Archive for May 20, 2020

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Don’t Bury a Wet Laptop in Rice

Kevin Purdy (via Josh Centers):

Most importantly, don’t try to use rice to “draw out the moisture.” It doesn’t work, at all. You’re giving water more time to corrode your laptop, and you’re probably getting rice inside your laptop or under your keys.

[…]

If you can remove the bottom of your laptop, or even just open up a battery/memory/hard drive compartment with a switch on the bottom, do that.

[…]

Here’s the trick with most MacBooks out there: the screws on the bottom are pentalobe screws. Specifically, they are P5 screws. They’re intentionally uncommon.

Joe Rogan Moves to Spotify

Joe Rogan:

Starting on September 1 the podcast will be available on Spotify as well as all platforms, and then at the end of the year it will move exclusively to Spotify

The podcast was already hugely financially successful, and it seems like this can only reduce his audience. On the other hand, maybe the fans will follow him and this will open up a new audience of people who don’t understand how podcasts work but already use Spotify (as 286 million people do). If I were a regular listener, I would be annoyed at having to use a separate app for one show.

Ashley Carman (tweet):

Listeners won’t have to pay to access the episodes, but they will have to become Spotify users. Spotify said in a press release that Rogan retains creative control over his show. It didn’t disclose how much it spent on the deal. The company will also work with an ad agency to jointly sell ads against the program. Rogan said last year his show reached about 190 million downloads a month.

Rogan’s YouTube channel will remain live, but it won’t contain full episodes.

Julia Alexander:

Rogan’s YouTube presence has two main avenues; full length eps and clips. Does not having full length episode impact spread of clips?

Peter Kafka (tweet):

Unlike other deals, this isn’t an acquisition, but a “multiyear licensing deal.” So Rogan will end up owning his own work and can eventually hop somewhere else.

[…]

This has echoes of Sirius XM’s move to bring Howard Stern’s popular morning show to the satellite radio service in 2004. One big difference: Sirius was a subscription-only service, and Spotify offers a free, ad-supported version; an ad-free version of Spotify costs $10 a month in the U.S.

Todd Spangler:

With Rogan, Spotify has landed one of the podcasting biz’s whales. It currently ranks as the No. 2 most popular show on Apple Podcasts (after Barstool Sports’ “Call Her Daddy,” whose hosts have been the focus of an ongoing controversy), according to Apple. A source familiar with the deal said Rogan became sold on Spotify’s ability to build his audience worldwide, after initially resisting distributing the podcast on the platform because he saw it as primarily a music service and because Spotify wasn’t offering to pay enough in licensing fees.

Via Sara Fischer:

Most Americans only subscribe to one audio service, but that could change if more podcasts begin to be offered exclusively on certain platforms.

acemcbane:

Everyone saying it’s a cash grab doesn’t listen closely. Over the last few years Joe has been demonetized and controlled by YouTube. I see a lot of podcasters following.

John Gruber:

It’s interesting to me, as someone with (to put it mildly) rather strong feelings on the advantages of publishing on the open internet, that Rogan sees moving to one exclusive app, with invasive tracking, as not exerting any sort of “creative control over the show”. I’m not trying to be coy, I know what he means — the content of the show will remain as-is, with no influence from Spotify. (So they say.) But I’m a big believer in Marshall McLuhan’s axiom: “The medium is the message.” Open podcasts and Spotify podcasts are similar, for sure, but they are not the same medium.

Previously:

Update (2020-05-25): See also: Hacker News, MacRumors, M.G. Siegler, The Talk Show.

David Heinemeier Hansson:

[The] difference between $20m/yr and $100m/yr is negligible in terms of lifestyle. The difference between literally RUNNING YOUR OWN SHOW vs being content bait on someone else’s hook is immense.

Nicholas Quah interviews Bill Simmons:

Spotify wants to be the dominant audio platform everywhere. That was the No. 1 reason I wanted to go there. I’m at a point in my life where I really just want to win. I’ve been in situations of all kinds over the last 20, 25 years, but the most fun I had was probably 2009 to 2014 at ESPN when we had the combination of the reach, the right people behind the scenes, the right ambition, and a lot of money. And people who are willing to take chances with it. If you look back at the stuff we attempted during that stretch, it was a cool time for the company. It’s probably something that will not happen again for them because of the way subs went backwards and everything.

Spotify reminded me of that point when I was at ESPN and a lot of the stars had aligned. The big difference is Daniel. The guy is like a genius. He might be Steve Jobs for audio.

Matt Birchler:

We can argue about how bad form it is for shows to go exclusive to one platform, and we can argue about how we distinguish shows that are available in all apps vs those who are available in specific apps, but to refuse to call these shows “podcasts” at all I feel is blatant gatekeeping that sounds very much like Spielberg’s stance, except people taking this stance would probably be calling films on Netflix “long TV shows”.

“I prefer podcasts that are distributed via RSS so I can listen in the app of my choice,” is a totally valid statement, but what I tend to hear is, “it’s not a podcast if I can’t subscribe to it from Overcast/Castro/Pocket Casts,” which is really starting to rub me the wrong way.

We already have a term for audio that’s not distributed via RSS, and it predates “podcast”: Internet radio.

Halide’s Third Birthday

Ben Sandofsky:

Meanwhile, a storm brewed on the horizon: iOS 13. At the start of summer, we tested Halide with the first iOS beta, and found significant issues. We filed tickets with Apple and hoped for the best, but as iOS 13 reached its last few betas in August, it was clear these issues weren’t going to be fixed in time If we didn’t find workarounds, we expected users breaking down our doors with torches and pitchforks.

So we halted work on Spectre to find iOS 13 workarounds for Halide.

Halide 1.13 launched with little fanfare but no complaints, which is all we hoped for.

[…]

There’s a million things we want to do, but the lost Spectre update was a warning sign that we’re bumping up against our limits. In the last year it’s felt like we’ve had to weigh the opportunity cost of everything. Does it make sense to spend two weeks building a demo for Apple’s event? (Absolutely.) Should we spend a few days writing this post? A few days doesn’t feel like much until you realize all product work grinds to a halt.

See also: LIDAR: Peek Into The Future With iPad Pro, Halide: Year Two.

Previously:

Be Careful When Scheduling Events Using Siri

Adam Engst:

When I used Siri to create the calendar event for the call, because I specified Mickie and Gary by name, Siri tried to be smart and invited them to the event without telling me. I didn’t want that to happen—the event was for my reference, not because I wanted to put it on their calendars.

[…]

Speaking as someone who doesn’t work in a large organization, calendar invitations make me uncomfortable. I never quite know when they’re being sent, or in what manner, or how the recipient will respond. […] Plus, when I receive invitations, I don’t know what will happen if I accept, reject, or ignore the invitation.

[…]

As a result, when I scheduled the call using Siri, it created the associated event on a calendar in Google Calendar. In itself, that wouldn’t have been a problem except that, by default, Google Calendar automatically adds video calls to events I create with other attendees. […] So as soon as Gary said he had been waiting in Google Hangouts, I realized that he had, for whatever reason, seen the event invitation and its associated link, rather than the email I’d sent.