Looks bad ass. Not like I don't already have enough TV to watch without this though.
Song Exploder →
One of my favorite podcasts lately. Every episode, an artist will talk about the story behind a piece of music they've created, and break apart the different tracks of that song so that you can hear them individually.
The episode on the Game of Thrones theme song is the one that first got me hooked.
The New Television Bundle →
To some, this is extremely exciting. To others, it’s beyond frustrating. After all, wasn’t the great unbundling of television supposed to be not only liberating, but significantly cheaper? This new bundle, when you add in a few more “à la carte” options, sure seems like it will cost more money than cable television ever did.
Here’s the thing: the money argument was a red herring. It’s not about money. It’s about choice and experience and a logical way of doing things.
Audi RS3
Pretty much my dream car at the moment.
Also, this advertisement is fairly explicit as far as car commercials go. Maybe it's just a little too soon for me?
Review: Casper Mattress
It's good.
That's about it. It's not life changing. I'm not sure what I was expecting really, but it's a mattress. After a while I just kinda stopped thinking about it. I sleep well enough at night, but it's not like I wake up every morning and think "That night of sleep was fucking amazing."
A couple miscellaneous thoughts:
- Along with the Casper I bought a metal box spring replacement thing from Amazon and together my bed is now absolutely silent. Which is really great.
- Traditionally, shopping for mattresses sucks. There's a million different brands, you have to go to a store and have some sales guy pressure you into buying for an hour. Picking out the Casper online was a breeze, and getting it delivered and set up was a cinch. This is a mattress business model that I want to support.
- We paid $850 for our Queen sized model, which seems expensive, but it's actually like $500-$1000 cheaper than the mattresses we were looking at in brick and mortar stores.
So yeah, I definitely recommend you get one yourself if you're in the market for a mattress. Just don't expect it to change your life or anything. And if you're going to buy one, then of course you should use my referral code so that I get a $50 kickback.
Techdown #44 - Little Sweden →
Now that I'm blogging again, I kinda *have* to link to new Techdown episodes, yeah? A few episodes back we started naming episode titles after little jokes from in the show and I think that so far it's worked out well.
Flash is Dead
New Homestar Runner cartoon pretty much makes it official. I of course loathe Flash, but it's really not the same having bonus clips just play at the end of the short without having to click around to discover them.
Also, I can't wait to work "Hypertext Markup Lotion" into casual conversation.
Why I'm still wearing my Apple Watch every day
I was originally pretty skeptical about the Apple Watch. I bought one mostly because I felt obligated to as a developer. I tend to be a minimalist, and I didn't know if the benefits of the watch would be worth the hassles that would come with it. Getting distracted by notifications on my wrist, feeling it against the desk when I'm typing, charging it every night, etc.
Turns out that, for me, it's totally worth it.
After 3 months, I'm still wearing my watch every single day. The watch enables me to do many things that I couldn't do before that not only make the devices worth its "hassle," but that are now a big part of my daily routine.
Checking the Time
Duh, right? But to be clear, time checking *alone* isn't reason enough for me to wear a watch. Which is why I haven't worn a "dumb watch" for years. But it's definitely a really nice side benefit of the device.
Checking the Weather
Just as easy as checking the time, but even more useful. The temperature complication on my Apple Watch face means I'm always .25 seconds away from knowing how hot or cold it is outside.
If i'm about to go for a run, I just flick my wrist and know instantly what running attire I need. And if it looks like it's about to rain, tapping the temperature complication launches the Weather app so that I can see a useful hour by hour breakdown of precipitation percentages.
Fitness
I only care a little bit about filling my rings. I mean, given the choice, I'd rather have them filled than empty. But it doesn't ruin my day or anything if they don't get done.
However, I really like being able to start running or biking sessions by touching my wrist instead of playing with an upside down phone strapped to my bicep. Every time I go out on a run or ride, I start sessions through both the Exercise and Strava apps, which is a little bit of a pain, but I want credit in both apps. And while I'm out, I can check my wrist at any time to see my duration and distance.
watchOS 2 (yes that's how it's capitalized) has APIs that will allow 3rd party apps to start the exercise session automatically, which is going to be pretty great.
Podcasts
I listen to a ton of podcasts, which means I've basically heard the sponsorship reads for a small handful of companies about a million times. Now when when a podcast starts to "tell me about something that's awesome" I skip right through that shit with a little help from my watch.
I flick my wrist, slide up from the bottom to get my audio controls, and hit the "+ 45 seconds" button to skip ahead. If the read is especially long, I can hit the button again to be 1:30 ahead, and if needed, hit the "- 15 seconds" button to go back a little bit. Usually this entire interaction takes me something like 2-3 seconds.
It may be worth noting that I never use the watch to start a new podcast; even if I'm in the car I always reach for my phone. The interface is just too small and requires too many steps to be done efficiently.
Apple Pay
Partially a matter of principle, I use Apple Pay whenever possible. And with the Apple Watch, I can just double tap the communication button, hold my wrist near the credit card scanner for a second, grab my groceries, and go. The longest part of the whole process is waiting for my receipt to print.
Notifications
This thing is really nice for notification triage.
My wrist buzzes when I get an iMessage, a Twitter mention, an email (I get very little email), and when a Tigers game has ended. It's nice to know about these things, but it turns out that most of them don't require a response, so my phone stays in my pocket.
Fashion
Since my son's been born, I've been getting photographed a lot more than usual. And every time I see these pictures of myself I appreciate how cool the Watch looks. I only have the blue band at the moment, but I can definitely see myself buying more in the future.
Conclusion
To be clear, I totally understand if you can't find reasons for the Apple Watch to fit into your lifestyle. In fact, I probably wouldn't even recommend the product to most people that I know. But I'm really glad that I have mine and I don't see myself putting it in the drawer any time soon.
Room
Looks really good, but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to watch movies like this anymore now that I have a kid.
"Your music"
A lot of people are getting upset at Apple for messing with their music. Jim Dalrymple thought that Apple had lost all of his music. Kirk McElhearn thought that Apple Music matched files using metadata instead of acoustic fingerprinting. And Marco Arment's been retweeting people all day complaining about Apple Music messing up their library.
All these guys are streets behind. They need to let go of the concept that there is music that is "theirs."
I spent the better part of my college years amassing (*ahem*) my collection of MP3s. I spent hours and hours ripping music from CDs, organizing gigabytes of songs, tagging them properly, giving them the correct album artwork... but as soon as I started using Spotify, a switch flipped in my head and I could clearly see that streaming was the future of music.
Let the companies be the ones that worry about gathering up the largest music collection that they can. Let them organize it all and take care of backing everything up. And let them write software that gives us a window into all this music that is easy to use.
And give us a way to tag songs that we want to listen to at a later date. So that we can consider them "ours."