Excursions

I wish I understood the compression and streaming of audio better to understand why some form of audio (for example, episodes of a podcast) sound choppy over Bluetooth and others don’t. I am sure @marcoarment could go on and on explaining the reasons, but this just baffles me.

I have observed significant reduction in the time for the posts to appear on the Micro.blog timeline. Hope this isn’t an anomaly and @manton has put some fixes around this. If so, looks like they are working 👍🏽

Less than 24-hours away from the Apple event and we still haven’t seen any credible hardware leaks of actual devices. All we have is hearsay mock-ups. Either Apple’s cracked the secret to keep the supply chain silent or it’s going to be bumpy few week full of brickbats for them.

Why haven’t audiobooks gone more mainstream yet? After so many years of existence, Audible remains the only credible global player. Plus the plans/costs have hardly changed. It’s a vicious circle at this point - it’s too costly for larger adoption and so remains a niche market.

This thread on Quora captures some of the best stories from real people meeting Steve Jobs — some wonderful memories.

You don’t often get close to people like the Jobs, much less in a ridiculous situation like this, where you realize that they are just really good people.

You know what the biggest surprise of any Apple event going ahead will be? An updated iPhone SE. The chances of that happening at this event? Close to zero.

But hey, I can continue to dream, right? #BringBackSE

The games that light plays in darkness always mesmerises me. At times, I am glad that my camera doesn’t have my sight at night.

But what is true today is that not all Chinese phone software is bad. And when it is bad from a Western perspective, it’s often bad for very different reasons than the bad Android skins of the past. Yes, many of these phones make similar mistakes with overbearing UI decisions — hello, Huawei — and yes, it’s easy to mock some designs for their obvious thrall to iOS. But these are phones created in a very different context to Android devices as we’ve previously understood them.

The Chinese phone market is a spiraling behemoth of innovation and audacity, unlike anything we’ve ever seen. If you want to be on board with the already exciting hardware, it’s worth trying to understand the software.

What Chinese smartphones offer is the feature parity in hardware with high-end devices from well-known brands, like Apple, Samsung, at a price which is affordable to the mainstream market. It is difficult to convince someone to buy an iPhone when all the devices are presented along with their specs. Doesn’t matter then if the software experience is ripped off.

What I feel is troubling though and a thing that gets neglected is the durability of these devices. The maximum life of these is what the warranty is - typically an year. Most often, these devices start failing at performance or battery or overall system level even before it hits that period. And when it does, there always are new cheaper devices to replace them with.

This will never get covered by reviews — because reviewers move on to the new, shiny devices in a week or two. It’s the mainstream that suffers. However, brands that overcome this behaviour outlive ones that fade away sooner.

I wonder what are the simpler ways to pull the data out from Mastodon? I do not think it supports Webmentions yet. Are there any feeds? I mainly want to pull likes and reposts and replies. Display them with original posts if possible. In short,

Twitter:Bridgy :: Mastodon: ?

Boy, Google’s Night Sight mode looks totally bonkers — if the image comparison by Vlad Savov is anything to go by, his comment “play around with it as I have and lose your shit at the unreal results it produces” is apt. Want to know how the hell is Google doing that?

With a very different demographic than West, India has an efficient way of solutioning a tech that focuses on local problems first. Mobile-first. Low-data Lite apps. And now with electric vehicles - “with more rides possible in a day, the e-rickshaws are proving more lucrative”.

This is not a post where I be a tech pundit, read tea leaves scattered all over the internet and predict what Apple is going to launch on the upcoming October Apple event. Nope. These are the things I wish Apple launches. Some because I need them now. Some because I would eventually need them.

1. Non-TouchBar Macbook Pro: I need this, my old MBP is crying out loud at this point. It needs to be replaced. I wish Apple updates this version with new keyboards.
2. Macbook Air: If my first wish is not granted or is granted, but does not solve the keyboard problem, I will go with an Air. Current Air is a mockery with that dated screen and processor and the tiny storage. Just update those, keep everything the same. Don’t touch that keyboard (no pun intended). And don’t make Macbook One the new Air in its current form — one port is not enough.
3. Non-Pro iMac: If you can give me a laptop, give me the updated iMac. Again, change nothing big. Just update the processor and if possible, get rid of that 5400rpm hard drive. Just make Fusion drive the default.
4. Mac Mini: You know there is that tiny device being sold on that tiny corner of your website right? Yeah that, update that. I would love to have it run some side projects.
5. iOS changes for iPad: I know you will refresh iPad Pros. But in the current form, the iOS platform seems underwhelming on these loaded iPad devices. Make it do more. To start with, get rid of that static-grid springboard.

