Linked List: March 5, 2018

Monday, 5 March 2018

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

That said, plenty of people enjoy listening to music but don’t care about playback quality. Growing up, most of the music in my house came via AM radio — a format so bad at reproducing music that it’s since been entirely abandoned to talk and news. Eventually I found rock FM radio stations and cassettes and CDs, but my first love of music came from an atrocious listening experience. The Amazon Echo reminds me of that, a little — though it provides a decidedly better audio experience — because for a whole lot of people it’s good enough. Even in my house, where we have access to far better speakers than the Echo, it’s ended up as the preferred player because of the ease of voice control.

The comparison to AM radio is a really good point. I wish I’d thought of that. Heck, even FM radio was often static-y back when tuners were analog and it was hard to get the frequency exactly right.

On the touch controls atop HomePod:

It’s the weak point in the HomePod’s design. Since the top is not visible unless the HomePod is lower than your vision, forget putting the HomePod high up. I placed the HomePod on the top of our upright piano and my wife complained that she couldn’t tell that Siri was activated — she couldn’t see the color blob. In contrast, the Amazon Echo’s colored activation ring goes around the edge of the device, so it’s visible even if you can’t see the top. You can’t feel for the volume controls, either, because there’s no tactile element to them at all. Even when I could see the top of the HomePod, I frequently tapped in the wrong place. I get why Apple doesn’t think physical buttons are cool, but the top of the HomePod isn’t a screen — and it would be better served with three buttons and an indicator light (that’s visible from the side as well as above).

In the weeks since I wrote my review, I’ve grown to dislike HomePod’s touch controls. Touching the middle of the touchpad to start playback sounds like a good idea, but in practice, it happens more often by accident. That might be because our kitchen HomePod is on a counter where we reach for things (including paper towels). But our Echo is at the same spot, and because it doesn’t have touch controls, we’ve never once accidentally started playing music with it. I also think the Echo’s spinning dial is a better volume controller than the HomePod’s plus/minus buttons. When you start music playing but are surprised that whoever used it last had the volume very high, you just want to make it quiet quickly.

Alexa Briefly Lost Its Voice on Friday ★

Chris Welch, writing for The Verge:

A regional outage impacting Amazon’s servers led to Alexa becoming unresponsive on Echo products and other devices that support the assistant. I tried a simple weather inquiry on the Echo Dot in my living room, and the signature blue ring stayed lit up for about 15 seconds without any answer. A tone eventually sounded, and Alexa said it had lost connection. Subsequent attempts also failed, producing a red ring accompanied by Alexa asking me to try again later.

By mid-afternoon, Alexa had returned to normal and was responding to voice commands again. The issue was likely tied to troubles Friday with Amazon Web Services. Slack and other applications that depend on AWS as a backbone experienced downtime earlier in the day.

I ran into this problem. It didn’t last long, but at first I couldn’t tell whether the problem was with my particular Echo, Amazon’s online service, or something else. While I was trying to figure out what was going on, my Echo told me it was having a problem connecting to Wi-Fi, and that I should use the Alexa app on my phone to reconnect it. I wasted about 5 minutes doing that. I would have been a lot less annoyed if the Echo had simply told me that there was a problem on Amazon’s side.

A HomePod Intervention ★

Stephen Hackett, writing at 512 Pixels:

All in all, I thought the move to the HomePod was going well right until my family staged an intervention. Their annoyance with Siri misunderstanding or misinterpreting has grown over the last few weeks, and the clumsiness with which Siri handles — or doesn’t handle — some requests has become bothersome.

I’ve overheard several interactions with the HomePod that entail a family member asking for a song or album that ends in getting upset with the device when it starts playing something else. The Echo — coupled with Amazon Music — had a much higher hit rate when it came to accurately playing what was desired.

In short, the increase in sound quality doesn’t make up for the frustration of using Siri. The HomePod is going to live in my studio; the Echo is back in its rightful place in the kitchen.

This suggests a rather simple summation: that Apple miscalculated that audio quality should be the top priority of a smart speaker. It’s the “smart” part that needs to be the top priority.

Christopher Steele, the Man Behind the Trump Dossier ★

If you’ve paid any attention whatsoever to the whole Trump/Russia/election interference/corruption saga, I’m sure you have the same feeling I do: it’s hard to get a handle on the whole story because it’s so utterly sprawling, and there are massive gaps in the publicly-known allegations. Jane Mayer has written a magnificent piece for The New Yorker, putting everything known (and adding some heretofore unknown pieces of reporting, including the stunning allegation that Trump decided against nominating Mitt Romney as Secretary of State at the direction of the Kremlin) into a cohesive, even-handed, and I must say, convincing story.

It’s best to think of this not as an article but as a short book. It’s over 15,000 words; the audio version is 1 hour and 42 minutes long. Put aside an hour or so today and read it. It’s compelling reading, and a remarkable piece of journalism.