Linked List: March 12, 2021

Friday, 12 March 2021

Apple Discontinues Original HomePod, Will Focus on Mini ★

Matthew Panzarino, reporting for TechCrunch:

After 4 years on the market, Apple has discontinued its original HomePod. It says that it will continue to produce and focus on the HomePod mini, introduced last year. The larger HomePod offered a beefier sound space but the mini has been very well received and clearly accomplishes many of the duties that the larger version was tasked with. The sound is super solid (especially for the size) and it offers access to Siri, Apple’s assistant feature.

I love my HomePods, but clearly the market deemed them too expensive. I think part of the problem is that the real HomePod experience is having two of them paired — they sound more than twice as good as a single HomePod. So to get the real HomePod experience, it’s $600 (and used to be $700).

Lou Ottens, Inventor of the Cassette Tape, Dies at 94 ★

The Associated Press:

A structural engineer who trained at the prestigious Technical University in Delft, he joined Philips in 1952 and was head of the company’s product development department when he began work on an alternative for existing tape recorders with their cumbersome large spools of tape.

His goal was simple: making tapes and their players far more portable and easier to use.

“During the development of the cassette tape, in the early 1960s, he had a wooden block made that fit exactly in his coat pocket,” said Olga Coolen, director of the Philips Museum in the southern city of Eindhoven. “This was how big the first compact cassette was to be, making it a lot handier than the bulky tape recorders in use at the time.”

The final product created in 1962 later turned into a worldwide hit, with more than 100 billion cassettes sold, many to music fans who would record their own compilations direct from the radio. Its popularity waned with the arrival of the compact disc, an invention Ottens also helped create as supervisor of a development team, Philips said.

Cassette tapes were a huge part of my youth. That’s how I listened to music, and, because you could easily record on them, that’s how I collected my own music. You could listen to the radio on your boom box (I had a classic Panasonic that looked a lot like this one) and when a song you liked came out, you could record it. When you caught a hit song with a tape ready to go, it was like winning a little jackpot. Cassette tapes were empowering and fun.

In high school I bought a Sony Walkman that I recall cost a bit north of $100. It was a Sports model, one of the rugged yellow ones, and it offered what to me then sounded like amazing bass, and a digital FM tuner that was a game changer for getting a perfect signal. There’s a direct line from cassette tapes to iPods and the modern world of streaming.

I spent a fortune on CDs when I went to college, but I don’t have the reverent nostalgia for CDs that I do for cassette tapes. (Cassettes were even part of computing — my elementary school had a few TI-99/4A computers with cassette tapes instead of floppy drives.)

YKK Zippers ★

Josh Centers, writing for The Prepared:

A “pro tip” for evaluating the quality of a piece of gear is to look at the small details, such as zippers and stitching. Cheap-minded manufacturers will skimp on those details because most people just don’t notice, and even a cheap component will often last past a basic warranty period, so it’s an easy way to increase profits without losing sales or returns.

If a designer does bother to invest in quality components, that’s a tried-and-true sign that the overall product is better than the competition. Zippers are a classic example when looking at backpacks, clothing, and similar gear. And although there are a few other fine zipper brands out there, the king is YKK Group — to the point that the first thing some gear reviewers look for is the “YKK” branding on the zipper pull tab.

My dad used to do some work for YKK back in the ‘90s, so I wanted to dig deeper into why they’re the king and what makes their zippers so associated with quality.

Centers quotes a remark from a post by Recycled Firefighter:

YKK Zippers are amazing, because they self-lubricate the more you use them. You’ll notice that other brands of zippers become sticky and gritty over time. Not with YKK… They will feel more smooth, the more you use them.

I have a hoodie from American Giant that’s a few years old now, and the zipper no longer stays up. It’s not a YKK. I also have a slightly newer hoodie from them — same size — and the zipper always stays up, and, I have noticed, just has a better feel. It’s a YKK.

Amazon Refuses to Allow Libraries to Buy the Books They Publish ★

Geoffrey Fowler, writing for The Washington Post:

You probably think of Amazon as the largest online bookstore. Amazon helped make e-books popular with the Kindle, now the dominant e-reader. Less well known is that since 2009, Amazon has published books and audiobooks under its own brands including Lake Union, Thomas & Mercer and Audible. Amazon is a beast with many tentacles: It’s got the store, the reading devices and, increasingly, the words that go on them.

Librarians have been no match for the beast. When authors sign up with a publisher, it decides how to distribute their work. With other big publishers, selling e-books and audiobooks to libraries is part of the mix — that’s why you’re able to digitally check out bestsellers like Barack Obama’s “A Promised Land.” Amazon is the only big publisher that flat-out blocks library digital collections. Search your local library’s website, and you won’t find recent e-books by Amazon authors Kaling, Dean Koontz or Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Nor will you find downloadable audiobooks for Trevor Noah’s “Born a Crime,” Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Michael Pollan’s “Caffeine.”

Looks like it’s time for the Justice Department to investigate Apple Books again.

Robbing Peter to Buy Paul’s NFT ★

James Tarmy, reporting for Bloomberg:^*

A digital asset investor who goes by the handle Metakovan and refuses to give his full name, announced that he is the buyer of the record-breaking $69.3 million digital artwork that sold Thursday. Christie’s auction house, which hosted the sale, confirmed his statement, also declining to reveal his legal name.

Metakovan is the chief financier behind Metapurse, a crytpo-based fund that acquires NFTs and other virtual properties; it claims to be the largest NFT fund in the world.

So an investor in an NFT venture made sure an NFT auction made news headlines? I’ll gladly admit I don’t understand this entire NFT thing, but this seems like a publicity scam.

* Don’t get me started on this outfit.

Drexel Heads to March Madness for the First Time Since 1996 ★

Mike Jensen, writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer:

This didn’t quite come from nowhere. Drexel had gotten a bit better each year of the Spiker era, no winning seasons, but inching closer, and picked third in the CAA this season, with two first-team all-conference vets.

Let’s face it, though, when you haven’t been there in 25 years, when your fans can recite the heartbreak and the near misses, when the DAC had gotten sparse even before COVID-19 hit … when you’re seeded sixth going into the CAA Tournament, when it all goes down in this crazy pandemic year…

… Yeah, this NCAA bid dropped from the sky.

Drexel’s last appearance in the NCAA tournament was 1996, my senior year, with a team led by Malik Rose, who went on to a solid NBA career (including a few championship seasons with the Spurs).