Linked List: June 13, 2018

Wednesday, 13 June 2018

Audio of Mets Pitcher Noah Syndergaard and Manager Terry Collins Getting Ejected From a Game Last Year ★

I don’t know why this is only going viral now, because it’s a game from last year, but this is amazingly entertaining. The backstory: in the 2015 playoffs, Dodgers second baseman Chase Utley slid hard into second base and Mets second baseman Ruben Tejada wound up with a broken leg. It was an ugly but legal play and it resulted in MLB changing the rules on how you could slide into bases. This is the first game the Mets played against the Dodgers last year, and pitcher Noah Syndergaard — one of the hardest throwers in the history of baseball — threw a pitch at Utley.

The umps ejected Syndergaard and manager Terry Collins from the game. Umpire crew chief Tom Hallion was wearing a mic. The audio is fantastically compelling and profane. If MLB mic’d every ejection their TV ratings would soar. I’d pay double to MLB for my annual At Bat subscription if I could listen to the audio of ejections.

Update: I keep changing the URL to one that still works, because MLB’s copyright lawyers are trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube with takedown demands.

What’s the Deal With AirPower? ★

9to5Mac, back in February:

According to a new report from Macotakara, Apple is on schedule to begin selling AirPower sometime in March through its own retail stores, as well as resellers such as Best Buy.

The report doesn’t offer a specific release date, with the blog’s source only saying that the release will occur sometime next month.

At this point Apple is under three months away from the one-year anniversary of AirPower’s announcement. To be clear, Apple said all along it wouldn’t be shipping until “2018”, but it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that something has gone seriously wrong with this product.

‘Do You Know What Fernet Is? It’s a Terrible Thing.’ ★

I laughed my way through this interview with my friend Lê, owner of Hop Sing Laundromat, by Philly Mag’s Victor Fiorillo:

One spirit I cannot stand… is — wait a minute. You’re trying to get me in fucking trouble. I already get enough hate mail. [Another off-the-record-conversation]. OK. OK. One spirit I cannot stand is any stupid thing that is praised by a quote-unquote mixologist. Make sure you put the quote-unquote around that word. They are fucking idiots. Anybody who calls themselves a mixologist is a fucking idiot. And any spirit that a “mixologist” likes to use fucking sucks. Fernet. Fernet. Do you know what Fernet is? It’s a terrible thing. Fuck that shit. These “mixologists” don’t even know what it is. They drink it because it’s cool. Anything that makes people look cool — or that they think makes them look cool — I fucking hate that shit.

Don’t get him started on the Rocky statue, either. I say we all go into Hop Sing for the next few weeks and ask Lê if he has anything with Fernet on the menu.

From the DF Archive: ‘What if the iPad Smart Keyboard Had a Trackpad?’ ★

Yours truly, a year ago, making the case for trackpad support on iPad keyboards:

In short, when you’re using the iPad’s on-screen keyboard, you have a crummy (or at the very least sub-par) keyboard for typing but a nice interface for moving the insertion point around. When you’re using the Smart Keyboard (or any other hardware keyboard) you have a decent keyboard for typing but no good way to move the insertion point or select text. Using your finger to touch the screen is imprecise, and, when an iPad is propped up laptop-style, ergonomically undesirable.

Whenever Apple executives are asked about the notion of touchscreen Macs, they argue, correctly in my opinion, that it’s a bad idea because the ergonomics are bad. It just isn’t comfortable (or precise) to reach out with your arm. There are several other good arguments against adding touchscreen support to Macs, but ergonomics are a good one to place at the top of the list.

The thing is, every ergonomic argument against touchscreen MacBooks applies exactly to using an iPad in “laptop mode” with a hardware keyboard. When using a hardware keyboard, it makes sense to keep your hands flat on the desk/table. If Apple thinks iPads are useful with hardware keyboards — and I think they could be — they need to add trackpad support of some kind.

I was in a busy coffee shop yesterday and looked around. At least 20 patrons were using notebook computers, most of them MacBooks of some sort. Old MacBook Airs (or maybe new MacBook Airs — how can you tell?), MacBook Pros, just-plain MacBooks. Some PC notebooks as well, of course. I didn’t see one person using an iPad — despite the fact that iPads outsell all Macs combined by more than 2-to-1 every single quarter. Would trackpad support alone change that? I don’t know. But it would certainly help, and it’d move us one step closer to an iOS notebook.

Apple Tries to Stop Developers From Sharing Data on Users’ Friends ★

Sarah Frier and Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

As Apple’s annual developer conference got underway on June 4, the Cupertino, California-based company made many new pronouncements on stage, including new controls that limit tracking of web browsing. But the phone maker didn’t publicly mention updated App Store Review Guidelines that now bar developers from making databases of address book information they gather from iPhone users. Sharing and selling that database with third parties is also now forbidden. And an app can’t get a user’s contact list, say it’s being used for one thing, and then use it for something else — unless the developer gets consent again. Anyone caught breaking the rules may be banned.

Hard to disagree with this policy change, but I’m not sure how Apple can police it. Boobytrap accounts?