Follow the headline link, click the play button, then make your way around the planet checking out all the radio stations.

I’m currently in La Paz, Bolivia, listening to Radio Cumbia. Radio Garden is a great little rabbit hole.

John Voorhees, MacStories, digs into a new game from the creator of The Oatmeal.

If you are a fan of The Oatmeal, read the review, take the game for a spin. The onboarding and the artwork alone are worth the download. It’s free to try, in-app purchase if you like the game, want to take it further.

You can immerse yourself in the official Oatmeal game page, or watch the video embedded below to get a sense of the game mechanic. It’s whimsical as hell.

Take a look at the video embedded below. Obviously, the concept is designed to work with some form of Apple AR glasses.

Need some extra screen real estate? No problem with AR glasses!#xcode #arkit #apple #AugmentedReality #appleglass pic.twitter.com/fsYhxdtHTR

— Dominik Hofacker (@domhofdesign) February 10, 2021

Makes me wonder about the future of devices with screens, if Apple glasses ship and gain enough traction to become widely used. The glasses themselves are screens. Presumably, in addition to adding overlays to real life and existing screens, they could implement the Mac or iPad screen in the glasses interface, no need for the hardware at all, beyond the glasses themselves.

I can also imagine a future with contact lenses, so all the AR is built right into your eye coverings. And, ultimately, Apple Eyes, Apple Eyes Pro, and Apple Eyes Pro Max.

If you are a fan of Ted Lasso, you might enjoy the linked review by Sara Stewart. And if you’re still not on board, do read the review. It does a great job capturing the magic that is Ted Lasso.

A taste:

The Apple TV sitcom, which arrived last summer, is a mental health stealth bomb. Dressed up as a sports comedy, it espouses a philosophy that’s hilariously antithetical to that genre: The notion that being a decent person, and treating other people with respect, is more important than who scored the most goals.

And:

While the character of Ted presents as unapologetically square, his origins are a little trippy: the show, Sudeikis has said, “grew from conversations he and Hunt had walking the streets of Amsterdam on mushrooms.” The experience stuck with Sudeikis, who name-checked the Michael Pollan book “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence” on Brown’s podcast. He and Hunt started writing the pilot shortly after Pollan’s book came out. “Ted is, in a … way, like mushrooms,” said Sudeikis. “He is egoless.”

Indeed. Production of Season 2 is underway.

EFF:

Almost one year after EFF called on Amazon’s surveillance doorbell company Ring to encrypt footage end-to-end, it appears they are starting to make this necessary change. This call was a response to a number of problematic and potentially harmful incidents, including larger concerns about Ring’s security and reports that employees were fired for watching customers’ videos.

And:

Videos taken by the Ring device for either streaming or later viewing are end-to-end encrypted such that only mobile devices you authorize can view them.

And:

Ring now has over a thousand partnerships with police departments across the country that allow law enforcement to request, with a single click, footage from Ring users. When police are investigating a crime, they can click and drag on a map in the police portal and automatically generate a request email for footage from every Ring user within that designated area.

The addition of one-to-end encryption adds another layer of protection to this model, presumably requiring a warrant to access your footage.

Read about the encryption model in this Amazon white paper.

If you own a Ring doorbell, here’s a link to Amazon’s instructions on enabling end-to-end encryption.

If you are in the market for a HomeKit video doorbell, check out this review of the Logitech Circle View doorbell. Still early days for HomeKit doorbells.

Sami Fathi, MacRumors:

During a 2018 interview in the midst of Facebook’s notorious Cambridge Analytica scandal, Cook was asked how he would lead Apple if it were to face a similar crisis. Cook responded by ruling the hypothetical situation out of the question, saying Apple would not be in the situation Facebook was in, thanks to its differing stance on privacy and user data. Zuckerberg shot back, calling Cook’s comments on TV “extremely glib” and “not at all aligned with the truth.”

If you had to pick between Apple and Facebook, which would you say is “not at all aligned with the truth.”

