Linked List: December 5, 2017

Tuesday, 5 December 2017

Painting With Microsoft Excel 

Great find from Tina Roth Eisenberg:

For over 15 years, Japanese artist Tatsuo Horiuchi has rendered the subtle details of mountains, cherry blossoms, and dense forests with the most unlikely tool: Microsoft Excel.

Modern-Day Payola 

Jon Christian, reporting for The Outline:

People involved with the payoffs are extremely reluctant to discuss them, but four contributing writers to prominent publications including Mashable, Inc, Business Insider, and Entrepreneur told me they have personally accepted payments in exchange for weaving promotional references to brands into their work on those sites. Two of the writers acknowledged they have taken part in the scheme for years, on behalf of many brands. Mario Ruiz, a spokesperson for Business Insider, said in an email that “Business Insider has a strict policy that prohibits any of our writers, whether full-time staffers or contributors, from accepting payment of any kind in exchange for coverage.”

One of them, a contributor to Fast Company and other outlets who asked not to be identified by name, described how he had inserted references to a well-known startup that offers email marketing software into multiple online articles, in Fast Company and elsewhere, on behalf of a marketing agency he declined to name. To make the references seem natural, he said, he often links to case studies and how-to guides published by the startup on its own site. Other times, he’ll just praise a certain aspect of the company’s business to support a point in an otherwise unrelated story. […]

The Fast Company writer also defended the practice by arguing that it’s enabled by editors who are hungry for cheap or unpaid blog content. Many high-volume sites, including the Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, and Forbes, maintain networks of unpaid contributors who publish large amounts of material.

That’s a pathetic defense. Everyone is guilty in this racket — the “sponsors” who pay for this bullshit, the writers who accept the payola, and publications that blindly run these stories. There’s a complete and shameless lack of integrity from all three sides.

Google to Pull YouTube From Fire TV Over Spat With Amazon 

Janko Roettgers, reporting for Variety:

In an unusually frank statement, a Google spokesperson squarely blamed Amazon’s unwillingness to strike a business deal with Google for the step:

​“We’ve been trying to reach agreement with Amazon to give consumers access to each other’s products and services. But Amazon doesn’t carry Google products like Chromecast and Google Home, doesn’t make Prime Video available for Google Cast users, and last month stopped selling some of Nest’s latest products. Given this lack of reciprocity, we are no longer supporting YouTube on Echo Show and FireTV. We hope we can reach an agreement to resolve these issues soon.”

Amazon shot back Tuesday afternoon, sending Variety the following statement:

“Echo Show and Fire TV now display a standard web view of YouTube.com and point customers directly to YouTube’s existing website. Google is setting a disappointing precedent by selectively blocking customer access to an open website. We hope to resolve this with Google as soon as possible.”

So Amazon Prime is (supposedly) coming to Apple TV any day now, just as Amazon’s spat with Google is escalating. Google seems to be in a strong position here — it seems hard to me to sell a TV box that doesn’t support YouTube. Is a web view of youtube.com really a good experience on a TV? But this also goes to show how powerful Amazon’s retail store is — Google obviously cares that Amazon isn’t selling these Google hardware products.

iOS 11 Adoption Now at 59 Percent 

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

iOS 11 is now installed on 59 percent of iOS devices, according to new statistics Apple shared this week on its App Store support page for developers. That’s up from 52 percent on November 6, indicating iOS 11 adoption has grown just 7 percentage points over the course of the last month.

iOS 11 adoption has been slower than iOS 10 adoption. Based on Apple’s official App Store numbers, for example, iOS 10 was installed on 54 percent of devices in October, a month after the operating system had been released. Comparatively, iOS 11 was only at 52 percent in November, a month and a half after launch.

I don’t think a difference between 54 and 52 percent is meaningful, especially this year, when many people were waiting for the iPhone X. The iPhone X alone could account for that 2 percent. I think it’s fair to say iOS 11’s adoption rate is about the same as iOS 10’s last year.

iPhone X Charging Speeds Compared 

Comprehensive testing from Juli Clover for MacRumors. Looks like the 7.5-watt contact charging (enabled by iOS 11.2) using the Belkin and Mophie charging pads is a nice improvement over 5-watt charging.

