Hi Tilderinos!

As the title says, I have used Android almost my entire life. Many parts of the internet (especially reddit) really look down on Apple for many reasons (may of them valid). Starting about 3 weeks ago, I started to wonder if the grass really was greener on the other side. I would like to share my experience.

My first smart device was an iPod tough 4th generation. Back then, iOS was really bad. Notifications took over the screen. If you didn't want to deal with a notification right then, you had to dismiss it permanently. Multitasking did not exist (until a few updates later) Android was miles better then. Switching was the obvious choice. Flash forward to now, through many different android devices. I had a Samsung Galaxy S10e, Galaxy Watch LTE, and Galaxy Buds. I had the best ecosystem of devices that Android has to offer (Tizen vs WearOS is arguable, but I have not used WearOS).

I wanted to get back into mountain biking, and I wanted to bring only my buds and watch. This should be an obvious use case for an LTE watch and bluetooth earbuds. Unfortunately, transferring music to the watch is a difficult prospect. You must have the files downloaded onto your phone, but I use Spotify or Google Play Music. Spotify does have a Tizen app, but it is pretty terrible. Also, I wanted to have audiobooks and podcasts downloaded to listen to. I could not find any apps for audiobooks or podcasts for my Galaxy Watch. All my google-fu got me to the answer: Just transfer the files and play them in the watch music app. This was a pretty bad solution for a few reasons. First, listening times did not sync with the phone. Second, I don't think that the watch music app would save the timestamp when you closed it. Finally, the Galaxy Watch has 4gb storage, and only leaves around 2gb usable. Game of Thrones book 5 weighs in at about 1.3gb. If I wanted my book and even a single episode from most of my podcasts, that would not be enough storage.

Because of this experience, I started looking into the Apple Watch. My grandfather gave me his old iPhone 6s+ and I got an Apple Watch series 3 LTE for a great deal on craigslist. I thought the phone would be a downgrade from an s10e. In a few ways it is, such as the screen, battery life, and camera. But for everything else about this phone, it is just as good as my s10e, which is 4 years newer. I still have my s10e, and I keep it charged. There are very few times where I want to use my s10e over my 6s+. This was not what I was expecting when I switched. I expected to use the 6s+ to see if I could handle a new iPhone, just so I could use an Apple Watch. Since then, I borrowed my dad's old MacBook Pro mid 2012 non-retina, to see if I liked OS X. I am currently typing this in that MacBook. I also bought the AirPods Pro.

Almost every single interaction between these devices is quick, intuitive, and seamless. OS X is way better than windows. Parallels makes running windows software a dream. When I bought parallels, I was able to pay with my watch through Apple Pay. I have not heard of any software doing anything like that with google/samsung pay and windows. Overcast is able to automatically sync podcasts and playback times to the watch, and easily switch which device is playing. Audible is a bit more clunky (and I am still looking for an alternative for books), but it is possible to get books on the watch, and the playback time syncs without issue. The AirPods Pro seamlessly switch between the phone and watch. They are already paired with the MBP through iCloud, although they do not seamlessly switch. I think this is because the bluetooth chip in the computer is too old. CarPlay is miles better than android auto. Siri is just as good for most thing as google assistant, and is more consistent.

This is a pretty long post already, but the bottom line is every single apple device I am trying out is better than the corresponding android/windows device that is 2-4 years newer. After many years of shunning apple, I am back on the apple bandwagon. I am currently planning on replacing all of my devices with something from apple (except my gaming desktop, unfortunately). I would like to hear about your experiences with switching to or from either ecosystem.

(Mods: I wasn't sure if this should be in ~talk or ~tech. Please move it if necessary)

I just finished binging The Habitat, the awesome podcast about NASA's simulated mission to Mars. And I'm feeling the urge to read something along those lines: fiction or true stories and indulge my fascination with space (and things coming from it) and how that relates to contemporary imagination.

Any suggestions?

Technically two people are a team, right? :P

If it was only me I would use Org Mode, but that's not the case.

Our projects are all artistic in nature, mostly screenplay collaborations, film criticism, YouTube, podcasts, etc ^[1]. It's easy to get overly excited about this kind of stuff, but we need to follow up too. And we don't have an external demand that would incentivize us to put in the effort.

Even though we're only two people, we both have trouble sustaining long term goals, organizing schedules and information. My partner is a brilliant writer, but for him concentrating is even more of an issue than it is for me. He needs something visual. This tool must also work very well on mobile since he currently does not own a computer. It also must be graphical and easy to learn for someone that only knows Windows and MacOS.

