Linked List: August 2, 2017

Wednesday, 2 August 2017

The Right Way to Pop Your AirPods Out of the Case, One More Time 

Back in January I made a YouTube video showing how best to remove AirPods from their case:

As of a few weeks ago that video had over 100,000 views, and while I hadn’t posted any other videos since then, I had a bunch of subscribers to my channel.

Yesterday I spent a few hours tightening the security of my various Google accounts (adding two-step security). As part of this, I deleted an account using an @daringfireball.net address that (I thought) I only used for viewing shared Google Docs, and added that same address as an alternate sign-in address for an existing Google account. Turns out, that was the account I’d used to create my YouTube account back in January. There doesn’t seem to be any way to restore that deleted account because I had already reassigned the email address it used to another account. Oops.

I just created a new channel and re-uploaded the same video. That’s what you see embedded above. If you subscribed before, please do again — this is the sort of mistake you only make once.

I don’t really care about the lost views or subscribers. I don’t have plans to get deeply into YouTube, and if I do, I ought to reclaim those subscribers quickly. I hate breaking links though — I mean I really hate breaking links — and now I’ve inadvertently broken the link to my video for anyone who embedded it or tweeted it. Sorry about that.

Steven Levy: ‘How Apple Is Putting Voices in Users’ Heads – Literally’ 

Steven Levy:

My conversation with Mathias Bahnmueller started as pretty much all my phone interviews do. “Can you hear me?” he asked, and I replied affirmatively. Then I asked him the same question. His answer was yes — he could hear me very clearly. And this was a tiny miracle.

That’s because Bahnmueller suffers from hearing loss so severe that a year ago he underwent surgery to install a cochlear implant — an electronic device in the inner ear that replaces the usual hearing mechanism. Around a million patients have undergone this increasingly mainstream form of treatment, and that’s just a fraction of those who could benefit from it. (Of the 360 million people worldwide with hearing loss, about 10 percent would qualify for the surgery.) “For those who reach a point where hearing aids no longer help, this is the only solution,” says Allison Biever, an audiologist in Englewood, CO who works with implant patients. “It’s like restoring a signal in a radio station.”

With this new integration, the iPhone transmits directly to the cochlear implant. It’s like a bionic ear:

Merging medical technology like Apple’s is a clear benefit to those needing hearing help. But I’m intrigued by some observations that Dr. Biever, the audiologist who’s worked with hearing loss patients for two decades, shared with me. She says that with this system, patients have the ability to control their sound environment in a way that those with good hearing do not — so much so that she is sometimes envious. How cool would it be to listen to a song without anyone in the room hearing it? “When I’m in the noisiest of rooms and take a call on my iPhone, I can’t hold my phone to ear and do a call,” she says. “But my recipient can do this.”

I’m a sucker for a good accessibility story.

Support Steven Troughton-Smith’s Work 

Steven Troughton-Smith has been at the forefront of iOS spelunking for the last decade. He pokes and prods at iOS and has an uncanny ability to find and identify interesting stuff (including a bunch of things just this week in Apple’s prematurely released image of the HomePod version of iOS). We, outside Apple, know far more about how iOS works thanks to him. He’s both extraordinarily clever and extraordinarily generous about sharing what he learns with the world.

Steven has a Patreon campaign to generate recurring funds to allow him to spend more time on this stuff. And he doesn’t just take things apart — he makes cool things, like this Mac-style tiling window system demo project for iOS, which he provides to anyone who backs his work for just $10/month. I am happy to back his work, and I hope a lot of you are too. Even just $1/month could make a huge difference if enough of you join in.