaround, and has me wondering if a similar system could provide a workaround for the lack of sync on other hardware, like the Xteink X4.
That said, it does not escape me that this particular workaround is something that we end up with largely because of the imposition of Digital Rights Management on ebooks. In an ideal world, you’d simply be able to pick up any device—audio, ebook, etc.—and just keep reading where you left off.
While I don’t expect the current situation to change anytime soon, there are occasional glimmers of hope. Amazon, for example, now lets customers download DRM-free ebooks (when publishers have made them available).
I’ve argued before that Apple pushing for a world of DRM-free ebooks—the same way it once did for music—could make the company more relevant in the market once again. But it’s done vanishingly little with its ebook marketplace in recent years, and nothing on the horizon suggests anything different to come.
2026-02-05 23:00:15
I cut the cable TV cord just about seven years ago, and I don’t regret the move at all. Through a judicious selection of streaming services—some free, some bundled—I’m able to see most of what I care to. And for the most part, it’s all on my own schedule.
The one pain point has been sports, which remains one of the few things keeping cable TV afloat. Even that’s changing a little bit, as streaming services are picking up coverage of more events. But to have access to everything, I’d have to subscribe to a whole host of packages, and that balloons the cost up to what I was paying for cable way back when. No thank you.
But there’s a solution of sorts when I need a sports fix, especially if there’s a can’t-miss event that I want to watch from the comfort of my own couch instead of at a sports bar or a friend’s house. It’s day passes via Sling’s streaming service.
If you’re not aware, Sling bundles up a bunch of different channels into one of two collections—Orange or Blue—that you can either buy separately or as one. It costs $45/month to buy one or the other or $69 for the whole megillah. That’s a bit steep for my tastes, but last August, Sling introduced a day pass option, where you can pay just $5 for 24-hour’s worth of access to the bundle of your choice.
So in this scenario, if there’s some event I want to watch on ESPN, I fire up the Sling app on my Apple TV, select the event from the schedule and follow the prompts to hand over my $5. (There’s a little extra tacked on for taxes, but the total bill is less than $6.) And that day pass means I don’t just get to watch one event on ESPN—for the next 24 hours I can watch anything on Sling’s Orange tier, which includes channels like the Food Network, TNT, TBS, and more.
I can tell you that Sling day passes work great in practice. I have a New Year’s Day tradition of watching the Rose Bowl game, a by-product of spending some formative years in Southern California. Or at least I had that tradition: the Rose Bowl has moved from free-to-air TV over to cable in recent years, blocking the game from my cord-cutting view.
On this New Year’s Day, though, I bought a Sling day pass, specifically to watch the Rose Bowl game. And because I made my purchase early enough in the day, I also got to watch two additional football games that were airing on ESPN. It was a nice throwback to my cable TV days, only without the big monthly bill.
There are, however, a couple pitfalls to the day pass approach. First, once you make a purchase from Sling, you’ll never be lonely again, as the streaming service will send many entreaties to your mailbox urging you to maybe consider a full monthly subscription. A quick tap of the Unsubscribe button takes care of that problem, though.
A more pertinent issue would be the fact that those day passes can add up pretty quickly if you don’t exercise some restraint. Fortunately, that’s not a problem for me, as my New Year’s Day splurge happened when there was an event I wanted to see at a time when I planned to be home. Maybe there will be similar circumstances later in the year—a World Cup match, maybe, or an NCAA tournament game. But I’m not too worried about racking up day pass charges.
And even there, you’ve got options. In addition to its day passes, Sling also has 3-day ($10) and weekly ($15) options, which can come in handy if there’s a multi-day sporting event on the calendar. I imagine those will get a workout in some corners when March Madness rolls around.
Cord cutting remains tough if you’re a sports fan, particularly if you blanch at the idea of committing to multiple streaming services just to watch your favorite teams. But at least Sling’s day passes give you a little more flexibility when it comes to unwinding with a good game.
2026-02-05 06:12:57
Our cozy gaming habits, list view vs. column view throwdown, whether AI coding integeration makes us want to build apps, and the rumored Apple products that we’ll instabuy.
2026-02-05 04:00:32
Is it age? Obliviousness? A delayed mental unacuity from my heart surgery last November? Or could it be a Shazaam/Berenstain Bears scenario? All I know is that the first version of this article took Apple to task for including a menu in the Phone app for macOS 26 Tahoe that, in fact, was there all along.
