Saranac Lake, New York. A weekly list named「7 Things This Week 」. Work at a gear shop and guiding service.
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2024-05-10 01:39:00
I’m a bit delayed on my end, but I’ve started emailing with Justin Wong this month. Justin is a software developer who has an awesome website, wonger.dev., and is a Florida enthusiast (which you’ll see below 😉):
We have a lot of sprawling oak trees covered with hanging moss. And there’s a lot of palm trees. (fun fact - palm trees are actually a type of grass. The trunk of a palm tree is closer to celery than a woody tree trunk. It’s bendy enough to survive high winds, instead of snapping or uprooting) There’s short, stubby palm trees, crooked palm trees, palm tree nurseries, fun little ponytail palms, and tall, springy palm trees.
We got started with some introductions and discussed the pros of living in Florida or elsewhere with more distinct seasons, career changes, and eating habits.
I can tell this is going to be a fun month getting to know Justin.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-05-09 23:39:00
Writing with Ratika this month stretched my skills in interesting ways. Her style encouraged me to get more creative with my descriptions and share more about what’s happening around me, not just within me. We got pretty meta though, discussing routines, the benefits and detriments of being online, and often our local weather. Here’s a bit from our final exchange:
I think our current zeitgeist puts a lot of pressure on us to have a perfect routine. What works for a YouTuber or a celebrity or an author might not work for us. We all live in different socioeconomic situations, with different privileges and abilities and responsibilities and priorities, and we each have a different way of defining joy, as well as what it means to have a “good day”. So I’m not very particular about routines anymore–having some things to do regularly is fine, but the moment I get too particular about the details, I end up making things unnecessarily difficult for myself. Who do we have to please? We can all do with being easier on ourselves a little, I think.
Big thanks to Ratika for agreeing to take part in this project. I really enjoyed chatting with her, and look forward to reading more of her book as she publishes it chapter by chapter.
Read our entire conversation →
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-05-07 12:17:00
I’ve been mostly offline for the last week, camping with my wife and dog, and taking a couple of trainings (Wilderness First Aid and AMGA Single Pitch Instructor, if you’re interested), so no big thinkpiece from me regarding Apple’s (presumed) iPad event tomorrow today. Also, I’ll be at work during the event itself, so don’t expect a live blog this time around. 😕
But I’m pretty excited to see what they have ready to unveil. It seems clear that it’s going to be iPad-focused — which is good since it’s been over a year since the last iPad refresh. I’m still pretty happy with my 2020 iPad Pro (except for a dwindling battery capacity), but my wife’s (7th-gen?) iPad has seen better days. We might have a hand-me-down situation in our near future.
Anyway, based on rumor mill and my own pondering, here are a few things I’m predicting we’ll see announced.
1️⃣ Apple Pencil Pro — This seems like the surest thing based on the event invitations, Tim Cook’s tweet, and the apple.com animation. What will come in a Pencil Pro? I think:
2️⃣ OLED Screen for iPad — Honestly, this is probably what I’m most excited for. The iPad Pro screen is great, but better contrast and true blacks will be awesome for what is a video-centric device for a lot of people.
3️⃣ M3 Chip Inside — This is almost a coin flip for me. It’d be kind of wild if Apple makes a splash by speeding onto the M4 chip even before the M4 Ultra makes its debut, but I also wouldn’t been too surprised. But if Apple can call the (fairly recently introduced) MacBooks Air “the best laptops for AI” with the M3 chips in them, I don’t see why they’d need to jump ahead to the next generation chip already. I think the new iPad Pro models will match the MacBooks Air chipset.
4️⃣ Every iPad gets an update — This is a bit risky, but, again, since it’s been over a year since any iPad was refreshed, they’re all plausibly due. Some might just get a chip bump, while other models get a design refresh as well.
5️⃣ New “Pro” Keyboard Accessory — I think they’re going to learn even further into the “Pro” moniker. The regular Magic Keyboard might stick around for some models, but I think they’re going introduce a newer, more advanced keyboard. Here’s what I’m hoping for:
6️⃣ Mac Virtual Display — While I’d love a virtualized macOS mode or (hybrid device), I highly doubt that’s coming anytime soon. But visionOS got a way to remotely control a nearby Mac, and since visionOS appears to be most closely realted to iPadOS, I think it’s within the realm of possibility that an iPad could get that functionality too.
7️⃣ Minimum storage space on the base-level iPad gets bumped up — The 10th-gen iPad starts at 64 GB and then the next tier up is 256 GB. 64 GB is simply too low. Even with minimal apps, that storage space is filled far too quickly, which makes installing any updates a real pain in the ass. And the next tier being almost a full 200 GB jump is kind of crazy. I’m hoping to see a minimum of 128 GB of storage across the lineup of new iPads.
8️⃣ Goodbye Home Button — Based on nothing but a gut feeling, I think we’ll the see the iPad (9th-gen), the last iPad with a Home Button, go the way of the Dodo. It’s time. They can keep the 10th-gen around at the sub-$400 price point and get all iPads on the full-screen interface. (That’ll leave just the iPhone SE with a Home Button — something else I think will get rectified in the next 12 months.)
9️⃣ Event video will be no longer than 45-minutes — 30 mintues seems a bit short, especially since I expect we’ll see some Pencil demos, but a full hour feels too long. So I’m splitting the difference.
🔟 “AI” will be said at least 15 times — Although I think “Machine Learning” was a better term for this technology, at some point you just have to use the popular vernacular and “Artifical Intelligence” won out. Apple really wants us to know that they’re working hard on AI features, and I think we’ll hear about it at least once every three minutes on average.
If all goes how I think it will, we’ll probably end up with a new 11-inch iPad Pro (with cellular, cause it’s the best), Magic Keyboard Pro, and Apple Pencil Pro in our household. I can’t wait to see how these picks turn out. Stay tuned for their grading!
Bonus, longshot, prediction: Updated keyboard, mouse, and trackpad accessories with USB-C, that work better across iPad, Vision Pro, and Mac (as ruminated on The Talk Show #499). And please, for the love of God, release a compact version in silver with black keys already.
Bonus bonus T-minus 7 minutes prediction: Freeform gets a major drawing/artist upgrade.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-05-07 11:05:00
A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ Good tip on sharing a specific quote from a webpage via iMessage. [🔗 Tim Hardwick // macrumors.com]
2️⃣ This use of a cross-section helps show how we perceive 4D objects in a 3D world, but it still messes with my mind and I don’t quite get it. [🔗 Rowan Fortier // youtube.com]
3️⃣ This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes down. It was at 7% battery level when I found it. [🔗 Kris De Decker // solar.lowtechmagazine.com]
4️⃣ Here’s a Stumbleupon-like website that shoots you off to another random neat site on the web. [🔗 theforest.link]
5️⃣ The coolest way I’ve ever seen to water crops. 🤯 [🔗 @imjustculture // instagram.com]
6️⃣ Who doesn’t like a fun fidget toy website? I’m sure they’ve created something quite special and useful with these pliable live models, but since I don’t know how I’d use it, I just like to play with the sliders. [🔗 robenrobin.nl]
7️⃣ Everyone loves a novelty roadside attraction on road trips. Here’s a super weird one in each state. A HeyDingus meetup at The World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things in Kansas, anyone? [🔗 thrillist.com]
Dark Horse by Nickelback (2008) — #18/52
I can’t say that I’m really a Nickelback fan, but Dark Horse holds a special place in my heart. For a full summer as a young teen working at Scout Camp, my cabin mates and I set this album, on full volume, as our morning alarm. We shot out of bed every day, bleary-eyed, but hearts racing knowing we had to turn the volume down before any of the “naughty” lyrics would reach any campers’ ears. That is not to say that we turned it down low, no, it still blared, but it was at least contained to our cabin walls.
The high-octane vibes of this record bring me right back to those bright summer mornings. I had the time of my life working camp staff with some of the most dedicated and hard-working people I’ve ever met. It was my first taste of independence, figuring out who I was and wanted to be — it was where I broke out of the mold of the life I thought was set before me. This “non-conformist” (at least to me at the time) album reminds me of that period of my life when I discovered I could chart my own path.
Follow along on the 52 Albums Project page where I’m making some playlists for you.
Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-29 10:43:00
As I become more cemented in the climbing community, meeting new people and expanding my “network” of fellow climber friends and acquaintances, its inevitable that I’ll know more people who will get hurt and die from our sport. Just this weekend, I learned of two falls of people I personally knew — one fatal, and one quite serious.
Any time I hear of fatalities of well-known climbers, it makes me do a double-take. “They fell?! But they seemed so solid, so professional, so infallible.” Doubly so now that they’re people that I actually know and have relationships with.
It makes me question my draw to an inherently dangerous sport. But never so much that I could ever walk away from it. Is that selfish? Yes. But climbing is something that brings me so much joy, and I know I couldn’t ever ask someone to leave behind the thing that makes them feel so alive — so I won’t do it to myself. Even if that joy necessarily comes with moments, like these, of sadness and doubt.