To be more specific, I'm looking for something that allows me to track what we have done, what we're doing now and what we're going to do next. A calendar and some kind of notification system would be nice, but, as I say in the title, it must be free (I'm Brazil and our currency is worth nothing, so even the cheap is expensive for us...).

Google gives me dozens of results, reviews, etc, but it's hard to assess how good each tool is without experimenting it. And I would like to avoid learning an entire platform just to conclude it is subpar (I know this is largely unavoidable, but we can do better with a little help from our friends!).

Any suggestions? :D

^[1] Even though our projects are artistic, their execution involves many things that are not artistic at all, such as understanding, budgets, legislation, registering our works with the copywriting authority, participating in public contests, networking, etc. There are lots of menial tasks that are easy to forget.

The trick is to find something interesting enough to make chores less boring, but not interesting enough to distract you to the point of making you stop what you're doing.

I used to play Friends on repeat, but that grew old when I quite literally memorized every single episode.

And my usual interests are way too interesting for me! (I wonder why hahaha).

Does anyone have the same habit? What are your current preferences? (TV shows, podcasts, docuseries, whatever suits your boat...)

This is something I've been struggling with for a couple of months now.

I want to make a website. I have the design I want to implement. I have a few things I want to post there. I have what seems to be a reliable hosting platform ready for use.

What I don't have is the URL.

It's a conceptually-difficult problem, because I want this URL to be permanent. I don't want it to be my name, because I don't want this thing I make to be about me. It's about what I do. This what I do is what needs the name, and I have nothing.

A few people around the Internet know me as ThatFanficGuy, but using that creates false expectations, because my writing is mostly original. A few people around the Internet know me as FirebrandCoding or simply Firebrand – it's my GitHub handle, among other things – but it's an old name that I'd like to transcend.

Essentially – and I hate myself for saying this – I need a brand name. I need a banner to unite the wide collection of all the things I do under a recognizable symbol. I write, worldbuild, code, design, blog, make games, photograph, potentially make music and even record podcasts... All of this needs encapsulation, and I've been racking my brain for a good name to no avail since November.

A great example of such a name would be Magic & Wires. The website is currently empty. It used to be a game dev company, led by Firestream, who made Destiny RPG (now defunct) and Titan Conquest. If you scroll down on the main page of both games, it says "Made of magic and wires", which is such a cool way to use your name. I'm not one for murder, but I'd kill to have a name so cool.

Has anyone experienced something similar? How have you dealt with it? Is there some sort of theory behind picking a good name for your project?

Some months ago, I found Weekly Weird News, a roundup of strange news from around the internet. I recently depleted their backstock, and find myself wanting. Now, I know there's no shortage of weird, odd, bizarre, and strange in our world. Just as I know there's no shortage of people willing to talk about it. But, I'm having difficulty finding "current" weirdness. Oh sure, there's podcasts to be found talking about the weirdness surrounding this murder in 1952, or that rural happening in 1991, but so far, I haven't found another that scratches that "that seriously happened recently?" itch.

Does anyone have any suggestions, or am I doomed to dripfeed?

Hey there people!

Seeing how last post I could find on the topic was posted almost one year ago and how my question is a bit more specific, I thought a new one could be worthwhile.

Admittedly, I am not an assiduous podcast listener - what I'm mostly looking for is a show to 'scratch the itch' every once in a while which features good chemistry between its hosts, exploring whatever topic with humorous tones; bonus points if said topic is interesting.

To exemplify, some of the best podcasts I can think of on the spot are How did This Get Made (I can particularly recommend the episode dedicated to Mr. Nanny), or How to Fuck Up an Airport.

The first one is a serie that analyze extremely poor or obscure movies, while the second one unveils the debacle surrounding the 20 year old (and still aging) Berlin Brandenburg Airport project; I know this last one might sounds boring, but it's a baffling and hilarious journey - surely and by far my favorite Podcast.

TL;DR
So yeah, what are your most entertaining, hilarious, and generally fun podcasts?

My use case:
I watch videos (YouTube) and listen to audio (Podcasts) as a major part of my weekly media intake. I would love some sort of generated Tildes Playlist . IANADev, but it sure would be nice if Tildes was able to parse, scrape, and categorize media posted as topics and in comments. Then present them to me with a date filter, and allow separating audio only and video media. Maybe something like tildes.net/?tag= but at tildes.net/playlist. I guess it would be nice to be able to sort media by tag as well.

Possible other use case:
Accessibility?

I see that some videos are already being tagged "videos." So there already is some organic interest in this special category, right?

What do you all think, is this useful?

