Just like with hockey and baseball, your options for watching local NBA games this year can vary drastically based on where you live. Read the full column →
Published work, shop talk, and stray thoughts.
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The latest Advisorator: Your new (old) internet homepage
With the right setup, RSS is still one of the most empowering ways to control your online content consumption.
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Cable’s fork in the road, Amazon’s Apple TV ripoff (Cord Cutter Weekly)
TV providers can either bundle up or slim down.
The post Cable’s fork in the road, Amazon’s Apple TV ripoff appeared first on Cord Cutter Weekly.
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Cable TV hits a fork in the road (TechHive)
A couple things happened over the past month that could lead to big changes in how TV bundling works. Read the full column ->
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omg.lol
This looks like such a neat offering for which I nonetheless probably have no practical use:
- A fun domain name (like newmy.omg.lol or whatever)
- An omg.lol email address that can forward elsewhere
- A Markdown-based profile page builder
- Access to the social.lol Mastodon instance
- An IRC community
- Some other stuff like a URL shortener and Pastebin instance
At $20 for a year it’s alluring for reasons I can’t quite articulate, given that I already have my own domain name, email address, website, and good-enough Mastodon home (on writing.exchange). Convince me that I actually need this!
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Cool Site Zone
Speaking of neat old web things, Michael Klamerus of Virtual Moose is assembling a “Cool Site Zone” with Geocities-style buttons you can click on, like these:
I’ve thought about adding a blogroll/webring for independent tech and gaming sites here as well. In the meantime, block out some time to click around on Michael’s site and discover some neat indie games.
Update: It’d be rude not to include the Virtual Moose button as well:
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Forums!
Over the years, forums did not really get smaller, so much as the rest of the internet just got bigger. Reddit, Discord and Facebook groups have filled a lot of that space, but there is just certain information that requires the dedication of adults who have specifically signed up to be in one kind of community.
He’s assembled a huge list of active forums on all kinds of enthusiast topics, from audio gear and gaming to gardening and—yep—taking drugs. If you remember the old internet all of this will resonate with you, in large part because many of these forums look roughly the same as they did 25 years ago.
I once came across a forum that was a treasure trove for downloading bootleg concerts from the 70s and 80s. I’ll post a link if I can remember it.
Update: From an astute comment, forums are “publicly accessible and search indexed resources,” while sites like Discord are “private, hard to find and search hidey holes.” (And Reddit wants search engines to pay for access now, thanks to AI.)
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Should you not fully charge your phone? (Advisorator)
Whether to deprive your phone of a full charge has become a topic of geeky debate.
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Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom
Developer: Panik Arcade
This madcap mash-up of Mario 64 and Crazy Taxi trades running and jumping for accelerating and steering as you hunt for collectible Gears around colorful 3D maps. The game boasts of having no jump button—technically true, as most vertical traversal involves using ramps to boost yourself skyward—though a double-tap of the boost button gives your cab a little bounce, which becomes essential for climbing the occasional step.
The idea works, and the goofy plot is appropriately low-stakes, but I wish the levels leaned more into puzzle-solving and found more ways to emphasize the thrill of scooting around at high speeds. Too much challenge comes from wandering around in search of each Gear rather than performing the right maneuvers to collect them. A hint system might be the one nod to 3D Mario that’s missing.
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Three awesome review sites that have nothing to do with technology
File these under “the kind of sites you’d hope to land on while clicking through StumbleUpon in the late aughts.”
Afoolzerrand: An extensive database of chocolate milk reviews. (Alpenrose Swiss Supreme Chocolate Milk: “Much more sweet than chocolaty and has a beefy yet accessible 6% base– which pays dividends in the highly satisfying afterglow.” 9.5 out of 10.) Via Naive Weekly.
AppleRankings: As in, the fruit. (Red Delicious: “Nowadays, you can find this thick-skinned, flavorless, mealy imposter unwashed in a dirty wicker basket on the floor of a convenience store.” 25 out of 100.) Via M.H. Williams on BlueSky.