And while incidents like these don’t make me want to stop climbing, they do encourage me to double-down on vigilance to take precautions that mitigate some of those inherent risks. Knowing full-well that not every risk can be avoided, and sometimes people just fall. But I will continue to strive to be the safest climber I can be, and to encourage others to be the same.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-29 10:03:00
A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ Rachel’s put together a list of blog posts from folks’ personal websites that praise the small web. I see some familiar names there! [🔗 Rachel // projects.kwon.nyc] (via Scott Wilson)
2️⃣ If you’re a fan of John Siracusa, you’re gonna like this website. [🔗 siracusasays.com]
3️⃣ Remember when SNL did a sketch about how Avatar, one of the highest-grossing films of all time, used the stock Papyrus font for their logo? Well, there’s a sequel sketch in honor of Avatar 2, and boy does it go places. 🤣 [🔗 Saturday Night Live // youtube.com]
4️⃣ I didn’t know you could “walk around” while viewing an Apple Maps Flyover. Pretty cool! [🔗 @thatchriscarley // threads.net]
5️⃣ I’m not a photographer, but this auto-setup, auto-leveling tripod looks slick. [🔗 @genenegata // instagram.com]
6️⃣ I’m just gonna leave the title here: ‘Elon Musk — Dead at 52 — Says There Is No Need for Misinformation Laws’ [🔗 The Shovel // theshovel.com.au] (via Paul Kafasis)
7️⃣ Lou Plummer’s App Addict blog has been one of my favorite recent follows. He tries everything, and I’ve already been hooked by a couple of his reviews into new apps I want to check out. The write-ups for each app are short and sweet, a reminder that every review doesn’t need to be sprawling. [🔗 Lou Plummer // apps.louplummer.lol]
Mr. Misunderstood by Eric Church (2015) — #17/52
Eric Church always seemed like the outlier Country singer to me. There was something about his music that paid tribute to Country tropes and themes, but always had a little extra pop or rock to them. Mr. Misunderstood was kind of like the outlier album of Eric Church albums. I don’t know if I can articulate what felt different about it, but it was different. I enjoyed it immensely, right from the jump, and I can’t believe it’s been out for almost a decade now. I still think of it as Church’s “new” album. The closing track “Three Year Old” still makes me giggle.
Follow along on the 52 Albums Project page where I’m making some playlists for you.
Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-27 12:08:00
The tech podcast where every day is Earth Day, except for that time we recorded on Mars.
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Dan Moren: Meta has rolled out its new AI Assistant in several places, including its smart glasses collaboration with Ray-Ban. Does this feel like the second coming of Google Glass, or does this time around feel like this kind of technology has more promise?
Like Karissa, I’ve been pretty impressed with my Meta Ray-Bans. But I hardly ever use their AI assistant. It only just recently got multimodal support so that I can ask questions about things that the camera can see, but I think that will be pretty limited in my usage as well. I’ve already got Siri for most of my random question answering, and although Siri doesn’t have all the answers, I’m more confident that it won’t hallucinate or lie to me as today’s AIs do.
That said, I’m bullish about glasses as an assistive device in general, even if it doesn’t revolve around asking questions. Just having a camera even more at the ready, along with microphone and speakers has been transformative for me and I’m excited to see where this product category goes over the next five or so years.
Having an AI chatbot in my Instagram search field is kinda weird, but I guess I kind of see the benefit? Surely it’s good for Meta to be able to roll it out everywhere and as long as it doesn’t get in my way of regular searches, I don’t mind an extra-capable search field there.
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Karissa Bell: Are you Team Chronological Feed or Team Algorithmic Feed?
Why not both? I’m happy to have an algorithmic feed in social networks, music platforms, video platforms, etc. provided that there is also a chronological/default option. I see value in an algorithmic feed bubbling up stuff I might be interested in but would never see otherwise. But usually, I just want to see the stuff from people I explicitly followed first. Then if I run out of new posts, I’ll switch over to the “For You” feed to discover new stuff.
I’d really really like it if I could choose to always open the chronological feed first too.
Of note, I use Micro.blog for the majority of my social networking. They only have a chronological timeline, and then a global Discover page that is manually curated. I like them both, but have resorted to reading my personal timeline via an RSS app because I want (a) to be a completionist and have synced/saved timeline position, and (b) to read my timeline from top to bottom, oldest posts to newest. It baffles me that timelines that include replies/conversations default to be read from newest to oldest. I wish every timeline-based app allowed you to switch to oldest on top so I can scroll naturally to the bottom, reading posts in the order in which they were made, and then eventually get to the bottom where there are no more posts. Doomscrolling on and on forever never feels great.
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Rosemary Orchard: How do you find new software tools?
I’ll jump on the word-of-mouth bandwagon and say that most of my app discoveries come from blogs and podcasts I follow, or from social media. Occasionally I’ll go searching in the App Store for something to fill a specific need, but that’s pretty rare. Otherwise, I do subscribe to Setapp, so sometimes I’ll test run an app from their catalog if I see it in their newsletter, or promoted in their catalog app.
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Anže Tomić: Where do you stand on one country banning apps from other countries?
Seems pretty untenable to a globally connected Internet in the long term. As I quipped recently, I’d much prefer laws be passed to regulate the specific actions that the government is concerned about rather than pursuing an outright ban/dissolvement.
Saying, “Well, China bans our apps, so we should ban theirs,” feels like a cop-out reason.
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Bonus Topic: What is your favorite animal that you have seen in real life?
I think otters are some of the coolest animals to watch. They’re so cute, so smart, and so playful. I could otter-watch all day and I’d so love to play with them!
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Overtime Topic: What kind of program/scene for a Holodeck would you create?
It’d be super handy to explore back through my own memories if we had some way to capture them.
Otherwise, I’d sign up for a weekly travel program where I could walk around iconic places with interesting cultures. Travel takes so much time and expense, but there’s so much cool stuff in the world to see. I’d use a Holodeck to do some quick exploration down the streets of Paris, New Zealand, Antarctica, etc.
Until next week, watch what you say, and keep watching the clock! Bye everybody!
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-25 08:20:00
As far as I’m concerned, this 8-minute YouTube video by Becca Farcace at The Verge is required viewing for anyone interested in the Meta Ray-Bans and will give you valuable context for this blog post. I didn’t see it until after I already had my Ray-Bans, but Farcace does an excellent job guiding us through where we’ve been and where we’re going regarding smart glasses and ambient computing. Her ideas on how they’re useful and who will “win” in the smart glasses competition (spoiler: the companies we trust the most), largely mirror my own.
Alright, you’ve seen it? Great! Let’s get started.
In a world full of new AI gadgets, headsets, and wearables, Meta, of all companies, is making the one that’s making the biggest difference in my life.
I’ve been using the Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses for about a month now, and I’m finding even more reasons to wear them all the time. My reason for buying them in the first place was simple: I wanted a hands-free camera that I could wear while guiding. As a rock climbing and hiking guide, I function as the dedicated photographer for my clients as well as their instructor and safety manager. That last bit, safety, was the clincher for the purchase. I didn’t want to be fumbling with getting my phone out of my pocket, especially while holding my climber’s rope as their belayer.
The glasses have been working great for that purpose. I’ve captured far more footage and videos of my clients and of my own climbing, first-person perspective, than ever. My clients love it, and I think I’ve sold more than a few of them on the idea of smart glasses because of all the candid shots I can get. (No one’s been skeeved out about the camera — I think cameras in public are just accepted now.) At a moment’s notice, I press a button or simply say “Hey Meta, take a photo/video” to capture the scene — an impromptu snowball fight, topping out on a climb, a hug at the mountain’s summit — without breaking my focus, fishing my phone out of my pocket, or taking off my gloves.
It’s revolutionary.
But there’s been another use case that I longed to be able to use the glasses for: on my runs. I’ve been running without carrying my phone for many years now. With the advent of the Apple Watch, particularly the cellular version for staying connected and streaming audio, I no longer needed to have the phone bounce around my pocket or strap on an armband for it. I slip on my shoes, grab my sunglasses, pop in some headphones, and away I go. But often while putting in the miles, I’d come across something I wanted to capture. A deer running across my path. A new trailhead that I want to remember for later. A funny sign. A particularly pretty flower my wife would enjoy. Countless bits of nature that I’d probably never come across again. And I could never get a photo or video because I’d left my phone behind.
Not to mention that I’ve never settled on an audio setup for runs that I’d been happy with. Regular AirPods fall out. PowerBeats Pro and Beats Fit Pro stayed in but were less comfortable. The closest I’ve gotten is with SHOKZ bone-conduction headphones. They’re pretty good, but wearing them with my sunglasses gets a little bulky around the ears.
No longer. After initial disappointment when I thought from Meta’s documentation that the glasses could only be paired with a device running the Meta View app, thanks to a Reddit comment, I realized I could make the perfect gadget combo for unencumbered-yet-full-featured runs. If you long-press the pairing button on the case with the glasses in them, they’ll go into pairing mode and you can connect additional devices for audio. You’ve never seen someone make a new Bluetooth connection so fast! And connecting it to my Apple Watch didn’t lose the original connection with my phone running the Meta View app.
I took it for a brief test run — literally — and I’m here to tell you that the hype I’m expressing here is real. Getting my Apple Watch to be the music source (rather than my phone) and broadcast to the glasses took a little fiddling in the Bluetooth menu, but after getting the music started, it was sublime. The audio quality is great, certainly as good as any of my other running-capable headphones. And yet nothing is blocking my ears from the sounds around me, meaning I can hear and be aware of traffic or other people around me. No sneak attacks coming my way! I didn’t worry about earbuds slipping out of my ears. I didn’t have a phone bouncing around in my pocket. The glasses, despite having a whole computer inside them, weren’t so heavy that they would slide down my nose. They were just sunglasses! I took a video of my dog padding alongside me on our darkening road without missing a beat.
This is the real deal.