From a dev perspective, is getting that correct enough difficult? Does Embedly categorize audio only and video?

edit: in the playlist view, there should of course be a link back to the topic or comment where the media was found. Also, @Deimos, I certainly don't want to take Tildes away from the text-first/only direction of the site, but sometimes I am doing stuff conducive to audio/video media intake like cooking, driving, etc. It would be cool to be able to easily consume it then, and come back to comment later.

My online habits are too limited by these three websites. What other aggregators, blogs or websites you suggest for me to open my horizons?

Some of my interests:

• Long-form film criticism (not movie news)
• History of American cinema
• Urban exploration (sewers, abandoned places, spooky stories)
• Python
• Learning techniques
• Transportation (subways and trains, mostly)
• True crime
• Science fiction literature (both new and old)
• Stand up comedy
• War history

I'm particularly uninterested by American or World News.

I currently am not listening to podcasts because my headphones break every week and I don’t have enough money to buy headphones that will last more than that.

I'm reading about the latest Gitlab shakeup, about (not?) filtering customers on moral grounds. Yesterday, it was Github's decision to continue to support ICE. There's Twitter's decision to allow politicians to (somewhat?) violate its own rules about threats and harrassment. Blizzard banned a star video game player for speaking out about the Hong Kong protests.

I'm on Mastodon, and while it's faded from the headlines a bit, the Gab-war still rages there, with the Tusky-v-Fediverse debate over apps blocking domains, and instances blocking other instances over their support for yet other instances.

Yada.

I'm thinking a lot these days about the "slippery slope". Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, Github/lab, etc ... these are all business(-like) entities, privately controlled, which are nonetheless approaching the status of public infrastructure ... at least, sort of.

PG&E intentionally shut off power to millions of Californians last week, to prevent hypothetical fires. You see where I'm going with this.

When/As smart capabilities for power grid, ISP, etc emerge, do racists, white supremacists, get Internet? Electricity? Hospital/Ambulance service? Where is that line?

Is reverse discrimination appropriate? "We don't rent to racists..."?

Not sure what I'm expecting here. Just starting the thread, see where it goes.

ETA: A really interesting, thoughtful 2-minute excerpt from a Rogan podcast

Edit #2: The Hacker News thread that prompted me to start this thread.

So, when we want to link to a podcast , should we link to the webpage or preferred aggregator, or directly to the MP3? Should we have an embedded object for playing audio built into Tildes, or is that out of scope?

Inside the Ethics Committee is a BBC Radio 4 programme. They describe it like this:

Joan Bakewell is joined by a panel of experts to wrestle with the ethics arising from a real-life medical case.

Each episode is chaired by Bakewell, with a range of different experts (who all sit on hospital ethics committees), talking about the ethical difficulties faced by healthcare professionals (and the organisations they work for) in different real life cases.

Some of it hasn't aged very well - there's an episode about HIV testing an unconscious patient after a needle-stick injury. With advances in treatment and reductions in stigma I think would have made it a very different programme today.

But most of it is pretty good, and explains in detail how some decisions are made.

For example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0643x61

Ashley is 14 years old when doctors discover a brain tumour. Tests reveal that it's highly treatable; there's a 95% chance of cure if he has a course of radiotherapy.

Ashley begins the treatment but he has to wear a mask which makes him very anxious and the radiotherapy itself makes him sick. He finds it increasingly difficult to bear and he starts to miss his sessions.

Despite patchy treatment Ashley's cancer goes into remission. He and his mother are thrilled but a routine follow-up scan a few months later shows that the cancer has returned.

Ashley is adamant that he will not have the chemotherapy that is recommended this time. He threatens that he will run away if treatment is forced on him. Although Ashley is only 15 he is 6'2" and restraining him would not be easy.

Should the medical team and his mother persuade him to have the chemotherapy? Or should they accept his decision, even though he is only 15?

The Apple Keynote is on September 10th, at 10am Pacific Daylight Time (daylight savings is in effect). I'm making this thread as a place to discuss the announcements here on ~tech.

TIme:

• 10:00am PDT (California / Apple time)
• 5:00pm GMT (Greenwich time)

Livestream Links

• Apple's website stream -- requires a browser that supports both HLS and HEVC (safari and edge)
• Apple's Youtube stream -- first time Apple is streaming on youtube. Should work anywhere that Youtube works :) They'll probably break the stream record.

