I’m comparing radio’s free plan (the only plan), with Spotify’s free plan. When it comes to free streaming music, radio was better. Radio isn’t giving you a taste for free in hopes you’ll upgrade. Spotify is more like a drug pusher in this way… first hit is free, but they are hoping that gets you to pay.

That’s exactly what I want in my car, security vulnerabilities that gives someone access to control anything electronic… that sounds terrifying.

Aspects can also become obsolete, like all the cars that lost their internet connectivity when the cell providers decommissioned the 3G data networks the old cars were using in 2022. Check out some of the cars on this list, they aren’t even that old… That’s a nice 2019 Porsche 911 you have there, too bad the remote, safety and security features stopped working 3 years after purchase. I guess that’s what $92k gets you.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/16/3g-networks-shutting-down-in-2022-could-affect-your-cars-gps.html

I don’t really want my car to have an API at all. I want it to be mechanical, so my car doesn’t become obsolete on a computer timeline.

We’ve gone through a few different models for MS Authentication at work. The current one is to put in your password for what you’re trying to access on the laptop, then it prompts for a number, and the phone gets a push notification to tell which number. It works well enough. I just wish SSO worked more so I didn’t need to put in my password so much.

So a free version of YouTube Music?

iTunes had this back in the day. All the iTunes libraries on your network would show up in iTunes. It was awesome in college when entire dorms or apartment complexes would be on the same network.

iChat had a similar feature of showing people on your network. I messaged someone once to see if they also had an internet outage, because the local network seemed up. We got to chatting, and they told me they had been rocking out to my music library all year and invited me to a party. Great features.

Some people also made some software to pull the songs from these shared libraries. That was less legal, but the native iTunes sharing was awesome in the right environment.

I tried listening to the radio for the first time in several years. Most of the stations I used to listen to are gone. I’m not pleased with this development.

If radio and Spotify are the same in terms of what they offer, radio was infinitely better. It was broadcast wirelessly over the air and all you needed was a cheap little AM/FMt tuner to pick it up. No internet or cell service provider (which both cost money), no accounts that track your usage to target ads, if there is a single issue it just gets a big fuzzy, it doesn’t totally cut out.

I miss analog stuff. It was so simple and useful. This new stuff seems needlessly complicated for what is ultimately being provided.

I think there is value to meeting the people you work with face to face. It goes a long way to help build rapport, and it doesn’t require all that much time.

I would be OK with 1 event per quarter, which would be 4 weeks per year. Not exactly 90/10, but close enough and 90/10 sounds better than getting too technical. Give me a free flight, hotel, and food in an interesting place for a week 4 times per year. I’m good with that, provided they aren’t all so mandatory that if you have a conflict with life they don’t shit can me. Maybe there are 4 opportunities per year, and you show up for 2.

I was actually going to suggest this to my boss as a compromise when I went to work from home and moved about 6 hours from the office… but the pandemic happened 2 weeks after I left, so that pretty much eliminated any chance of that happening and the team I was on in that office was gutted.

If this allowed a company to eliminate their offices completely, I wonder how that would work out financially. I assume it would be cheaper than maintaining an office.

macOS does this too, but by default it changes based on your input device and it can be changed in the Settings.

I’m all for a return to skeuomorphic design on macOS and iOS. I think it was a nice juxtaposition to the minimalist hardware design.

One of the big selling points for Apple stuff is how it all works together. That’s lost when releasing generically on Android. There is an old quote from Alan Kay that goes, “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” Apple lives by this idea.

An iPod was my first Apple product, pre-iTunes for Windows. The software I had to use sucked, so I took an irresponsible amount of money at the time, and bought iMac so I could use iTunes. OS X at the time had an app called iSync to sync your contacts to a cell phone, it worked with the Moto Razr. When I went to go buy one from Verizon and asked if iSync worked they proudly (for some reason) said no, because Verizon put their own software on all the phones they sold to help with support… so I went to Cingular (now AT&T), so I could sync my phone with my computer. The iPhone came out, so of course that would be the phone to get, because it would sync my music, contacts, calendar, etc to my phone as seamlessly as the iPod worked with iTunes. That sync has only improved over time and includes so much more. Then smart watches start to become a thing, Apple has already shown me they know how to make things work well together, so of course the Apple Watch is the smart watch to get. I can fire up Apple Fitness on my Apple TV, iPhone, or iPad, and my Apple Watch will automatically see it and start a workout, and show my heart rate on the screen with 0 setup.

The halo effect and the ecosystem are very real and it’s a reason to buy Apple stuff. In many cases there are new hardware features that enable the software to do what it’s doing. Apple has dabbled in software for other operating systems. iTunes for Windows, Safari for Windows, Quicktime for Windows, Apple Music for Android, Apple TV for all sorts of TVs. A lot of people get upset by the the seemingly needless extras it comes with, or just think they sucks. A lot of this is because many of Apple’s apps heavily leverage system services within macOS and iOS, so to run them another OS requires reimplementing all that stuff, so it feels very non-native, and overall weird, with more bugs, and a lack of some of the nice to haves around the ecosystem when things are all coming from Apple hardware as well as software.

I’ve had Comcast offer me cable TV services for $1/month and -$1/month on two separate occasions. That’s much less than $73/month.

Fuck Comcast, but it seems this stuff doesn’t have to cost near as much as they’re all charging.

The reason why iMessage works and is so popular is because there is no friction. If an iPhone user messages an iPhone user, it just happens. No extra apps, no choices to make, no switching apps to message different people.

There is no want in hell I’m going to get everyone in my life to download Signal, set it up, and use it. Even if I did, I complicated their life, because they would need to do the same, or bounce between apps.

Seeing as 99% of the people I text are on iOS, iMessage isn’t an issue. I think this is the case with a lot of people, where groups of friends/family have the same type of phone… at least that’s what I’ve seen. I have an aunt with an Android phone, but no one really likes her, so it’s not much of an issue.

RCS dates back to 2008 and Samsung and Google are just now getting around to supporting it… They should be ashamed of themselves. iMessage exists, and has the pull that it does, because Google spent 15 years fucking around with all kinds of bull shit. Meanwhile, Apple users had 1 consistent platform which saw regular updates to add features and functionality.

Ars put a nice list together of Google’s nonsense. Maybe Google should prove they can stick to something for more than a year or two before having the gall to shame others who have been very consistent on their approach for over a decade.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-of-instability-the-history-of-google-messaging-apps/

I’ve been debating dropping it, not because it’s not nice to have, but because it makes YouTube too easy to watch. Maybe if I was hit with more ads I’d get frustrated and do something useful.

Hmm… I can’t remember if I’ve seen anything like that or not. 90% of my YouTube watching is on my TV, 9% is on my phone (full screen), and 1% is probably on the desktop, so it’s rare I’d have the opportunity to see this. The platforms I do watch on would be most impacted by in-video ads, and I get none of those, which is the main thing I care about. If only YouTube Premium let you auto-skip messages from sponsors.

I’ve had YouTube Premium for a couple years now and I’ve never experienced this.

It’s more about the annoyance factor. Before buying or using any of the port modules I’d need to check the reference to see what’s compatible. It’s one more thing to think about and it would make me less likely to use the modules.

This is good to hear. Last I heard China made him disappear. I assumed he was either dead or wasting away in some reeducation camp.

The idea is that day to day charging is done at home. The charging stations should really only be needed on road trips… hence their locations at hotels. For those without a living situation that allows for home charging, it’s probably best to way until that piece of the puzzle is figured out and more mature.