Linked List: April 17, 2023

Monday, 17 April 2023

Michael Klein, writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer:

This month marks the 40th anniversary of a watershed moment in journalism: the publication of the “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headline on the front page of the New York Post. [...]

Vincent A. Musetto, one of the Post’s managing editors, gets the credit for “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” In a madcap newsroom run largely by owner Rupert Murdoch’s Fleet Street-hardened crew of Brits, Aussies, and Kiwis, Musetto was a real-deal, prototypical New Yorker: brash, zany, unafraid to drop-kick a trash can during a debate.

From that day, I wanted to work for Vinnie. Two years later, as a pun-loving 25-year-old copy editor at a South Jersey paper, I tried out as a Post sub-editor, designing pages and writing headlines. On the first day of my tryout, the editors sent me a goofy filler story about male dogs being electrocuted by a poorly grounded lamppost. The headline I submitted: “Piss of death.” It ran in exactly one edition before someone pointed out that such a four-letter word in 18-point type might be too much, even for the New York Post, which five years before had paid a morgue worker to unzip John Lennon’s body bag and take a photo of the slain Beatle in repose.

Musetto slapped my back, shot me a grin, and offered me a job.

The best detail: the Post got two sources to confirm that the bar did indeed feature topless dancing.

Play – Watch Later App for YouTube (and Other) Videos ★

Another deceptively simple, very well-crafted app I’ve been meaning to recommend: Play, a “watch later” app by Marcos Tanaka. Play is a great native app on iOS and Mac, and includes a Share sheet extension for adding new videos to your queue. You can categorize videos with tags, but that’s not necessary. What I really like is that Play is also a great app on Apple TV. I queue videos from my Mac and iPhone, then watch them later on my TV. I like this way better than using YouTube itself. One-time purchase of $3 gets you access to Play across all platforms. (That’s too cheap — I wish it cost more.)

For years I’d been using an app called Zinc for the same purpose, but I find myself using Play more than I ever used Zinc, because it has a Mac app, and Play’s Share sheet interface is better than Zinc’s bookmarklet. Play pulls in all sorts of metadata from YouTube automatically — it’s just great. (Zinc still works, if you have it installed, but it appears that the app is no longer available in the App Store.)

Short Circuit — ChatGPT App for iOS ★

Developer Joe Fabisevich, on Mastodon two weeks ago:

28 days ago I started built a prototype of Siri powered by ChatGPT, and was immediately drawn to the idea of a premium-feeling iOS, iPad, and Mac app for ChatGPT. This amazing technology deserves a good user experience, and we gave it one.

Partnering with @Soroush to make that happen has been a dream, and I’m so excited to share Short Circuit with you.

Very nicely done AI chat app for iOS. Worth checking out for the splendid icon alone — which itself was crafted by AI. (Short Circuit works OK on MacOS via Catalyst, but the developers have a proper Mac app in the works.) If you’re new to ChatGPT and aren’t sure what to do, there’s a fun “random prompt” button in the chat input field. The integration with Shortcuts means you can just say “Hey Siri, ask Shorty...” and get answers from ChatGPT instead of Siri itself. It’s free to try for a limited number of answers; after that, reasonably priced subscriptions (ChatGPT is not free):

$3/month: 100 answers
$6/month: 300 answers
$15/month: 1,000 answers

They also offer a $30 lifetime unlock, if you have your own OpenAI developer token.

The Magic Highlighter Safari Extension ★

$2 Safari extension from Caleb Hailey:

The Magic Highlighter is a brand new Safari Extension that automatically highlights your Google.com, DuckDuckGo.com, and Bing.com search terms and phrases on search result web pages — saving you time, and helping you find what you’ve been searching for. The Magic Highlighter is available to download for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It’s easy to use thanks to direct integration with Safari — just install the app, enable the extension, and use Safari like you normally would.

Clever and simple. In addition to highlighting terms you entered from a search engine, you can highlight whatever terms you want on any page, via the extension’s toolbar button.

DPReview Is Working on Some Sort of ‘Archive’ ★

Scott Everett, general manager of the soon-to-close Amazon subsidiary DPReview:

We’ve received a lot of questions about what’s next for the site. We hear your concerns about losing the content that has been carefully curated over the years, and want to assure you that the content will remain available as an archive.

We’ve also heard that you need more time to access the site, so we’re going to keep publishing some more stories while we work on archiving.

I don’t understand either of these paragraphs. I mean, I’m glad they’re still publishing new content, but I don’t understand what publishing new stories has to do with giving readers more time to access the site. And it’s completely unclear what sort of “archive” is going to be available after it closes.

What I’d really like to see is for Amazon to change its mind, and keep DPReview going. Or sell it to someone else who will. But if it’s going to close, the right way to “archive” it is simply to keep the site as-is and make it read-only. When you search for reviews of a specific camera model, DPReview’s articles are always at or near the top in the results. Keep those old URLs available, unchanged.

As for that new content, here’s a good one: a look back at the most significant cameras DPReview has reviewed over the last 25 years. Remember the Nikons that looked like this? I owned this one and this one, both purchased in part because of DPReview’s review.