Now, I know that many of you out there will disregard these glasses simply because they’re made by Meta, the artist formerly known as Facebook. You probably didn’t even make it this far into the article if your distrust or dislike of Meta runs that hot. But if you did make it this far, know that I absolutely understand where you’re coming from. I, myself, ditched Facebook a few years ago.
But what I’ll say is that you can, as far as I can tell, lock down the mandatory Meta View app to a surprising degree if you want to distance your data as far as possible from Meta’s servers. You do need a Meta account, but it doesn’t have to be linked to an existing Instagram or Facebook account to be useful. You can choose to never have your images and videos get sent to Meta’s servers. If you use their AI features, those voice prompts do get sent to Meta since the AI model does not run on the glasses themselves. If you turn on their multimodal AI features, like the new “Look at this and [insert request about the image]” thing, those images also get sent to Meta, while you’re personal captures continue to transfer directly between the glasses and the connected View app.
Meta has made improvements over the years with the kinds and extent of permissions users have around their data, and I think it’s worth noting. And if you use Instagram or Threads, I think you’re already sending way more data their way than you would just by using the glasses as a connected camera and headphones.
But concerns regarding these being Meta Ray-Bans are valid, and it’s something you’ll have to accept if you want to use them. Just pay attention when setting them up, and I think you’ll be happy with just how private you can make the glasses. I was.
I might have just four feature requests left for a future pair of smart glasses:
If Meta made any of these improvements in a second-generation product, I’d be sorely tempted to upgrade. If we got two or more of them, it’d be a no-brainer. I like them that much.
I would also be very into an Apple version of these glasses. A pair with even tighter integration with my other devices (iCloud Photos, automatic device switching, an Apple-designed photo pipeline), and less entrenchment in the Meta-verse, would be a home run.
I know first impressions are supposed to go, well, first, but I just found these notes I took in the first night that I tried the glasses and thought they were worth sharing.
They are surprisingly comfortable and fit my smaller face as well. Usually, I struggle to find sunglasses that fit my head, but these slipped right on, aren’t heavy, and don’t look large at all.
I really think the transition lenses are going to be the key feature to get the most use out of these glasses. I haven’t had them transition to dark yet because it’s been nighttime this whole time I’ve been wearing them, but they are clear they can drive while wearing them without it seeming any darker than my normal vision. And although I’m not a glasses wearer, I feel like I’m getting used to having them in my field of view and on my face very quickly. I don’t know if I will want to wear them all day every day, but I think I could.
I stand by this observation. I know they’re already expensive, but if you can swing the extra $80 for transitions, I sure do recommend it.
The voice control is very quick. They must have some sort of on-device processing, at least for little stuff like taking photos and videos, and music controls. The voice response is pretty pleasant too.
The touch controls on the side of the temple are also responsive… sometimes almost too responsive. When I try to double-tap to seek forward or triple-tap to seek back, sometimes it gets interpreted as a pause and then a double-tap. Not great. But that might improve over time, or I just may get used to the necessary interaction.
I have gotten used to the controls and no longer think about them. I particularly like that I can adjust the volume with a swipe on the right temple.
I am desperately hoping that there’s a way for me to pair the glasses with my Apple Watch so that I can go for a run and just use them as the speaker for listening to music and podcasts from my watch, and then I have a camera with me too!
Ha! I knew exactly what I wanted right from day one.
Battery life might be a little lacking, but I’m going to give it a pass for the first day and see how things go after a full recharge tomorrow.
I mentioned this above too. Battery life could be better, and they definitely struggled in cold temps when I went skiing and hiking in the snow.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-25 06:55:00
Speaking of drafts you discover and then decide to publish, this was from last week.
So I just used ChatGPT to learn about some CSS selector concepts I was confused by and, on a whim, asked it to quiz me to make sure that I understood everything. It was a very good experience that I’m sure I’ll use again. Check it out!
Me:
Cool. Can you quiz me with some questions to make sure I understand?
ChatGPT:
Of course! Here are some questions to test your understanding:
- What does the CSS selector
p.class-nametarget?- Describe the difference between
p.class-nameandp .class-name?- How would you select only the first
<h2>element within a<div>using CSS?- What does the adjacent sibling selector (
+) target?- In the HTML structure
<div><h2>Title</h2><p>Paragraph</p></div>, how would you target the<p>element using a descendant selector?Feel free to answer each question, and I’ll provide feedback!
p.class-name targets any p elements that individually have the specified class.p.class-name is for p elements with the class name. p .class-name is for any elements descended from p that has class-name.h2 descended from a div. You can’t use a child or adjacent selector alone.+ targets only elements above or below the specific element/classp with the selector h2 pGreat job! Your answers demonstrate a solid understanding of CSS selectors. Let me provide a bit of feedback:
- Correct!
p.class-nametargets<p>elements that have the specified class directly.- Perfect explanation!
p.class-nametargets<p>elements with the class name, whilep .class-nametargets any elements descended from<p>elements with the class name.- Correct! To target only the first
<h2>element within a<div>, you would typically use a specific class or ID assigned to that<h2>element.- Exactly! The adjacent sibling selector (
+) targets elements that come immediately after another specified element.- Absolutely! You can target the
<p>element using the selectorh2 p, which selects<p>elements that are descendants of<h2>elements.Well done on your understanding of CSS selectors! If you have any more questions or need further clarification, feel free to ask!
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-24 01:48:00
Speaking of cool climbing gear, if you’re getting any traditional slings for alpine draws, general extensions, or building anchors, it’s hard to beat Mammut’s Contact Slings. They’re made of dyneema, so they’re super strong and slippery, but that’s not why I like them so much. They’re the sling that does the best job of mitigating how the bar tack (where the two ends overlaps and are stitched together) tends to catch on things.
Typical bar tacks are bulky and unconsidered, and their ends often get stuck on carabiners when you’re trying to adjust the sling or extend an alpine draw. The stitching on the Contact slings is small and svelte to begin with, and Mammut covers the bar tack with a little sleeve of fabric which smooths everything out. You’ll still want to avoid getting the bar tack in the middle of any knots you tie, but at least it doesn’t get hung up on carabiners, rocks, or anything.
A byproduct of the Contact Slings being made of dyneema is that they can be much smaller and lighter than a traditional nylon sling, and that’s why I picked up another 120cm one for my rack. The double-length sling from Metolius I’ve been using is nice, but its extra width means takes up more space on my harness and isn’t as good for long extensions. The Contact Sling wraps up extremely small and I hardly notice it on my harness.
A plea to climbing brands worldwide: standardize on a color scheme to distinguish between sling length. When you’re in the middle of a hard climb, it pays dividends to not spend any extra time or brain cycles on determining if you’re grabbing the right tool you need in that moment. It’s a little thing, but it really helps — especially if you’re using someone else’s rack that you’re less familiar with — to not second guess or have to try again. I wish every brand would standard on a single color scheme. Mammut’s would be fine with me:
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-22 09:35:00
A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ This roundup of 20 years of Google searches really brought me back. [🔗 Carmen Ang // visualcapitalist.com]
2️⃣ You’ve probably heard about MKBHD’s review of the Humane Ai Pin already, but if you haven’t watched it yet, you should. I found it to be very fair about the good and bad — there’s just a lot more bad at this point. [🔗 Marques Brownlee // youtube.com]
3️⃣ Greg Pierce, Drafts proprietor and automation wizard, shared a tip on how to deal with all those spam texts without lifting a finger. [🔗 @agiletortise // mastodon.social]
4️⃣ What about physical junk mail? Here’s a ‘chaotic good’ way to cut down on junk mail, and also feel like you’re getting revenge (while maybe also supporting the USPS?). [🔗 @coopmike48 // threads.net]
5️⃣ Or some more official low and no-cost ways to cut down on junk mail per the US government. [🔗 consumer.ftc.gov]
6️⃣ Michael Steeber outdid himself yet again with this retrospective on the Apple Watch launch, retelling how Apple created pop-up shops around the world just for the watch. Many of these temporary shops piloted designs that would later be introduced to the main retail store. [🔗 Michael Steeber // michaelsteeber.substack.com]
7️⃣ Have you ever wanted a compass This app turns your pocket computer into a galactic compass. [🔗 Matt Webb // interconnected.org]
Some Nights by Fun. (2012) — #16/52
Whenever I listen to this album, it brings me straight back to freshman year at Central Michigan University where, during orientation week, the entire freshman class — or at least those of us who arrived early for a kick-off week — danced our hearts out to its songs. The drummer from the band, Fun., was an alumnus of CMU, and when this album took off on the charts were all quite proud of them.
While that week was my introduction to the album, it’s stayed in my heavy rotation in the decade-plus since. There’s something about Nate Reuss’s vaguely melancholy yet piercingly sincere voice that has always stuck with me. There’s something about the mixture of rawness within their music and its epic soundstage that just pushes all my right buttons.
Follow along on the 52 Albums Project page where I’m making some playlists for you.
Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-20 08:51:00
The tech podcast that just had its gears oiled!
⏱️⏱️⏱️
Mikah Sargent: What is one of the first delightful things you remember doing on the World Wide Web?
Tinkering with, breaking, and eventually fixing my iServ webmail. Turns out email has always been my love language.
It’s actually quite difficult to remember how I got started with the internet and doing what, but I sure do have that dial-up tone burned into my brain!
⏱️⏱️⏱️
Christina Warren: What was your worst or most disappointing tech product that you’ve ever owned or reviewed?
