Linked List: October 13, 2020

Tuesday, 13 October 2020

Online Sportsbooks FanDuel’s Stats Are Down Too 

Stephanie Dube Dwilson, writing for Heavy:

FanDuel scores are still down as of early afternoon, and some fans are wondering just how long it’s going to take to get the service up and running again. Live scoring from FanDuel’s stats provider was down this weekend and scores still haven’t been updated in the service itself by early Monday afternoon. RealitySportsOnline was also experiencing issues and has been working with a different provider to update their stats. Here’s a look at what’s happening and what we know so far.

Seems likely this same data provider is also the cause of Siri’s four-days-and-counting live sports outage — apparently a company called Stats Perform, who has been very quiet on Twitter. I just asked Siri for the score of the currently in-progress game 3 of the ALCS and I got the score of last night’s game 2.

Google Assistant, of course, got it right. You want it done right, you might need to do it yourself.

HomePod, HomePod Mini Pairing, New Home Theater Support Coming 

Jim Dalrymple, writing for The Loop:

The short answer is no. You can’t make a stereo pair of a HomePod and a HomePod mini. You can make a stereo pair of two HomePods or two HomePod minis, but you can’t mix and match the two products. Now, if you have a HomePod and a HomePod mini in your house, they will work together so you can play music throughout the house or use the intercom feature. So, they do work together.

This makes sense — to create a stereo pair, you need to pair two of the same HomePods. But for just playing the same audio in multiple rooms, all HomePods work together.

There is an update coming for HomePod that will add features announced today as part of the HomePod mini launch. Those new features include Intercom from one HomePod to another, personal update, Maps continuity, multiuser support for Podcasts, support for third-party music services as they become available.

No word from Apple on when we might expect these features, other than in the future. That might sound snarky but I don’t mean it to be. I think there’s a lot of coordination required for these features — updates to iOS, tvOS, and the HomePod’s OS — and “coming soon” is just an honest answer.

Siri’s Sports Integration Has Been Down for Three Days 

I cracked wise on Twitter Sunday afternoon after I asked Siri for the score of a football game that had already ended and Siri replied with the starting time for the game, four hours in the past. (Which led to this amusing reply.)

Turns out this wasn’t a brief hiccup. Siri’s ability to report sports scores was down all weekend. No scores for the Lakers-Heat NBA Finals clincher Sunday night, no football scores, and here we are on Tuesday morning and Siri still can’t tell me, say, when the Dodgers and Braves next play.

The timing could be entirely coincidental and this is just an unplanned outage, but I can’t help but wonder if this is related to some sort of Siri upgrade debuting at today’s Apple event.