Back to the post:

Zuckerberg, outraged by Cook’s comments and public influence on Facebook’s reputation, reportedly told internal aides and team members that Facebook needs to “inflict pain” on Apple, according to sources who spoke on anonymity to The Wall Street Journal.

And:

Facebook is reportedly planning to take its disapproval with Apple to court, as it’s allegedly been preparing to file an antitrust lawsuit against the Cupertino-based tech company over its “unfair” approach to privacy with ATT and iMessage. As part of its lawsuit, Facebook is considering partnering with other companies such as Epic Games, which is already embroiled in a massive legal battle with Apple, to propel its antitrust case forward.

Here’s a link to the paywalled Wall Street Journal post.

It is amazing to me how Apple’s efforts to promote transparency are being weaponized against it. To me, good for consumers trumps bad for business.

A dungeon crawler, best played on the Mac. Hat tip to John Kordyback.

This really takes me back. Back to my Unix sysadmin days, when I would while away the hours playing the original dungeon-crawler, Rogue, and the 3D multi-player, Maze War.

OK, so I’ve mixed two things together in that headline. But still.

From Reuters:

Germany’s Volkswagen is not concerned by any Apple plans for a passenger vehicle that could include the iPhone maker’s battery technology, its chief executive Herbert Diess said.

And:

“The car industry is not a typical tech-sector that you could take over at a single stroke,” Diess was quoted as saying an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

“Apple will not manage that overnight,” he added.

Of course, the headline referred to the mother of all Claim Chowder, this Daring Fireball post from 2006, where Palm CEO Ed Colligan famously addressed the upstart iPhone’s entry into the smartphone space. Worth a re-read.

Not counting the two Steves, any guess as to the name of Apple’s employee number one? Follow the headline link for the answer and an interview from back in 2016.

And for a fun little rabbit hole, follow this link, which will take you to a list of other interviews from the Hacker News Employee #1 series, including interviews with folks from Amazon, Tumblr, and Airbnb.

From the uncanny valley Wikipedia page:

In aesthetics, the uncanny valley is a hypothesized relationship between the degree of an object’s resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object. The concept suggests that humanoid objects which imperfectly resemble actual human beings provoke uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers.

In a nutshell, fake people that are close to real, but still clearly fake, are creepy.

Watch the video embedded below. This is remarkable work. For me at least, the uncanny valley has been crossed. But that said, this terrifies me as much as it fascinates. Yet another sign of the deepfakes to come.

Sami Fathi, MacRumors:

Starting with iOS and iPadOS 14.5, Apple will proxy Google’s “Safe Browsing” service used in Safari through its own servers instead of relying on Google as a way to limit which personal data Google sees about users.

And:

Apple relies on Google’s “Safe Browsing,” a database/blocklist of websites crawled by Google of websites that it deems to be suspected phishing or scam.

And:

While Google doesn’t know which specific URL you’re trying to visit, it may collect your IP address during its interaction with Safari. Now on iOS/iPadOS 14.5, that’s no longer the case. As confirmed by the Head of Engineering for WebKit, Apple will now proxy Google’s Safe Browsing feature through its own servers instead of Google as a way to “limit the risk of information leak.”

Good move.

Give it a try. It has the acronyms you expect, like NAFTA, NASA, and SCUBA, but it’s also a good place to turn when you encounter IIRC or SMH.

Ben Bajarin:

Helping Intel stay in the semiconductor manufacturing game should be among one of the highest priorities for all US-based technology companies. While TSMC is the leader in manufacturing process technology, they remain a geo-political risk should China decide to enforce its will on the region. Samsung is not far behind, but being a Korean company, again, future politics guarantee no safe bets.

And:

I don’t want to dismiss the technological achievement of TSMC by being the first foundry to 7nm, 5nm, and likely the first to 3nm. Anyone who knows transistor designs knows how hard it is, at a micro level, to keep shrinking silicon. However, Apple helped make it easier for TSMC to justify the RND and CapEx costs and to continually invest in leading-edge process technology by being their largest customer, always committing to the latest node. I am not convinced TSMC would have the clear lead they do in process tech without Apple.