The one that’s sprung to mind is a recent disappointment. My wife and I received a Roomba as a Christmas gift, which I was pretty psyched for because, in a house with a long-haired dog, cat, and wife, the floors are difficult to keep clean. But between the layout of our furniture and a few rugs, the Roomba just couldn’t handle our home. On every test, it would get stuck. And when I dislodged it, it could never find its own way back home to the charger. Way more trouble than it was worth, so now it’s sat unused for months in a corner of our dining room.
(I will say, although my experience hasn’t been as bad as it sounds like Mike’s has been, I’ve been disappointed by the clarity and comfort issues of the Apple Vision Pro.)
⏱️⏱️⏱️
Dan Moren: How much time do you spend trying to get a tech product to work or troubleshooting a product you have before you throw up your hands?
I’m like a dog with a bone when it comes to troubleshooting. Partly due to a general dislike of dealing with support chats/calls, and partly because I like to be self-sufficient. It always seems like the next little thing will solve all my issues, and I can follow that rabbit hole for a long time before I give up.
For example, I months without cellular capabilities on my Apple Watch because I was sure resetting this or that, restoring, turning the device off and on, or some combination of them would eventually lead to success.
If I get to the point where I do call tech support, I’ve mostly given up and assume the thing will never work again.
⏱️⏱️⏱️
Jason Howell: What’s the oldest piece of working technology that you still use regularly, or semi-regularly, and how did you acquire it?
I don’t have a go-to answer on this one. I guess I don’t hang onto old tech for very long. One thing that comes to mind is a HyperDrive USB-hub/Qi charging gadget that I backed on Kickstarter back in the day. It used to be pretty key to my computing life when I rocked the 12-inch, one-port MacBook. It’s how I plugged in my display, charged the laptop, and connected any peripherals. Nowadays, it’s a sometimes resting zone for my AirPods to charge and very occasionally how I more easily plug in a thumb drive to my Mac mini.
Or maybe my Quip toothbrush. That’s got to have been going for close to a decade now.
⏱️⏱️⏱️
Bonus Topic: What’s your least favorite song by one of your favorite artists?
I’m sure there are better (worse?) examples, but I vividly remember deleting the song “Mama” from my iTunes copy of the seminal The Black Parade album by My Chemical Romance. I just couldn’t handle the sharp-and-dark-yet-polka-like motif in the middle of an otherwise outstanding record.
⏰⏰⏰
Overtime Topic: Are you a regular user or dabbler with emulators?
Pretty much zero, zilch, nada experience with game emulation specifically or other emulation generally. The closest I got was freshman year in college when I brought back my GameBoy Advanced from home after Christmas break so that my roommate and I could play Pokémon together. But that was an original game cartridge played on its original hardware, so…yeah, I don’t think that counts.
I did download Delta from the App Store just so I would have a copy in case it gets taken down, but I don’t have any games to play on it. If I come across those old GameBoy cartridges, I might try to download the ROMs so I could pick up my old Pokémon games yet again, but I doubt I’ll ever get around to it.
It’s been a minute since I’ve been “on the show”. For some reason, I told myself that I would do a post for every single show, so when I got behind and they started piling up, I lost motivation. But this is my blog and I don’t owe anyone anything with it. So I’ll just write these as I can — hopefully often! — and not put so much pressure on keeping up. 🙂 But good to be back.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-18 12:42:00
From my latest exchange with Ratika Deshpande:
The sky is a color that refuses to be named; it is at once peach and grey and beige and white. I can’t think of anything to compare it to. In On Writing, Stephen King says that while people can go, “It was so beautiful I couldn’t describe it!” a writer should be able to give that description. I can’t, however, and that makes me happy, because it means I’m truly paying attention to a thing without simultaneously taking notes in my head. It means that I’m looking at something that feels beyond words. And every such occasion is a chance to truly live. I wish for everyone to have such experiences.
Chatting with Ratika encourages me to stretch different writing and storytelling muscles. It feels good, even if I know I’m struggling to reach my toes.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-17 11:28:00
Valerie and I wrapped up our month(+) of email exchanges:
And on that note, I suppose we’ll bring this part of our public conversation to a close. I’m so glad that we connected and have been able to share so much with each other. It’s been a pleasure getting to know you Valerie, and I like to think that I now have a friend in Kyrgyzstan. 🙂 You certainly have one in the Adirondacks. I’ll see you around Micro.blog, and my email is always open if you want to continue to chat.
Talking with Valerie opened my eyes to yet another way of living — a more nomadic and culturally curious one than the life I lead. I’m in awe of her tenacity to travel across the world to live in unfamiliar places. But, I suppose, places are unfamiliar for only so long. That’s one thing I got out of our conversation.
I hope you get something out of it too.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-15 07:12:00
A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ If Keenan blogs, there’s a good chance I’m going to link to it. This time, they write about their three years working Apple Retail and how it shaped them, for the good and the bad. [🔗 Keenan // gkeenan.co]
2️⃣ I ran across Frills’ website via CSS Naked Day, and immediately lost my morning poking around its corners. I love so much about it! This particular link is to a post in which she shares a bookmarklet that lets you make any webpage editable. [🔗 Frills // frills.dev]
3️⃣ I really liked Matt Birchler’s description of design being a conversation between you and your user. [🔗 @matt // isfeeling.social]
4️⃣ I might have shared this before but it’s worth watching again. This magician nails the act as a bumbler while being in complete control of his tricks. [🔗 Markobi // youtube.com] (via @[email protected])
5️⃣ A bit gruesome, but this video from the Slow Mo Guys recreating Superman’s bulletproof eye was fascinating. Without spoiling it, the damage was not was I expected. [🔗 The Slow Mo Guys // youtube.com]
6️⃣ One of my favorite eclipse-related jokes this week. 😆 [🔗 @siegel // mastodon.social]
7️⃣ BasicAppleGuy’s newest wallpapers are true stunners and mix the iconic Mac OS Tiger desktop design with modern graphics. [🔗 BasicAppleGuy // basicappleguy.com]
Angle of the Airwaves by All Night Boogie Band (2023) — #15/52
I didn’t know anything about the All Night Boogie Band until they came to play a local show here in Saranac Lake. Boy, did they ever bring some serious musical chops and their lead singer’s vocal pipes to match! I don’t listen to a lot of soul music, but it sure is fun. Angel of the Airwaves is their latest album and a good primer for what to expect from the band.
Follow along on the 52 Albums Project page where I’m making some playlists for you.
Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-13 16:17:00
So you like memes. (Me too!) And you like Markdown. (Right there with ya, buddy.) And you’re the sort of person who cares about web accessibility, and you do your best to add alt text (image descriptions) to all your images. (Geez, you and me are like peas and carrots!)
You’ve got your favorite memes that you return to, time after time. But you also discover new ones that you want to add to your arsenal. If you blog or post to social media using Markdown (👋 like you can over at Micro.blog), you’ll know there’s no good way to keep track of your go-to GIFs. You might be uploading the same image again and again — a waste of time and server storage — and you’ve got to rewrite the alt text each time… you are still adding those, right?
Say you’re Super Into It™ and keep a note of all your memes and their Markdown. (Wow! You’re in good company.) But now you’re hunting and pecking through that list, trying to find the right one, doing the copy/paste dance, and are frustrated that the one meme you use all the time and need to deploy at a moment’s notice is buried in the list. (Not that I would know anything about that…) Why can’t your most-used memes just float up to the top of the list? (That’s what we call a foreshadow in the business. 😏)
Or maybe you don’t suffer any of these problems because you’re not as maniacal about crafting the perfect post. (Honestly, good for you. That’s probably healthier than what I’m going through over here.) But if you do run into any of these friction points, definitely click the button below. You’ll probably like the shortcut that I’m about to share.
And if you’re interested in how this thing works, read on past the button. I’m low-key quite proud of how it came together. It’s got text files, it’s got counting, it’s got splitting text, rearranging it, and something I like to call the ‘Dynamic Auto-Sorting List…Thingy’. (Okay, you got me. I just made that bit up.) But it sure was fun to make, and (🤞) has been working great for me for a few months.
Let’s get into it.
Before we get into it though, it might be helpful for you to be able to follow along with the shortcut in full. I won’t go step-by-step through every part of this thing, but here’s a massive full-res screenshot of the whole thing in all its glory. At least, the way it was at the time of publication.
Here are the broad strokes of how this shortcut works. It stores each meme as a line of data in a text file. That data is structured with three key bits of information: (1) The meme’s use count, (2) The meme’s name, and (3) The meme’s Markdown including its alt text and image URL.
The shortcut parses that text file by splitting up each line, checking the use count to sort the highest used ones to the top, and then it displays a menu to choose a meme from that sorted list. When a meme is chosen, that line is plucked from the text file, the Markdown is copied to the clipboard, and the use count is increased by 1. The text file gets rewritten with that new use count, and the user simply pastes the Markdown without having to re-upload the image or re-write the alt text.
When a new meme needs to be added to the list, the shortcut guides the user through selecting the image if it’s not already passed in, uploads it to Micro.blog (or other online storage bucket), and (optionally) generates alt text using OpenAI’s Vision API. The meme’s Markdown is assembled, copied to the clipboard for immediate use, and added to the text file with a use count of 1.
Does that make sense? Alright, let’s get to the nitty-gritty.
Nobody wants to edit a shortcut every time they add a new meme — believe me, I tried. For a while, I had a Dictionary action that I’d paste the meme’s title and Markdown into every time I uploaded a new one. It sucked. It was worse than just using an Apple Note. So instead of storing all this data in Shortcuts itself, I needed somewhere that could be written and overwritten. I could have used an app like Data Jar, but that would be one more step for every user to download and maintain. Yuck. Instead, I chose to build the foundation of this shortcut with the quickest and slickest file format known to mankind: the .txt file.