Or was it?1
The Phone app introduced in Tahoe for the Mac (and on iPadOS 26) made it much easier to deal with telephony across your devices. Instead of cramming phone features relayed through your iPhone into FaceTime, you can use a full-fledged Phone app. I have been a big fan of it, since I spend most of my working hours standing in front of a desktop Mac. I far prefer using my hard-wired USB headset for calls than AirPods or, gasp, holding my iPhone to my ear!2
After months of using the Phone app successfuly, I suddenly couldn’t get audio input to work. The Phone app has minimal controls and—I thought—no option to select audio input or output, which, in other apps, means the system selection rules apply.
I use several Rogue Amoeba apps and installed the latest version of SoundSource to see if that helped. Maybe there was an audio routing problem? But no: no settings were active and quitting the app didn’t change the input problem.
Checking the Sound pane in System Settings, I could see that the correct microphone was selected for input and, crucially, showed that it registered me speaking in the “Input level” section as I tested it. I could also be heard on Zoom and Google Meet, and could record audio locally.
Clearly, something else was at work! I called up my old pal Jeff to do some testing. (He’s also a technology writer, so we trade off troubleshooting.) After trying several things, I launched FaceTime by clicking the camera icon on the Phone lozenge that appears by default in the upper-right corner of your display during a call.
Jeff still couldn’t hear me! Interesting. FaceTime’s input and output controls are ancient and mysterious. Audio and video are both controlled from the (inappropriately named) Video menu, and it turned out that my audio input was set to a screen-sharing program I no longer use. I changed it to the microphone that was set as my system default, and suddenly my voice rang out.
“Ah ha!” I thought to myself—and said to Jeff and to editor Jason Snell—”I am a very clever chap and should document this as an article for Six Colors,” which Jason agreed to. In editing the article, Jason said, “Isn’t there a Video menu in the Phone app?” Despite my recollection that there was none, and my recent checking for such a menu, there it was on my Mac. It must have been there all along, and, Westworld-like, it didn’t look like anything to me.
In my defense: Why, why, is there a Video menu in an app called Phone that doesn’t use video?3 Apple doesn’t document this in the Phone part of its Tahoe manual And I wasn’t the only one unaware of it: Jason and Jeff didn’t know it existed either, until Jason was pushed past the Somebody Else’s Problem Field level of awareness.
I guess this is how I keep humble. Despite decades of using a Mac, I can still miss a Video menu in an audio app.
2026-02-05 02:00:15
I’ve been a fan of the Transit app for a long time. Apple and Google Maps can provide similar information about how and when to catch a bus or a train, but Transit has always focused more tightly on those modes, with lots of real-time data, and a social component, if you’re into that sort of thing.
It had been a long time since I’ve used Transit, so updates haven’t been on my radar until I found myself in Northern California recently. I needed to use BART, the AC Transit bus system, and San Francisco’s MUNI, all in the course of a weeklong trip. And when I opened Transit, I discovered that a lot of things about using the app have gotten better with the release of version 6.0 last year.
Transit has always been best as a “live” app, the kind you want by your side when you need to know if you’ve missed the bus, or how long it will be before the next one comes. It works great for route-planning, too, but so do the “big two” mapping apps. Transit also excels when you’re on a train or bus, watching for a stop.
What’s new are the big, bright boxes that tell you how long you need to wait for your transit vehicle, offered with real-time data, when available. It’s also easier to scroll a list of stops your vehicle will make, because the list is bigger and bolder onscreen. As before, you can use the Go feature to plot your route, live, and have Transit tell you where and when to get off, with any combination of phone and Apple Watch notifications.
If you’re planning a trip, Transit offers a lot of preferences you can adjust, whether it’s limiting the amount of walking you need to do, or getting there quickly, whatever the mix of modes. These have been beefed up, but they’re a little hard to find for the beginner.
There’s always been a social component to Transit, from usage badges to aggregated data that gives the app more information about the routes its users frequent. In the most recent version, there are also poll questions, meant to gather information about vehicles, stops and safety. Multiple choice questions pop up when you’re on a bus or train, and it’s easy to either ignore them or participate. If you answer two or three multiple-choice questions, Transit will ask if it can send you more, or if you’d rather not. It might be annoying to some riders, but it’s a way to pass the time while you ride, and the questions are all on the app’s screen, not pushed to your phone as notifications… Which feels like a nice balance.