The Mix Review: Excessively granular analyses of modern pop songs. (“Please Please Please” by Sabrina Carpenter: “By changing the key of the second verse, the music rouses us listeners from our complacency with a jolt of novelty, but without any risk of rendering the verse’s underlying musical content less memorable.”) Found searching the web for “please please please modulation” because I was wondering if anyone else appreciated it, while also wishing someone had bestowed similar love upon the crunchy altered secondary dominant chord in “Feather.”
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Google’s going to ruin quick settings on Android, isn’t it?
Mishaal Rahman dug into Android 15’s source code and found a change that he believes is being held over for Android 16 next year:
Pulling down the status bar a second time no longer brings down the Quick Settings panel. Instead, the Quick Settings panel is accessed by pulling down the status bar with two fingers. This is the change that I expect will be the most controversial, as it requires you to put more effort into accessing your Quick Settings tiles.
Samsung is reportedly planning to split quick settings and notifications in a way that essentially rips off iOS—something Xiaomi has already done and, saddeningly, claims that 90% of users prefer it—but this sounds even worse.
Two-finger swiping is not a common gesture. It’s also impossible to accomplish one-handed. Google needs to rethink this.
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Why the best phones have bland colors
Imad Khan, writing for CNet:
Why don’t manufacturers, generally, bring bold and fun colors to pro devices?
“The approach that most manufacturers have taken is to experiment with color at lower price points, but stick with black and white for the premium tier,” said Avi Greengart, president and lead analyst at Techsponential. “This is both an admission that many consumers invest in cases to protect their expensive phones, and an unwillingness to deal with inventory management.”
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Among iPhone owners, for example, case usage is as high as 87%, according to data from NPD.
Tough luck for us weirdos who go caseless.
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Remembering the Purple-ish Pixel 3a
Quoting myself from five years ago:
Google’s Pixel 3A phone has a lot of admirable qualities. It sports a great camera that rivals the higher-end Pixel 3. Like other Pixel phones, it’s first in line for Android updates straight from Google. You can squeeze it to speak with the Google Assistant. And its starting price of $400 unlocked is tough to beat.
If I’m being honest, though, the best thing about the Pixel 3A is the “Purple-ish” color option.
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The purple Pixel 3A’s great triumph is in the way it manages to be distinctive and subtle at the same time. While Google has always offered at least one offbeat color scheme for its Pixel phones, the purple Pixel 3A is the company’s high watermark.
This morning I pre-ordered an iPhone 16 Pro Max in “Natural Titanium,” and I’m sure it will be sufficiently slick. But Google’s early Pixels had a playfulness that I really miss—even the plain white Pixel 3 had a minty green power button—and the Purple-ish Pixel 3a with its tennis ball green power button hasn’t been matched since.
Just terrific.
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I’m excited about a menu bar
The more I think on inverting the format for Advisorator’s free edition, the more confident I’m feeling about it, and a lot of that has to do with a menu bar.
Here’s what Advisorator’s top nav bar used to look like:
After some fiddling, here’s what it looks like now:
Most notably, it now has a “Subscribe” link, which leads to the free newsletter sign-up form. This might seem obvious to include, but Advisorator used to be for paying members only, and the website existed only for those subscribers.
It all got kind of awkward as I added and expanded the free edition. The site still catered primarily to paid subscribers, and so I avoided putting a sign-up link in the nav bar so as not to cause confusion. Until now, I’ve also been creating two separate newsletters, and so it made sense to only include the paid edition’s archives in the top nav bar.
The new format will make it much easier for me to have a single, canonical archive, with a paywall that applies to the bottom half (ish) of each newsletter. That means the Archives link will be useful to free and paid subscribers alike.
Meanwhile, I’ve moved the “Home” button over and renamed it to “Membership.” When you sign in as a paid subscriber, it serves as a welcome page with quick links to the latest newsletter and other resources. If you’re not a member, you’ll see an explanation of membership benefits and links to subscribe.
All of which helps make way for the aforementioned “Subscribe” button, which gives you an easy way to sign up no matter where you navigate on the site. To me at least, the whole thing feels cleaner, more transparent, and more professional. I hope it leads to more free and paid subscribers alike.
As for The Blog, this is still just a place for me to dump some excess thoughts from my head. I’m not sure that’s worthy of a nav bar item just yet.
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Flipping Advisorator’s free and paid versions
This might be a bad idea, but I’m going to try inverting the format of Advisorator’s free edition.