A text file, stored in the Shortcuts folder of iCloud Drive, houses all the Markdown and supplies this dynamic list that we’ll choose from later on. But since the user won’t already have this set up to start, we need to create the base file.
Each time the shortcut runs, it first checks to see if the necessary text file exists. If it does, great, it’ll move on. If not, it creates and saves a text file to the correct location with a singular line of text 0 | ➕ Add new meme. You’re getting a peek at the sorting system. That item has a use count of 0 and will be the only choice in the menu until we, well, add some new memes.
After saving the foundational text file, the shortcut runs itself again so it can actually do something useful. Just don’t forget to add a Stop This Shortcut action when you do these restarts, lest you get into a weird never-ending loop.
Since we have a structure that each line of data added to that text file follows, we can separate each bit and use them in different ways. First by splitting each line, and then by sorting it highest-to-lowest since each line starts with its use count. The Filter Files action is key here, even though they’re not really files that we’re sorting.
Okay, now that we have all the lines in order, we want to isolate the meme’s name since all use counts and Markdown just make the list hard to read. With each of those lines, we split them further by the pipe character | which separates each bit of the meme’s data. The second one, after the use count, is the Meme’s title. We can set the name to a new variable meme-name and add it to a new list meme-list. They’re already in the right order, so now a simple Choose from List action deployed on that meme-list variable gives us a menu to choose from.
Voilà!
The important bit, choosing a meme to copy, is already done, but all the behind-the-scenes stuff still has to take place. Namely, copying it to the clipboard and increasing its use count.
Since we want the ‘➕ Add new meme’ item to remain in a predictable spot, namely the bottom of the list, we need to check if that was the item chosen, and if so, exclude it from increasing its use count above 0. An If action takes care of that.
We return to the Filter Files action to filter those original individual lines of data down to only the one containing the name of the chosen meme. We split it up again using another Split Text action and assign variables to each of the three parts.
We can finally copy the Markdown to the clipboard, and then use a Calculate action to add 1 to the chosen-use-count variable. The meme’s line of data is rewritten with the new use count, and that line is swapped in the original text with a Replace Text action. We immediately save the new text file over the old in iCloud Drive. Woohoo!
The other half of the If action we used earlier to check if ‘➕ Add new meme’ was chosen comes back into play. In the ‘Otherwise’ section of that action, we start the process of uploading a new image with another If action.
This time, we check if anything was passed into the shortcut as input — an image perhaps! — because if it was, we can just upload it straight away with the ‘Simple MB Image Uploader’ shortcut.
I should note here that while I built in my shortcuts for uploading images to Micro.blog, you don’t have to be on Micro.blog to get use out of this shortcut. You can swap in any shortcut here that uploads an image and returns an image URL or, better yet, Markdown. Maybe you use a different hosting platform, ImageKit, Amazon S3, or even Dropbox to house your photos. Awesome! Swap in your shortcut to upload the image here. And give me a shout if you need a hand getting it right.
Otherwise, when nothing has been passed in, we can present a menu with a Choose from Menu action. Most of the time you’re going to upload a new meme image, but sometimes you might already have one uploaded with the Markdown good-to-go, so I’ve included an option to simply paste in that Markdown. But when you need to upload an image, choose that option and it runs the same uploader shortcut as earlier, which is configured to present source options like the Photos and Files apps when nothing is passed into it.
We’re in the home stretch! Once the image is uploaded by the external shortcut and its Markdown is returned, after allowing for edits to the Markdown (in case you need to revise the auto-generated alt text), it’ll walk you through providing a name for the new meme (Ask for Input action). Just like when we updated a chosen meme’s data line with its new use count, in this case, we assemble the line of data with a fresh use count of 1, its title, and its Markdown, and then prepend it to the original text file and save it.
Finally, the new meme’s Markdown is copied to the clipboard and, as a sanity check, an alert pops up so that you can visually confirm that everything copied correctly before pasting the meme elsewhere. I’m a big fan of those final confirmation steps as it means I don’t need to stare at my phone waiting for the shortcut to finish, since the alert will, well, alert me. And it’s nice to double-check that no pipes got twisted up in the shortcut somewhere.
Dynamic List. I learned a lot while building this shortcut. The idea to use a text file to store all the data came to me after I employed a similar technique for my file-sharing shortcut, UpShare MB. In that one, file URLs are saved to a text file for long-term storage and retrieval — again so that you’re not uploading the same file over and over, you can just retrieve it from your history — but it doesn’t have any sorting function. Being able to dynamically add new bits of data and have it adjust to your usage was a breakthrough technique that I’m sure could be used elsewhere.
For instance, you could build a list of loved ones that you want to keep in touch with. Every time you choose one of them to call, their entry could get timestamped and sorted to the bottom of the list so that you know the last time you chatted and you can easily rotate through everyone on your list.
Manual Edits. Even though adding and copying memes all happens through the shortcut, you can very easily revise your list of memes just by opening the text file and manually editing it. You can remove old Memes, artificially bump the use counts, or change a meme’s name and Markdown. As long as you save it when you’re done, the next time you run ‘Markdown Memes’ your list of options will reflect any changes you made to the text file.
Embrace the If Action. I used to lean toward using a Choose from Menu action every time I needed to use branching paths of actions in a shortcut. Lately, I’ve been finding a ton of utility in combining Choose from List with If to make more complex menu trees with conditional statements, or if just one or two options need their own set of actions. In this case, the ‘➕ Add new meme’ option had its own set of actions, while everything else chosen from the list could follow the same path.
Design Shortcuts to be Multi-Functional. I’m a big fan of shortcuts that work just as well when they’re run on their own as when they’re run with something passed into them from the share sheet. If you can build your shortcuts to work with or without input, you’ll catch way more use cases, especially if you’re sharing them with other people. Everyone’s workflows are different and they’ll probably use your shortcut in ways you hadn’t imagined, so the more versatile the better. For instance, running ‘Markdown Memes’ from the Shortcuts app or Home Screen will display your list of memes to choose from. But if you share a GIF to it from the Photos app ‘➕ Add new meme’, it knows to just upload the shared image rather than making you pick it out again.
I hope you picked up a few new tricks here, and if nothing else have a new meme-deployment tool to play with. Let me know if you have any questions or comments on this shortcut or a wild idea of how I can improve it.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-13 00:02:00
Say what you will about Humane’s Ai Pin1, I have to give them credit for nailing the timeline they set years ago, perhaps at the very outset of the company. Their whole brand and logo, revealed in 2018 and solidified in 2022 with their “It’s time for change” video, revolves around an eclipse, and now they’re shipping their first product within days of the massive solar eclipse event across North America.
Even as someone very open to believing in coincidences, it’s hard to think that this is one.
Advanced tech products famously go through long, multi-year development periods. Few companies can get a gadget out like clockwork, as Apple does with the iPhone each fall, and even they sometimes stumble. Which makes Humane’s accomplishment of getting this product — their first and in a brand-new category! — out the door (presumably) on time all the more impressive.2
I gotta appreciate the foresight and follow-through. 👏
And people sure have. 😳↩︎
Although, if you read the review linked above, maaaaybe they should have waited a bit longer. Perhaps for one of the next eclipses.↩︎
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-12 11:11:00
Edelrid is making some of the coolest, most forward-thinking climbing gear at the moment. My first exposure to their brand was through the Mega Jul, a belay device that offers assistive braking without any moving parts while looking and working (mostly) like a traditional tube-style belay device. That was over 10 years ago, and even back then they were walking the walk while talking the talk about producing sustainable, long-lasting gear by incorporating stainless steel where other climbing brands use less durable aluminum. In most cases, that makes the product notably heavier, but with the Mega Jul, the increased strength actually meant they could produce a smaller device that was really really lightweight.
Since then, I’ve moved onto to using their Giga Jul belay device — the Mega Jul’s also steel but bigger, smoother-running sibling — and I have my eye on their Pinch — another assistive breaking belay device, but one that works more like the gold standard GriGri by Petzl. Edelrid did something groundbreaking in making the Pinch able to be used without a separate carabiner to attach it to your harness. I’ll admit that it looks unusual and I’ve had to look into the product development to feel comfortable trusting my life to it, but I can’t deny that it does provide a key benefit of getting the device closer to your harness so that you’re able to take in and pay out more slack with every motion. And of course it uses steel in the key spots where the rope could wear it down.
Which brings me to their carabiners. Many people default to getting the lightest gear as possible so they don’t feel extra weight on their harness while climbing. But I’m not pushing the edge of climbing performance, and I tend not to notice the weight of my rack on my harness once I’ve left the ground and am concentrating on my movement anyway. So I don’t mind carrying a bit more gear, or a bit heavier gear if it is more useful or durable than the alternative. Edelrid is attempting to eliminate that trade-off altogether. In their “bulletproof” series of carabiners, they mold the frame of the carabiner out of your standard aluminum alloy, but then then add stainless steel inserts in the basket of the carabiner where the rope runs over it.
This provides two key benefits. First, as I mentioned before, better durability. More durable gear that wears less means you don’t have to replace your gear as often (fewer items produced, less money spent, less environmental impact). Second, cleaner ropes. When grooves are worn into aluminum carabiners by the rope running over them, it doesn’t just weaken the carabiner, that aluminum has to go somewhere. It ends up as a sort of dust or residue imbued in your rope. It’s not super noticeable at a glance, but that aluminum oxide is the reason your hands end up blackened after having climbing rope run through them all day (as I do as a guide). Seeing as my rope is my number one safety gear when climbing, I really want to protect it as much as possible. Less aluminum getting worn into my rope sounds good to me.