Most importantly:

Having a leading semiconductor company founded and based in the US is incredibly strategic given how critical semiconductors are to our digital future. Apple may be one of the only companies that can help Intel right the ship.

This seems a perfect match for Apple. Political gains by bringing more technology leadership and high-tech jobs to the US. A joint venture that helps ensure processors on demand to keep their supply chain healthy.

So you’ve watched all the episodes, and you’re jonesing for some Ted Lasso goodness.

Here ya go. Sound on, hit play…

i made a Ted Lasso intro in the style of F.R.I.E.N.D.S.😄♥️⚽️ @jasonsudeikis @hanwaddingham @brettgoldstein @brendanhunting @jezpswift @nickmohammed pic.twitter.com/G4lF4VvWCY

— Em (@tedslasso) February 9, 2021

Michael Potuck, 9to5Mac, with a good read if you’ve got AirPods that work well, but suffer from aging batteries.

What I found most interesting:

PodSwap is a relatively new service, and it looks like a great option to get your AirPods batteries replaced at a nice discount. You can swap in your gen 1 or gen 2 AirPods with dead batteries for a refurbished and sanitized pair with “restored battery life.”

The company has indeed found a way to replace AirPods’ batteries with “specially developed equipment.” You’re not getting an official Apple battery here, but PodSwap says it’s done independent testing to make sure “The batteries we use are similar in performance to your original ones from Apple.”

The caveat:

PodSwap gives your AirPods new life for just $59.99 (the same would run $99 from Apple). The trade-off here is this service is mostly compelling for AirPods gen 1 owners since if you send in AirPods gen 2, you’re getting back gen 1 earphones.

Worth bookmarking PodSwap, especially if you’ve got gen 1 AirPods. And hopefully, they’ll work out fixes for gen 2 AirPods and AirPods Pro as well.

Justin O’Beirne:

After four years of driving in parts of fifteen countries, Apple announced in June 2019 that its imagery collection vehicles had driven “over four million miles”.

And:

What makes this number interesting is that Google has made similar statements about its Street View vehicles over the years. Google first started collecting imagery in 2006 and by mid 2012, its Street View vehicles had driven more than five million miles.

And:

Five million miles over six years (Google) is slower than four million over four (Apple)—and it suggests that Apple has been driving the world faster than Google originally did.

But when it comes to releasing this imagery, Apple has been releasing it much slower.

What follows is an interesting, and quite detailed look at Apple’s imagery rollout in southern Canada and the US. If nothing else, check out the map showing the sparsity of US Look Around coverage (about halfway down the page) vs the map showing US places visited by Apple Maps vehicles vs the map of robust Look Around coverage in southern Canada.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

If you swipe up on the ‌Apple Maps‌ interface where maps details are available, you can tap on a “Report” button that lets you flag an accident, a hazard, or a speed check, similar to other mapping apps like Waze.

Interestingly:

Tapping automatically flags your location with no confirmation window, so it shouldn’t be used except in a valid situation.

That does open the door to accidental flagging, but this is crowdsourcing, so it’s not likely a single report will trigger the flag.

You can also say “Hey ‌Siri‌, there’s an accident” and ‌Siri‌ will send in a report to ‌Apple Maps‌, and presumably, if enough people file reports, an accident site will show up in the maps app through the crowdsourcing.

Sounds right. Nice to see Siri interface.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

The third-generation Apple TV, last made available in 2013, is slowly losing support from third-party app developers. YouTube recently announced that the YouTube channel will disappear in March, and now the CBS All Access channel is also being removed.

And:

The timing coincides with an upcoming shift that will see CBS All Access rebranding as Paramount+. ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish said in September that CBS All Access was being rebranded because the Paramount brand is more recognizable. The rebrand will be accompanied by original content designed to lure new subscribers.

And:

Though there will be no app on the third-generation ‌Apple TV‌, Paramount+ content will be able to be streamed from an iOS device to a third-generation ‌Apple TV‌.

CBS All Access and Showtime have a bundle deal. Will that deal continue under Paramount+?

On a related note, will we see a new Apple TV this year?

