Linked List: January 9, 2025

Thursday, 9 January 2025

Understanding the Various Inscrutable Beeps, Bops, and Bloops AirPods Make 

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

In a support guide, Apple says that the AirPods Pro may play a sound every so often while in the case to ensure the microphones and speakers are working as intended. From Apple:

To help ensure that your AirPods microphones and speakers are operating at their best (for example, to help provide high-quality hearing test results), your AirPods may periodically play a quiet chime when they’re in their charging case.

Information on the mysterious chime was highlighted on Mastodon after Apple’s unclear AirPods sounds were discussed on today’s ATP podcast. As noted on the podcast, Apple does not have an established guide that provides insight into the different sounds that the AirPods make, so it can be confusing.

Years ago, Apple was a successful company and documented how their products work. These days, Apple is struggling financially, and alas can no longer afford to produce something even as simple as an interactive web page with examples of the sounds that AirPods make and explanations of what those sounds mean.

Breathable, Garrett Murray’s AQI Widget for iOS and MacOS, Is Now Free of Charge 

I first linked to Breathable back in 2021 when Murray released the first version, writing then:

The entire point of Breathable is to offer widgets — the app itself just lets you configure how the widgets look. Brilliantly simple, and in a way, fun, with its clever “emoji scale”. I started using it last week after Murray pinged me about it, but only because I was interested in the idea of a widget-only weather app — Philadelphia generally doesn’t have air quality issues. I should have known better. Turns out, the whole world now has air quality issues.

Breathable costs just $2, and Murray is donating a portion of the proceeds to foundations focused on climate change initiatives.

Breathable is now up to version 3.0, and is better than ever. Today, Murray announced he’s making it free of charge:

In light of the awful fires and air quality in Los Angeles, I’ve made Breathable free and app will remain free permanently. I charged for the app prior only so I could donate the proceeds to climate change charities, but paying Apple 15% for that privilege is silly.

If you paid for the app in the past, thank you so much — your money was not wasted! It was donated to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Clean Air Task Force and the Climate Change Emergency Fund. I took great pride in donating to these terrific causes in Breathable’s name.

Good thoughts and best wishes to everyone in southern California facing this catastrophe.

Microsoft’s Recent History of Dirty Tricks With Edge 

Following up on yesterday’s item regarding Bing masquerading as Google to trick Edge users into searching with it, this Mastodon post from Timo Tijhof lists a few other such subterfuge tactics they’ve pulled recently. My favorite was this one from last year: when users opened a tab for “bard.google.com”, Edge inserted an ad in the tab bar encouraging the user to “Compare answers with the AI-powered new Bing”. Ads in the tab bar, jeebus.

There’s also a longstanding practice where if you search for “Chrome” or “Chrome download”, Edge shows a special pop-up encouraging you to stick with it rather than switch. Google pulls a similar thing, using popups across its web properties to encourage users of other browsers — perhaps especially Safari, unsurprisingly, considering how much money they pay Apple each year — to switch to Chrome, often with the implication that Google recommends switching for security reasons, not financial ones.

As a comparison, the best search engine in the world, Kagi, is so scrupulous that they don’t screw with the order of the results for the search term “Orion”, even though that’s the name of their own web browser. (If you missed it over the holidays, I had a great interview with Kagi founder Vlad Prelovac on The Talk Show last month.)