So I’m pretty psyched to have picked up a couple of their bulletproof carabiners to use on my anchor systems and a belay version for my belay device, where rope constantly runs through and wears things down.1
And I’ll end my gushing for Edelrid’s innovations with their soft goods (ropes and slings). Many climbers will use a double-length sling for building anchors, rappel extensions, and personal anchor systems. They’re probably the most versatile tool in a climber’s toolbox, besides the climbing rope itself. But a potential problem with slings is that they can be less durable because they don’t have a sheath protecting the core like a rope, and they can be more difficult to tie knots with because they’re flat instead of tubular and get twisted quite easily.
For the last few years, Edelrid’s Aramid Cord Sling has been quite popular because it combines the benefits of a sheath/core rope, with the versatility of a double-length sewn loop. The aramid (Kevlar) gave it excellent durability against abrasion from rubbing against rocks, but it knots and unknots very easily. Their newest version swaps the aramid for HPME, which is supposedly even more durable while being more supple to work with.
Finally, Edelrid’s rope design. Your basic rope comes in one color pattern from end to end, but it’s really helpful to know where the middle of your rope is, so they’ll typically be marked with a small black section there. More modern ropes switched to being bi-pattern so that it’s both more obvious where the switches and it can’t wear away like the black markers can. But they’re usually still the same color scheme, just a slightly different pattern like spirals and checkers. Edelrid took things one step further by making their newest bi-pattern rope out of two completely different colors on each side, like red and blue, so you can’t miss when you cross the middle mark. Something that’s especially easy to do, and can be catastrophic, in the dark even with a regular bi-pattern rope. It literally looks like you have two different ropes hanging on your backpack when you’re hiking into the crag.
Better yet, at the point where the two pattern weaves meet, you can feel where they’re woven into each other — that’s not the case with traditional bi-pattern ropes. It’s so helpful to feel that transition run through your hands as a belayer while you keep your eyes on your climber. Since you typically only want to use half your rope length while climbing (so you can still be lowered all the way back to the ground), it’s very handy to feel that texture and know your climber has reached the middle without taking your eyes off them.
Safer, more durable, and more sustainable (we didn’t even talk about how they’re choosing not to anodize their carabiners into fancy colors so that they don’t need to use more chemicals!). Edelrid’s innovative engineering and clever solutions to long-standing problems in the climbing scene mean I’m looking at their products first when I need to replace my climbing gear.
Their newest belay carabiner is so close to perfect. The opening for belay loop keeper just a little too small and I wish it pivoted down from the gate side instead of the spine side. And the slide gate closure isn’t quite as ergonomic as I expected. But it’s still a great belay carabiner.↩︎
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-11 06:53:00
My latest tiny tool is a three-action shortcut that helped me quickly get all the new descriptions for oneamonth.club formatted correctly. I had emailed all the member creators asking for their one-sentence description, so I had a bunch of messages to work through one at a time. There are many ways that I could have gotten this done. For example, I could have…
<div class="blurb"><p></p></div> bit and then copy and paste the blurb into the middle of the p tags.Instead, I built a shortcut! (Because of course I did.) By using the Shortcut Input variable and running it as a Quick Action on macOS, I could really easily take action on the text without having to do a copy/paste dance. (Don’t miss the backup of getting the clipboard if no text is passed into the shortcut. That makes it a little more useful for operating systems where it’s not as easy to pass text as input.)
In practice, it meant I could highlight the description from my email client, select the shortcut from the right-click Services menu, and wait just a second for the alert noise to signal that the shortcut was done formatting the text and had copied it to the clipboard. Then I pasted the whole formatted bit in each creator’s entry and moved on to the next one.
It took me less than a minute to build and text this shortcut, and maybe one minute more to add the niceties of the success noise (a no-click way to know it was done) and an emoji to start its title (which brings the shortcut to the top of the Services menu). #pro-tips The whole project took only 15 minutes by the time I’d finished updating the site, and I might never need to use this shortcut again. But for even such a small one-off task, it’s fun playing with Shortcuts to solve the problem. It keeps that puzzle-solving mind sharp. Plus, being automated, it got done quickly, well, and without errors.
I’ll remove it from the Services menu for now — just so that list doesn’t get too clogged up — but the shortcut will continue to live on in my library’s ‘Tiny Tools’ folder, just in case.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-11 03:16:00
I just watched the Apple Immersive Video MLS Highlights reel that been talked about… and I didn’t think it was nearly as bad as I expected based on the rhetoric. Sure, there were too many jump cuts that didn’t let me look long enough at any given thing. But I feel like it did a good job of, well, highlighting the capability of immersive video for sports. With all the quick cuts, it almost forced you to look around each scene to see what was going on. Looking around this spatial content is super cool, and it was fine that I had to do it a bunch for this short-form version.
Three other quick notes:
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-09 00:08:00
I saw this blog post from Dominik Schwind, writing for lostfocus.de, about CSS Naked Day:
It’s CSS Naked Day! And if (big if) my
ifworks properly, you should see this website without any CSS on April 9th, 2024 in all timezones.
I was intrigued, and, always being game for weird blog fads, I removed my style.css file from HeyDingus for the next day. It’s not pretty, but it still works as a fully functional website!
Care to get naked with me? 😉
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-08 01:04:00
A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ Huh. Third-graders are no longer frightened of quicksand as I was. [🔗 Radiolab // overcast.fm]
2️⃣ Not sure if I’d ever actually use this web tool of pre-written reply messages, but I like little websites like this. 🙂 [🔗 reply.cards]
3️⃣ mb bischoff is redesigning their website with a single style change each day, and documenting each change here. Neat! [🔗 mb bischoff // mbbischoff.com]
4️⃣ I haven’t tried it, but this Photos Takeout app looks pretty slick for getting photos out of your iCloud Photos Library in a sane way. [🔗 Photos Takeout // photostakeout.com]
5️⃣ Take one minute and learn about robot timing versus human timing in music. It’s pretty cool that music editing software has this built-in, and I immediately noticed the difference. [🔗 synthet // youtube.com] (Via Matt Birchler)
6️⃣ My friends and I laughed and laughed over this Total Eclipse of the Heart spoof video back in high school. Glad that Kottke finally found it. 🤣 [🔗 kottke.org]
7️⃣ Voice-to-text is getting wild, y’all. Aqua Voice seamlessly melds dictation and directions given to a text box. Just think what this will be like in 3-5 years. [🔗 Aqua Voice // withaqua.com]
Burlesque (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Christina Aguilera & Cher (2010) — #14/52
I’ve only seen the movie once or twice, but I return to the music of Burlesque all the time. Cher and Aguilera are masters of their craft, and their music shines in this Broadway-esque large stage production setting. And have you ever heard of someone as matched regarding raw power with exquisite control as Christina Aguilera? I sure haven’t! If you missed the movie and have yet to hear these songs, boy, you’re in for a treat!
Follow along on the 52 Albums Project page where I’m making some playlists for you.
Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-06 11:42:00
For the PenPal Project this month, I’m chatting with Ratika Deshpande, as writer’s writer — in that she’s authoring a book — and boy does it show:
What does the sky look like where you are? Pictures are easy to share, but I’ve found great joy in using just words, because they don’t limit me to just the sight, the way a camera does. I can also note down the shouts of the children playing down in the street, the call of the eagle swooping overhead, ideas for essays running through my head, questions about how clouds form and what our earliest ancestors felt when they saw the setting sun, not knowing the science of what was going on, among other little details.
In this first exchange, we mostly talk about the weather, how it isn’t just small talk, describing how it’s bringing variable conditions our way, and do our best to paint the sky with words.
Bonus: You get to hear about how I was once mad at my dad for not capturing me a jar full of clouds.
I’m really looking forward to seeing where this conversation goes — I’m expecting places this blog has not yet been.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-05 23:08:00
Being the Micro.blog advocate that I am (read this whole thing with that grain of salt), I’m always curious about why someone chooses to leave, as Khürt Williams did this morning:
In conclusion, there are several factors leading me to withhold a full recommendation for the current iteration of micro.blog. While acknowledging the challenges, it’s worth noting that platform governance, akin to Twitter, rests with the owner. Despite this, I maintain a positive view of Manton’s character, even if we haven’t met in person. However, the platform’s responsiveness to change requests could benefit from improvement.
Wishing for a future where µblog strikes a better balance between fostering a safe environment and encouraging vibrant community engagement, I bid farewell.
Definitely some valid points here, particularly around Khürt’s experience with customer service and the friction in design and with editing. I’d say neither are insurmountable, but also neither are best-in-class.
Khürt, as do others, seem to long for Micro.blog to evolve into a fully-fledged social network to rival the feature-set of X, Mastodon, or Threads:
µblog’s simplicity is commendable, offering a clutter-free experience devoid of ads. However, this streamlined approach also translates into limitations, such as the absence of features like direct messaging, group chats, and advanced search functionalities.
Personally, I went to Micro.blog for my social network of choice precisely because of, not in spite of, the limited social functionality there. More advanced search would be nice, but if I wanted like counts, boosts, or an algorithm to surface posts I might like, then I would go elsewhere for those feature. (Which, to be fair, is what Khürt has done, but I don’t think all the social networks need to have to same feature.) I recognize that I need to work harder (but not hard) to find people to follow in Micro.blog, and that is by design to cut down on the social noise.
