Category: Internet
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ESPN, Charter, The Cable Bundle and the Future
I have been fascinated by the recently resolved standoff in the US TV industry between the second biggest cable provider in the country, Charter Communications, and one of the biggest TV providers, Disney. Over the US Open tennis final at the weekend, and the start of the opening weekend of the new NFL season, millions…
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Getting Your Podcast Promo Code Right
A short PSA about podcast promo codes. There’s a certain advertiser on podcasts right now who has a podcast promo code in the copy, which is absolutely fine. But they specify in the copy that the promo code listeners should use for the discount must be, “All lower case.” Really!? Is there really any kind…
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RSS Headline Display with Raspberry Pi Zero and Pimoroni Inky wHAT E-ink Display
Back in 2019 I was quite pleased when I built an e-ink display which would display the latest news headlines from a handful of news providers. My solution utilised those outlets’ Twitter feeds. But now it’s mid-2023 and Twitter in its old guise is no more. More importantly with respect to that previous project, it…
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Site Refresh
It has been an awfully long time since I gave this site a thorough refresh, and now it has one. This site has been around in one form or another since 2002, beginning on the Movable Type platform. Sometime around 2013, I finally migrated it over to WordPress, always wanting to maintain my full history…
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RIP Tweetdeck
There are books and TV series to be written about how Elon Musk has reduced a moderately successful social media network, overpaid massively, and then destroyed it in months. And I’m not going to write that here. But I have long been a Twitter user, and mostly enjoyed using the platform. Key to that usage…
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Why is Everyone Trying to Sell Me NFTs?
OK. I do know why. Easy cash. But I loathe just about everything NFTs stand for. Right now we’re in a few days into the Winter Olympics – a games that I’m not overly interested in, if truth be told. The timezone is bad for Europe, the pandemic means that there are sparse crowds at…
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Podcast Moderation
Spotify is learning the tough way that while you can build perhaps the most sophisticated software platform that scales beautifully and completely redraws the revenue model of the music industry, “content moderation” is hard. Particularly when you’ve backed the person at the centre of things with a $100m investment. Spotify has finally responded by finally…
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URLs in Communications
I’m not a marketing expert, but my view on URLs that are given out in any kind of communications, for any reasons, is that they need to be as simple as possible. Of course, the ideal is that you just click a link. But if you get an advert on TV, the radio or in…
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The Pros and Cons of YouTube Music – September 2020 Edition
I’ve been a user of Google Play Music for quite some time now – almost exclusively because they uniquely allow you to upload your own music (or other audio) to their servers. You could upload 50,000 tracks to the site. Why is this important? Maybe you have music that hasn’t been commercially released? Your friend’s…
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Apple and Dark Sky
Yesterday came news that Apple has bought the company who make the mobile weather app, Dark Sky. For those who don’t know, Dark Sky is a particularly good weather app that marries great design with accurate minute-by-minute prediction of things like rain. They began as an iOS app, before making an API available to other…
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Magic Mirror
Note: Taking good photos of mirrors is very hard! This photo suggests lots of double images, but in fact they’re not visible to the human eye, and the text is nice and sharp! Nor can you see acrylic marks in the screen. Yes, the mirror still works as a mirror. And yes, I’ve intentionally blurred…
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When Things Go Wrong: aka Thank Goodness for Amazon Drive
I have a NAS drive, and it holds all my worldly digital goods. That is, it has all my photos, videos, documents and other things. I still haven’t found a cost-effective off-site backup solution beyond the NAS drive, although I do need one. Something that I can back up, upwards of 6TB of data. Amazon…