Google will now let you sign into your accounts using a selfie video. Google says this is so that you can sign in if you forget your password, but that seems a bit thin—I’d say that most people let their iOS or Google password manager take care of passwords.
It seems much more likely to me that this is a way for Google to harvest some sweet biometrics from its users, which it can then associate with your Google account, and all the other data Google has on you.
I’ve started to learn to play piano. I’ve been playing the guitar for years, and I’m pretty good at it, but the keyboard is way better for electronic music than trying to send MIDI from a guitar. Plus, there’s all that sweet stuff that you can’t do on a guitar, like playing basslines and melodies together, and the huge octave range.
One thing that struck me is how much easier it is to get started on the piano.
There are a zillion samplers and recorders out there, so why do almost none of them work like we want them to?
Recently, I’ve been checking out the OP-1 Field, the new update to Teenage Engineering’s stone-cold classic OP-1, a sampler, synthesizer, sequencer, and digital tape recorder, all packed into one little battery-powered box. The Field is pretty much the same device, but with way better sound quality, stereo, Bluetooth MIDI, plus a few tweaks that make it easier and nicer to use.
The Field is essentially the same as the original, and yet still, eleven years after launch, there’s no other device that’s as immediate, or as easy and fun to use.
“Content” is what marketing folks, or platform builders, call video, music, text, and so on. For them, songs, movies, and stories are equal, interchangeable units, the purpose of which is to fill up their online stores.
When an artist describes their work as “content,” they belittle the work itself. By referring to their creations in the terms of marketers and salespersons, they reduce it to a widget on a production line.
Is it possible to link to a category page from the top navigation on my microblog? In the screenshot, I’d like the Podcast link to point to /categories/podcast, for instance.
Possibly never previously published This bonus episiode was possibly never published. It doesn’t show up in the archived feeds of any of the usual podcast directories, and I can’t find my original episode captions. So, you can go in cold, and enjoy a discussion from the world as it was around one year ago i.e. better than it is now.
First published 13-03-19 Andrea and Charlie talk about the utter lack of ethics at Facebook and their deceiving tactics, while managing to deliver what’s intimately known as “the most delayed episode ever”.
It might be worth mentioning here that I have a couple of posts about how I record and edit these podcasts. Yes, this one was originally weeks late, mostly down to me not getting around to editing it, but the editing process is really quick:
First published 27-01-2019 Charlie and Andrea talk about the content they consume, one infamous video that Charlie has no intention of ever consuming, and conspiracy theories worth appreciating at least for their narrative.
This episode has a previously-unknown alternative title: A Thelma and Louise Death
First published 23-12-2018 Like every single person who gets paid for writing, Andrea and Charlie like to talk about keyboards. Quiet, or clicky? Long travel distance or short jumpy keys? Why would Italian put a vowel at the end of many Spanish words? And, most importantly: Chinese Democracy.