Tl;Dr of actual announcements (updating right now)

• Apple Arcade announced
  • $4.99 / month and one month free.
  • 100 indie exclusives on launch
• Apple TV+ announced
  • $4.99 / month, launching November 1
  • New originals every month! 100 countries at launch
  • Including 1 year free with device (iPhone, iPad, or mac) purchases starting today.
• New base model iPad
  • 10.2 inch display, Runs A10 Fusion chip, (optional) smart keyboard
  • New iPad is made from 100% recycled aluminum (like the new MacBook air)
  • Starts at $399 (competing with chrome books). $299 for education customers.
  • includes Apple Pencil support
• Apple Watch Series 5!!!!
  • Health and Fitness video
  • 3 New health studies!!!
    - Apple Hearing Study
    - Apple Women's Health Study (How cycles affect various health conditions)
    - Apple Heart Study
    - Enrollment is voluntary. OPT-IN by downloading the app and getting enrolled.
  • Apple Watch Series 5
    - ALWAYS ON LTPO OLED display, with Dynamic Refresh Rate (1Hz - 60Hz VRR)
    - Same 18 hour battery life
    - International Emergency Calling on all cellular models
    - 100% recycled aluminum.
    - Stainless Steel, Titanium, Ceramic
    - Series 3 watch starts at $199, Series 5 starts at $499
• iPhone 11!
  • Aluminum and Glass, comes in a bunch of colors
  • Spatial audio + Dolby Atmos for next level smartphone sound
  • New Camera -- 120º FOV Wide angle camera, 12MP with 100% Focus Pixels
    - 0.5x Optical Zoom out :)
    - New Image processing pipelines, with semantic rendering and adaptive tone mapping
    - Portrait mode improvements (wider portraits, and more) (yay, now for pets!)
    - Night Mode has adaptive image slicing and fusion for reducing blur in long exposure.
    - 4K HDR video at 60fps (was previously 30fps!)
    - Front Camera is now 12MP wide angle
    - 4K 30fps HDR video, Slowmotion Video for front facing camera! :)
  • A13 Bionic processor
    - fastest GPU and CPU ever in a smartphone
    - Game demo showing off Metal 2 Shaders, Bloom, and AA in realtime at 60fps
    - Battery is now 1 hr longer than the previous XR
    - U1 Chip? (on slide, not mentioned)
  • Wifi 6 support!
  • 2m water resistance for 30 minutes
  • 6.1 inch Liquid Retina display
  • Priced sanely at $699
• iPhone 11 Pro
  • 3 camera array
  • Matte Textured Glass
  • Super Retina XDR Display.
    - 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio
    - 1200 nits of brightness
    - 426 ppi
    - Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos
  • A13 Bionic Chip Design
    - Machine Learning Matrix Multiplier Accelerators make matrix operations 6x faster on iPhone
    - Best ML platform of any Smartphone
    - Lower power design using 7nm+ lithography
    - 8.5 Billion Transistors
    - 4 High Efficiency CPU cores
    - Hundreds of Voltage domains and clock domains
    - Each region of the chip is at least 20% faster, and uses at least 20% less power
  • 3 camera system
    - 4x zoom range (0.5 to 2x)
    - 53-13mm focal lengths, and f1.8 to f2.4
    - Deep Fusion camera system - stitches together burst photos + long exposure to maximize detail and reduce noise.
    - Filmic Pro demo -- allowing multiple camera use at the same time.
  • iPhone 11 Pro at $999, Pro Max at $1099
  • iPhone 11 at $699 and XR at $599 and iPhone 8 at $499 to complete the lineup.
• Apple Store Updates
  • Apple Watch Studio - pair any watch with any band of your choice. Configure as you want
  • iPhone trade ins can now be used for a lower monthly rate if you buy an iPhone, rather than simply taking off the purchase price.
  • 5th Ave Store is being redesigned and re-opening Sept 20th!

Other miscellaneous / fun stuff

• Apple Keynote Bingo Card -- 5 in a row to win! :)
• Upgrade Podcast Draft Card -- the hosts have predicted what they should see at the event. Person with the most points wins.

Edits:

• fixed part about browsers with HLS support, and added a table showing compatible browsers.
• remved "what we're expecting" section, and started updating the event live feed.

Hey all, I listen to a bunch of podcasts during my commute to/from work, and I was wondering if anyone had some recommendations for good anime podcasts?

I've already made it through All Systems Goku, which followed two of the Giant Bomb guys on their first viewing of Dragon Ball Z Kai. It was a lot of fun! There were a lot of wrestling references, all of which I didn't get, but they had a fun time.

99% Invisible is a podcast about "the unnoticed architecture and design that shape our world". Episodes from other podcasts that have a similar theme are always welcome.

Edit: moved my favourites to a comment.