Furthermore, with the entire Fediverse of ActivityPub users that I can follow simply by searching their Mastodon, Pixelfed, and now Threads usernames, I’ve never felt like I couldn’t expand my social circle. I’m glad those other options exist for anyone who wants a broader, necessarily more noisy social network experience, but I’m also glad that Micro.blog exists as a (yes, friction-y) option.
Because of the emphasis and speed in which Micro.blog pursues interoperability with other social networks, plus its dedication to owning your content and making it straightforward export elsewhere, I was surprised to see this blockquote from Evgeny Kuznetsov featured so prominently in the introduction of Khürt’s blog post:
Micro.blog is not just an alternative silo. It’s worse than your average silo. It’s worse than Twitter. From the point of view of IndieWeb, it’s even worse than Facebook. — Evgeny Kuznetsov
Had I been duped by Micro.blog into joining not just another silo, but a worse one? I didn’t think so, but I read on hoping to see Khürt’s reason for why he’d called out a quote poking at one of Micro.blog’s core tenets. But silos aren’t mentioned at all in Khürt’s own prose.
The only valid argument that I could see made for labeling Micro.blog as a silo is that you need an account there to use it, and a hosted blog to get full functionality. Personally, I’m not sure how you would achieve full functionality in any other way, except perhaps running an instance of Micro.blog on your own server, which isn’t something I’ve seen anyone ask for. On the contrary, I’ve yet to come across another platform that works as hard as Micro.blog to let users post elsewhere — it’s an ActivityPub/Mastodon citizen, you can cross-post to all the other major networks that offer a mechanism to do so (and a few that don’t, through clever URL-schemes), there’s two-way posting with native replies to Bluesky, you can host your blog elsewhere and still get the social/crossposting features if you need them — it goes on. Along
with the fact that you can export everything from your account makes it more of a leaky sieve than a watertight silo. In fact, since there wasn’t a standard export format to make it easy for users to take their blog’s content and move it elsewhere, Micro.blog’s founder, Manton Reece, created one, the .bar file and advocates for its adoption to make moving around less of a hassle. It’s the only place I know of where you could import your Twitter archive, and the immediately reexport all your tweets as traditional blog posts to take elsewhere.
Anyway, I’ve gone on far too long here, but I should circle back to Evgeny Kuznetsov’s comment briefly. Khürt’s blockquote of it sent me down the rabbit hole, reading his original post which seemed to me to be mostly comprised of his misgivings about Micro.blog as an IndieWeb citizen and the gripes he had using its feature-set with his separate, non-Micro.blog-hosted site.
Several members of the IndieWeb community responded with their support of Micro.blog as an active member, Manton chimed in to clarify a few things, Evgeny realized he didn’t have his RSS feed going into Micro.blog correctly (which might have contributed to the broken communication) and wrote a follow-up post. In that post, he conceded that perhaps a full Micro.blog account would probably solve most of his issues (which, again, makes sense to me) and does not raise any siloing issues again.
Evgeny’s remaining misgiving with Micro.blog, and perhaps this is where Khürt agrees, is with its imperfect and incomplete implementation of IndieWeb principles. I can’t and won’t disagree there — I’d love to see Webmention support be more robust and intuitive, but it certainly doesn’t make me think of Micro.blog as a big bad silo.
Anyway, I wish Khürt the best in finding the web home and community that meets his needs, and I commend him for “voting with his feet” by moving on when it became clear Micro.blog wasn’t cutting it. But I think I’ll stick around.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-05 14:53:00
If you’re new around here, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I love building shortcuts. I have 579 of them in my personal library at the moment, and I’d guess that I built or modified about half of those at some point or another. Between my HeyDingus Shortcuts Library and my old home on RoutineHub, I’ve shared over 40 of them publicly, thinking that maybe someone else will find these little tools helpful.
Has the time I’ve spent building, testing, tweaking, and sharing those shortcuts been earned back in the time they’ve saved me rather than doing things manually? After all, they are called shortcuts for a reason.
It’s hard to say, but I’d hazard a guess that I’m coming out ahead, but not nearly as far as one might imagine. Saving time is just one reason I like throwing my time into creating these (sometimes) small digital hammers. Another is because, at this point, all my digital problems look like little digital nails, just waiting to be tapped into place with a few well-placed Shortcuts actions.
But mostly, it just lights up my brain in a way that few other things do. Throughout primary and secondary school, I used to be very into mathematics. I loved figuring out the logic behind equations and how you could always solve your way down to an answer. My field of study in college didn’t require any advanced math courses, so I’ve long since fallen out of practice and now would be embarrassed to tell you how often I pull out a calculator for simple mental math.
But when there’s a little burr in my computing life that I think could be sanded down with Shortcuts, my wheels get turning and it’s hard to pull myself away from refining, adding features, and solving down to an ideal answer. I’m sure if I learned traditional coding, I’d feel the same. Or if I had a workshop to craft furniture or pound metal into useful shapes. But since I don’t know that much about programming languages nor have the desire to craft physical products, Shortcuts is my IDE, my workshop.
Why am I pondering this tonight, when by all accounts I should be fast asleep? Because I spent the last many hours creating, troubleshooting, and refining a handful of shortcuts, of course! I worked on a particularly complicated one that’s been giving me some trouble (over 100 actions long), and then followed it up with one of the simplest ones in my library (just two actions). Was the little one, which amounts to some elementary text replacement, even worth it? Absolutely! That two-action shortcut, along with its PopClip companion extension, helped me to speed through adding run-shortcut URLs to each of the 30 entries in my public library. And then it led to me updating another larger shortcut with expanded functionality, which will streamline putting together every shortcut I
share from now on.
And I enjoyed every second of getting them just right. Some people like physical puzzles best, but I found my preferred brain stimulation in being a digital toolmaker. Whether they’re just for me, or designed specifically for others to use, it brings me great joy to scratch this itch.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-02 12:03:00
From my latest exchange with Valerie V.:
You said, “posting a photo every day is quite a commitment”. Yes, I used to think of my blog as “posting a picture every day”. But now I think of it as “posting a picture for each day”. There are no consequences if I miss a day, or don’t have any [good] pictures for a day, or just want to share a photo from the past that I never posted. It takes the pressure off of my blog needing to be a perfect track record of everything I’ve ever done at that exact time, and keeps it more about just fun, interesting or weird things that I want to share.
It tickles me to chat with people whose day-to-day lives are so different than mine, and yet invariably find how very much we always have in common.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-01 11:12:00
A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
I was in Las Vegas all week — not to gamble, but to climb in the beautiful Red Rocks Conservation Area. It was an incredible week of climbing and descending very big rocks in the desert canyons with my buddy. They were long days, all of them, so I didn’t do much internet browsing. Here are some of my favorite routes I climbed instead.
1️⃣ Lady Luck (5.6, 7 pitches, 1000 feet)
2️⃣ Peaches (5.7, 1 pitch, 120 feet)
3️⃣ Stand Dumb and Speak Not (5.7, 1 pitch, 80 feet)
4️⃣ Kibbles ’n bits (5.8-, 2 pitches, 190 feet)
5️⃣ Man’s Best Friend (5.7, 2 pitches, 180 feet)
6️⃣ Motorcycle Mama (5.6, 1 pitch, 90 feet)
7️⃣ Johnny Vegas (5.7, 4 pitches, 450 feet) linked with Going Nuts (5.6, 2 pitches, 300 feet)
No Matter Where You Are by Us The Duo (2014) — #13/52
I know I shared an Us The Duo album just a few weeks ago, but they’ve been on my mind since learning that they’re no longer together as husband and wife. It sounds like they’ll continue to produce music together, but just as friends (and co-parents) and not as a married couple. Kind of a shock.
Anyway, this is one of my favorite albums from them and contains a song (“Make You Mine”) which was this close to being my wife’s and my first dance song. Great stuff from start to finish.
Follow along on the 52 Albums Project page where I’m making some playlists for you.
Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-04-01 01:35:00
Manton Reece, creator of Micro.blog, with some pretty momentous news on this Easter Sunday:
Some folks on Micro.blog who also actively use Bluesky have noticed something new we’ve been rolling out over the last couple of days: Micro.blog will now look for replies on Bluesky to your blog posts, bringing them into the Micro.blog timeline. This transforms Micro.blog into a base platform to manage even more of your social interactions.
Micro.blog has long supported cross-posting to a Bluesky account, but now it’ll look for replies to those cross-posts and bring them into Micro.blog as native mentions, which allows for this:
Now you reply to the Bluesky post directly within Micro.blog. Micro.blog copies your reply back to Bluesky seamlessly.
Rather than being a one-way train out to Bluesky, Manton has built a railway back, allowing two-way travel between your blog and your Bluesky account. It’s even more of the social web’s Grand Central Station than ever!
I’d love to see this interoperability come to its Mastodon/Threads support too. It’s less necessary for those platforms since they work with ActivityPub, which Micro.blog does natively. (I don’t have a “true” Mastodon account but can follow and interact with Mastodon users from within Micro.blog using my @[email protected] address, as well as follow Threads accounts with it.) But some people would prefer to have a “real” Mastodon and/or Threads account to get full functionality out of those platforms. Having everything flow back to your blog, even from those platforms, would be pretty cool.