There’s been a steady drumbeat on Twitter recently, a river of tweets about fake/scammy apps on the App Store.

From the headline linked post:

I have spent the last four years of my life working on my very successful app only to have it ruined by scam apps with very obvious fake reviews as well as false advertising claims that Apple does not take action against. I can literally prove they are fake but Apple refuses to take action for undisclosed reasons, allowing thousands of more people getting scammed by these apps day by day.

Follow the link, read the post. This is a detailed breakdown of one developer’s experience, a very specific example that is one of many.

When you’ve read that post, hop over to this Michael Tsai rollup page with comments on another, perhaps more well circulated example.

App Store folks, spend some time reading through the linked comments on Michael Tsai’s page. There are links to examples, stories, and specific thoughts on small ways to address the problem. As is, one might think Apple is looking away. This has got to stop.

Austin Carr and Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Joe Biden had a question for Tim Cook: Why, the then-vice president wanted to know, couldn’t Apple make the iPhone in the U.S.? It was January 2012, during President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign and three months after the death of Cook’s predecessor, Steve Jobs.

And:

As everyone at the dinner well knew, the idea of mass-producing an iPhone, or any advanced consumer electronics, in a domestic factory was an exceptionally tall order. The big Asian contract manufacturers, especially Apple Inc.’s main partner, Foxconn, had built city-size factories in China with armies of hundreds of thousands of skilled laborers. None of that scale existed in the U.S. Chinese factory employees generally worked much longer hours, for a fraction of what even the lowest-paid American workers make.

And:

Biden’s question put Cook, who’d become Apple’s CEO the previous August, in an awkward position. He was the architect of the strategy to outsource Apple’s production to China, a trend of increasing concern for the Obama administration. But Cook was also, as it turned out, extremely effective at deflecting political pressure.

This is just a tiny taste of a fantastic, detail-filled profile of Tim Cook’s Apple stewardship. Great read, worth every minute. Riveting.

Andy Hertzfeld is at the root of the Macintosh tree, part of the small team that brought that original Mac to life. He was also a friend of Steve Jobs and his site Folklore.org is a keeper of the old stories and a rabbit hole that is well worth your time.

Andy recently did an episode of the DNext podcast. It’s not a look back, so much as a sharing of thoughts. I enjoyed every minute of it, thought you might too. You can find DNext in your favorite podcast app as well as by following the headline link.

Mr. Macintosh:

I’ve been trying to get a handle on this issue for over a month now. The first signs that this is becoming a larger issue came after the macOS Big Sur 11.2 update was made available. People would say that their Big Sur Upgrade failed and found no way to recover.

And:

If you installed the macOS Big Sur Upgrade and you are now stuck in boot loop ending with the error – An error occurred preparing the software update – you are affected by this issue.

Bottom line, make sure you have a good amount of free space on your Mac before you start the install. Personally, I’d make sure I had at least 50GB free. But follow the headline link and scroll to the section titled, How can I prevent this from happening to me?

Struggling to stay on top of client follow-ups and projects by relying on Apple Contacts, Calendar, spreadsheets, Siri reminders and your memory? Daylite to the rescue for all Apple lovers!

Daylite is a native Mac CRM and project management app for teams. Keep track of communication with clients and the status of projects and deals all in one place, even when you are working offline. Sync with your iPhone and iPad when you’re on the go (or on the couch). Compatible with Big Sur and M1-powered Macs, plus enjoy the new sleek look of Daylite in dark mode.

Daylite is designed to work seamlessly with all the Apple features you love:

• Integrate with Apple Mail on Mac
• Share your Apple Contacts and iCal
• Leverage features like Siri & Caller ID on your iPhone
• FaceID and TouchID support

Unlike other Web based CRMs that just focus on customer relationships and sales, Daylite takes you through the full customer lifecycle. From meeting prospects & winning business, to managing the moving pieces on projects, all the way through following up for referrals and repeat business, it’s all done in Daylite.

Daylite offers complimentary onboarding support to help you get the most out of Daylite. Ready to grow your business? Start your free 30-day Daylite trial today!