Gabe Weatherhead, writing at Macdrifter:

Here’s a little Safari trick that is just gold. Hit Shift-⌘-\ to enter the Safari “Show all tabs” mode. From there it’s just a simple ⌘-F to search the open tabs.

Notice that the search also covers tabs open on other devices too?

Whoa, this is cool. Had no idea you could search in this mode.

But there’s a huge shortcoming: it only searches the tabs in the current window. It seems crazy to me that you can use this to find tabs open on other devices, but not tabs open in other windows on the Mac you’re currently using.

Update: Turns out you don’t need to type Command-F. Just type Command-Shift-\ and start typing, and whatever you type will go into the search field.

Russia Banned From Winter Olympics by I.O.C. 

Rebecca R. Ruiz and Tariq Panja, reporting for The New York Times:

Russia’s Olympic team has been barred from the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. The country’s government officials are forbidden to attend, its flag will not be displayed at the opening ceremony and its anthem will not sound.

Any athletes from Russia who receive special dispensation to compete will do so as individuals wearing a neutral uniform, and the official record books will forever show that Russia won zero medals.

That was the punishment issued Tuesday to the proud sports juggernaut that has long used the Olympics as a show of global force but was exposed for systematic doping in previously unfathomable ways. The International Olympic Committee, after completing its own prolonged investigations that reiterated what had been known for more than a year, handed Russia penalties for doping so severe they were without precedent in Olympics history.

I’m curious if Old Happy Thumbs will fire up his iPhone to comment on this one.

Wes Meltzer’s Review of MarsEdit 1.0 for ATPM 

Wes Meltzer, in his MarsEdit 1.0 review back in January 2005:

A brief historical diversion, if you will: going all the way back to LiveJournal clients, weblog editing clients have tended to be non-document-based, until quite recently. I used the original Windows LiveJournal client, which was modal way back when, and there weren’t a lot of alternatives. Sure, if you had a Radio blog, you had a document-based application — but the huge proliferation of blogs, as Maciej Ceglowski demonstrated in the NITLE Weblog Census, means that most people use Movable Type (about 44,000) or the big hosted services, BlogSpot and LiveJournal (707,690), all of which now support some form of remote posting. Between Ecto and MarsEdit, though, the future is clearly in document-based weblog editing.

Movable Type, Blogspot, and LiveJournal are all still around, but today they’re dwarfed in usage by WordPress and Tumblr. It’s a testimony to the strength of MarsEdit’s engine-neutral design that it remains relevant today, despite a nearly complete change in the publishing systems people use to blog.

MarsEdit 4 and Try-Before-You-Buy on the Mac App Store 

Daniel Jalkut:

MarsEdit 4 also brings a new sales approach that aims to unify the trial, purchase, and upgrade experience between the Mac App Store and direct-licensed versions of the app. The app is free to download and can be used full-featured for a 14 day trial period.

After the trial expires, all features of the app continue to work except for actions that update published content on the web. This ensures that all of MarsEdit’s powerful offline features, including download/archiving of posts, can be used in perpetuity for free.

MarsEdit 4.0 

Major update to one of my very favorite and most-used apps. I’ve been using MarsEdit ever since it was first spun off from the built-in blog editor in NetNewsWire back in 2004. MarsEdit 4 is a terrific update — it both works and looks better than ever. The basic premise — a native Mac blog editor that follows the basic layout and structure of an email client — remains as sound today as it did 13 years ago. MarsEdit is great for both its integration with various blogging platforms and its integration with MacOS as a native app.

I’ve said for years that almost everything I write for Daring Fireball goes through MarsEdit. The only posts that don’t are the ones I write on my iPhone (or, very rarely, iPad). But now that I think about it, it’s not just that almost everything I post now goes through MarsEdit — given that I’ve been using it since mid-2004, almost everything I have ever posted to Daring Fireball has gone through MarsEdit.