I wish Apple goes crazy a bit. It is ok to be doing the stuff thoughtfully, making things that work well. That sell well. But at times, it is also important to stop being “boring” and do more stuff that you don’t know how people will react to. Things like Pencil. Or AirPods. Or even Surface Studio from Microsoft.

At times, you can’t understand why something triggers a positive vibe in your mind. And you don’t need to, always.

These look like such simple questions, but am sure one can’t get all right. Even when you employ the internet. Is that’s the case, how can complex claims made during election period?

This election season before you share, decide, vote, double-check.

An investigation reveals many apps were used to dupe brands; revelation, they say, shows “just how deeply fraud is embedded in the digital advertising ecosystem”. Why are we surprised? When was the last time you clicked an ad? Am trained by now to ignore all ads. I do not think any humans click an ad intentionally.

In addition, the whole online ad business is built on duping users to click on ads and force the brands to pay for these useless click-through. I won’t be surprised if the automated ad clicks are way more common.

It’s time for Apple product launches. And so is the time for all the talks of -gates and sheeples and reality distortion. There’s so much noise this time with iPhone XR screens. Typical comments from most folks.

• “..just 326 ppl in 2018? WTF?”
• “..not even 1080p screen? How will it play 1080p videos?”

I get it, both are facts. iPhone XR is not a full-HD screen and has a pixel density way lower than it’s better sibling XS. But does it deserve all the brickbats? Am not sure about that. This is the screen configurations of all the lowest configuration iPhones over the year (since Retina displays were introduced).

I hope one can get the trend with this. Since the time retina screens were launched, pixel density of lowest configuration iPhone has always been 326ppi. And iPhone XR is that device this year. So it gets that screen. Sure, Apple always has a Plus size device with a better resolution screens. That need is addressed by XS this year.

So am not sure why there is such a huge pushback on XR devices. If reviews are anything to go by, these screens are just as good as Apple’s LCD screens have ever been. Are there cheaper Android devices that have screens with better resolutions? Of course. There will always exists cheaper devices with better configuration on paper than iPhone. But I think one thing tech nerds should have learnt by now, Apple never plays the configuration game.

I don’t get the enmity for Bluetooth headphones. For normal usage, these are very convinient. Are they without any issues? Of course, not. But they never evolved because there wasn’t any demand. And hence no incentive. Now there is, and am already seeing these become common.

There was a time when I used to visit the Wikipedia main page as a routine, every morning. It’s one trove of fascinating information. As I grew, not sure why I decided to be less smarter and abandoned this routine. That page is still brilliant.

There are new calls for retraction of Bloomberg’s compromised spy chip story — a story that apparently a lot of background research from renowned publications too failed to corroborate. And now people with skills are getting critical of the presented claims. Not looking good.

Time for another break. Time for another chai! ☕️

Learnt that “olden” is an accepted English word. It is so obvious, but I never thought it to be a “real” word. I always believed it to be just a poetic substitute for “old”. So never used in prose. I guess I was wrong.

Micro.Threads Update: Added an option to fetch more posts in the Thread Discovery section. I’ve played with this option on my local - though not wholly solved yet, it has reduced the missing out on posts issue for me.

YouTube’s recommendation engine is one of the worst out there. It fails to understand long running interests and prefers decisions based on the immediate watch history. Makes me completely wary of clicking on a video that I do not want Google to learn from lest it gets polluted.

So OnePlus preferred to postpone their event by a day to “maximize the amount of people we could reach with our message”. Reason? Well, Apple decided to select the same date as theirs. And they will even cover any costs people’ll incur to change the plans. Apple is .. splashy.

Magic happens when you let the colours play their natural game!