Previously, it went like this:
- Quick tip
- An upsell for that week’s feature story, which appears atop the paid newsletter
- News roundup
- A useful app to try, sometimes with an upsell for my ultimate list of awesome apps
- A truncated version of the deal list I usually send out to paid subscribers.
- Another upsell for the paid edition, referencing the omitted deals.
- Sign off.
Now it looks like this:
- The feature story that I used to reserve for paid subscribers
- An upsell for the news, quick tip, useful app, and deal list that now reside only in the paid edition
- Sign off
At minimum, it’s a lot less convoluted, but I’m also hoping it makes the newsletter more enjoyable and shareable for free subscribers. You might be more excited to share, say, an article about an inexpensive AirTag alternative or the best ad blocker than a grab-bag of other stuff. It’s certainly easier for me to share on social media.
At the same time, that grab bag is easier to talk up as a benefit for paid subscribers. They’re not just getting one extra article per week, but rather a whole bundle of useful intel. And that’s in addition to other benefits like my online guides and Slack channel.
If all goes well, this may even allow me to produce one canonical version of the newsletter—and therefore a single archive page—instead of separate free and paid versions. Still, it’s nerve-racking to give away the part of the newsletter that takes maybe 60% of my time each week.
As I mentioned in this week’s issue, we’ll see how it goes and adapt as needed.
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Thoughts on ad blockers
After last week’s column about uBlock Origin, we had a spirited discussion in the Advisorator chat room about the ethics of using an ad blocker. In particular, Matthew Keys of The Desk raised concerns about how using an ad blocker can deprive independent journalists (himself included) of revenue. I appreciate that Matthew brought this up, and after some reflection, I wrote down some thoughts that he encouraged me to share here.
Matthew raised a couple of separate questions, the first of which is whether it is acceptable to recommend ad blockers to readers.
My feeling is yes. Readers have been given a raw deal by the current state of online advertising: Accept ads that track their every move around the web, create malware risks, and put a drain on system resources/battery life, or block those techniques and deprive revenue to publishers. I wish that wasn’t the choice, but it is, and I believe users should have control over what happens to their data and what happens on their computers.
The second question is what publishers should do about ad blocking, which is becoming table stakes in basically every browser besides Chrome. Safari already blocks the vast majority of ads by default. So do Edge, Firefox, DuckDuckGo’s browser, Brave, Vivaldi, and Arc. Regardless of what happens in my little newsletter, publishers will need to adapt to that reality.
There’s no perfect answer to this, but I think there are many possibilities. PCWorld has built a nice business around affiliate revenue, has a subscription digital magazine, and has a YouTube channel that I presume is monetized through ads/sponsors. Fast Company has a premium subscription, an events business, and various awards which vendors can pay to apply for. You can have a newsletter that monetizes through direct ad deals that don’t rely on tracking. You can sell special reports, solicit donations, or throw up paywalls. And maybe there’s room for a more privacy-respecting kind of online ad. I don’t think the answer is to just guilt people into accepting a system that does not respect their system resources or their privacy.
A few other stray thoughts:
- You could argue that some ad blockers are more harmful than others, for instance by hiding the pop-ups that discourage ad blocker usage. I don’t see a huge distinction as ultimately it’s the same choice being made. Notably, in browsers that let you choose between ad blocking or just tracker blocking, those nastygrams show up regardless. The tracking goes hand-in-hand with the advertising.
- Any time you consume content in ways that the creator did not sanction, there are going to be some ethical dilemmas. You could argue, for instance, that DVR is a form of revenue theft, if not for the creator (which may still get paid to serve the ad), then for the advertiser. Yet I continue to recommend services like PlayOn and Channels DVR because they provide control for users in a system that is increasingly stacked against them. I view ad blockers in a similar way.
- In any case, I don’t entirely believe that publishers are to blame. A lot of this falls on the tech giants that build the ad tech system and have encouraged a race to the bottom on advertising, thereby making many webpages intolerable to read.
- All of that said, consider disabling your ad blocker on sites whose journalism you appreciate, particularly if they are respectful with the quality and quantity of ads they show.
Got your own thoughts on the matter? You can always send me an email.