Here’s the bottom line, and one of the reasons I love Micro.blog best despite its quirks and bugs:
Micro.blog is effectively a universal timeline for not just Micro.blog but also ActivityPub, Bluesky, and other services. We want to make the web a little better by encouraging people to post to their own blog while still being connected to friends. That means embracing open platforms wherever they are.
Manton Reece is building the open social web he wants to see in the world, and I’m all for it.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-03-25 07:50:00
I know I just shared a bunch of links in 7 Things, but then I saw this video from Scott Yu-Jan. WOW! He 3D-printed a case for the Mac Studio in the style of the original Macintosh, with a slot in the front to hold an iPad mini for the screen. As Yu-Jan says in the video, it gives his iPad mini a new purpose when not in tablet-mode as an external display for his Mac (much like Federico Viticci’s MacPad) with the added benefit that now it’s always charged when he takes it on the go.
Oh, and the pull out drawer for storage, headphone hook, and cord slots are just chef’s kiss.
It’s the perfect intersection of nostalgic desk trinket and kick-ass functional tool. As an M1 Mac Mini user, that tease about a version for its smaller case certainly also has my attention. 👀
As an aside, I was as transfixed by Yu-Jan’s cinematography as I was by the product — it’s beautiful! He artfully captured the design, printing, and assembly of the casing, and told a compelling story all in a tight eight minutes. Nice.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-03-25 07:24:00
A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ Blogroll.social is a new site from Dave Winer with a neat way to display a blogroll: sorted by more recently updated. Blogrolls are cool again! [🔗 blogroll.social]
2️⃣ I don’t record a lot of videos of myself, but if I did I’d be very tempted to get this auto-tracking dock that Belkin made to work with the iPhone’ DockKit. Stephen Robles gives a great overview in this video, and it’s pretty charming to see the little robot arm swing the phone around to keep faces in frame. 🤖 [🔗 Stephen Robles // youtube.com]
3️⃣ Playing chess via brain implant. The future is wild. [🔗 @pronounced_kyle // twitter.com]
4️⃣ Old-school lighters had so much more personality and functionality. I want them badly. [🔗 @histoireduneflamme // tiktok.com] (Via Todd Vaziri)
5️⃣ I guarantee you’re not ready for this site. 🤯 [🔗 henryheffernan.com] (Via Keenan)
6️⃣ Credit where it’s due, Humane seems to have taken criticism of their over-serious demeanor to heart. This latest demo video is far more casual and fun. Not as fun as the Rabbit R1, and still without a lot of personality, but a step in the right direction. There’s a lot to digest here, but my impression is that this interface may be better served by glasses and/or watch hardware. It’s very early days, though, and I’m intrigued to see where this technology goes. [🔗 humane // youtube.com]
7️⃣ LinkTalk is a fascinating idea for a very different sort of social network. [🔗 Jatan Mehta // journal.jatan.space]
Kind of Blue by Miles Davis (1959) — #12/52
It’s not very original to select one of the quintessential jazz albums as one that’s influential or important specifically to me. And yet. When I was a wee seventh grader, still learning my way around the trumpet and with dreams of joining the Ionia Middle School Jazz Band, Miles Davis is to whom I turned to get a feel for swing and blues. I don’t think I even knew at the time that he was the jazz trumpet guy. I just searched iTunes for jazz trumpet, Miles Davis popped up, I clicked “Buy”, and started listening on repeat.
I would later transcribe and play “So What” as a class assignment, so it has an exceedingly high play count as I would play along, scrubbing back and forth trying to nail the notes and style. Miles Davis’ music opened the door to learning about getting behind the beat and how one could infuse emotion and personality into every note.
I don’t listen to as much jazz these days, but I do find that it makes for excellent music to have on to get my creative juices flowing. I can’t listen to lyrics when I’m reading, writing, or focusing on something — but a little soft jazz gets things flowing.
So, yes, I’m going with Kind of Blue as one of my go-to jazz albums. An unoriginal, but absolutely essential choice.
Follow along on the 52 Albums Project page where I’m making some playlists for you.
Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.
2024-03-23 02:37:00
This isn’t a novel thing to say, but I’m a big fan of AirPods. I’ve named them as my most transformational tech product in the past, and I spend multiple hours every day with them in my ears. I’ve tried every generation of AirPods, save for AirPods Pro (2nd gen), and have more audio products scattered throughout my home than I’d like to admit.1 My daily drivers are AirPods (2nd gen). Suffice it to say, I have opinions about AirPods.
With rumors ramping up about next the generation of AirPods non-Pro, I wanted to take a moment to lay out what I’d like to see come in their next version.
In order of importance:
You saw above that I’m still rocking the AirPods (2nd gen) that debuted in 2019, but whose design is unchanged from the original AirPods introduced in 2016 along with the iPhone 7. Why? Because they’re the design that fit in my ears. As far as a first-generation product goes, Apple truly knocked it out of the park with AirPods. They said they studied thousands of ears to come up with the best shape to fit the most ears, and I believe them.
That said, they also made the same claim about the third-generation AirPods, the ones that gained an elongated “head” to nearly match the style of AirPods Pro, and those didn’t fit my ear holes at all. I was so disappointed that they fell out with any sort of activity or chewing motion. The same goes for AirPods Pro. I’ve tried every ear tip size, third-party foam tips, and every imaginable orientation to try to get them to fit. They just don’t and the combination of discomfort and worry that they’d fall out at any moment prevented me from ever getting lost in the music or conversation getting piped through them. In-ear tips are not the answer for me, and there are plenty of us out there that I think there needs to be a non-canal-obstructing option.
And so I’ve stuck with the second-generation version which Apple has mercifully kept available for sale, I assume, because they know that the two fits cover a wider breadth of customers than if they only sold the third-generations. But I can’t imagine Apple wants to keep that original design around forever, and so I’m optimistic that the next design will fit me as well as the 1st/2nd gens do.
Here’s another thing I want to see brought forward from the second-generation AirPods to the fourth: the imprecise tapping mechanism to control media playback. For the first two generations of AirPods, a simple double-tap with your finger on the outside of the head of the earbud would play/pause the media, and a triple-tap would skip tracks. And they were configurable to summon Siri.
For the third-generation design, the stem of the earbud shrunk in size but grew in capability. Play/pause/skip was moved to a pinching gesture on the stem, as measured by a new force sensor. AirPods Pro brought volume control to the stem as well, allowing you to drag a finger up and down it to adjust volume. In my experience, the volume control is awesome and something obviously missing from prior models. But the pinching gesture is a swing and a miss.
John Siracusa did a, predictably, good job at articulating why the pinching mechanism is a regression back when it was introduced, and you should listen to his rant about it on the Accidental Tech Podcast. The tl;dl version is that you need to be more precise to grab and pinch, you run the risk of pulling the AirPod out of your ears when you grip the stem (as opposed to pushing them in with the tapping gesture), and it is a difficult gesture to accomplish with gloved or otherwise covered (dirty, soapy, etc.) hand. Oh, and it’s likewise difficult to do when the AirPods are covered by a hat like mine often are here in the northeast.
I’m sure that plenty of people have gotten used to the new gestures, so I don’t necessarily think that the pinch gesture should be removed, but bringing back “tap-to-control” and introducing volume control to the non-Pro model would be big wins in my book.
Now we’re getting to the nice-to-haves. Apple is doing such interesting work in the noise cancellation field with AirPods Pro, that I’m, frankly, a bit jealous. I’d like to be able to tune back outside noises with cancellation, boost conversations with conversation mode, or let the AirPods do all the decision-making and just keep them on Adaptive Audio. I recognize that these features would suffer from the lack of an in-ear tip to provide passive noise cancellation along with the active version. But I also think Apple can make some headway here. And you could always turn it off if you don’t like the effect.
I think this is pretty much a gimme that Apple would tout their audio processing prowess, along with an improved physical speaker system for any new set of AirPods. But it’s fourth on my list because I’m not dissatisfied with how even my second-generation models sound. I don’t have particularly discerning hearing, so any slight change that could made in earbuds so small would likely get lost on me.2 But better is better, so let’s always keep moving sound quality forward.
Alright, now I’m just throwing pasta at the wall. There have been whispers of fitness tracking features coming to AirPods, and that sounds cool, I guess? If having a sensor inside my ears helps my Apple Watch to better track my heart rate or other health metrics, sure, let’s go for it! But it probably wouldn’t be a selling point for me, just an extra cool thing.
Finally, let’s not regress from any other improvements AirPods have enjoyed along their journey. USB-C should be the physical port on the charging case. The buds should have some water resistance to guard against sweat or rain when out on a run. Current battery life is plenty, but could always be improved (provided the case doesn’t have to get bigger — in fact, the smaller the case the better). Their Bluetooth standard should meet the latest specs, or maybe even adapt to use ultra wideband for a more stable and dedicated connection with larger data bandwidth. Improved microphones for phone calls and voice assistants. In short, the usual suspects when bumping up a generation.
AirPods are the gold standard in the wireless headphone industry, and they could stand on their own as a titan in the tech industry if broke out from the rest of Apple’s business. They’re a wearable product, which comes with distinct challenges regarding fit and durability. And they’re deeply personal. Most people I talk to would feel as out of place without their AirPods as they would without their keys or wallet. So a lot rides on each new generation, but I’m hopeful that the next ones will be the best yet.
Although, I really should do a full write-up of my audio journey one of these days.↩︎
I’m honestly not sure why I even have the higher bitrate setting in Apple Music turned on. I should experiment if I can even tell the difference there, or if I can save storage and bandwidth by dropping back to the default setting for sound quality.↩︎
HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!
I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.