A few days ago, I received a plea in my usual email from the media outlet Tangle.

The last six months have been a difficult time for media outlets. Overwhelmed by the news, many readers and listeners are tuning out. Those who are staying up to date are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence round-ups to get their news, which has caused website traffic to fall.

I feel bad about the situation that Isaac Saul, who founded Tangle, and his crew find themselves in. They have a publication that does a wonderful job balancing perspectives on the news of the day. They are trustworthy and thorough. Yet, I find myself deciding again and again not to upgrade to a paid subscription when I consider the option.

With so much admiration for Tangle, why don’t I just support them? The problem is that I don’t always read the newsletters they send. It’s not because I don’t have faith in them to introduce me to viewpoints that I may not have considered on my own or read elsewhere in publications with clear biases that drive coverage. It’s that I’m worn out by the news. I’m fatigued by constantly reading of the shifts in the political landscape. I have a subscription to the New York Times gifted to me by my employer, and the number of emails I get from them claiming to carry “breaking news” is breaking my brain. In other words, my response to the good folks at Tangle would be, “it’s not you, it’s me.”

In my feed reader service (Feedbin) I have a rule to filter out mentions of our president. For some time, I wondered if The Atlantic was even still publishing, so few were the pieces that made it through the filter. My sister—who gifted me a subscription to the publication every year for my birthday—quit doing so this year because of the cost increase. At first, I was bummed, but now I find that I hardly miss it. Similarly, I enjoy the perspectives from The Dispatch, but my paid subscription to that site didn’t even last a month because I just didn’t want to read about politics any more than is reasonable.

Zachary Brown writes for the Verge about a new game/utililty from Hank Green. The premise of the Focus Friend app is sort of like an updated Tamagotchi for phone addicts. You are the virtual caretaker of a character like Billy Bean King, a bean who can only work to upgrade its environment and wardrobe (it knits) if you put down your phone.

As it turns out, helping furnish a virtual bean’s lo-fi room is exactly what I needed. Over the last week, Billie Bean King and I have been on an absolute grindset. We’ve been locking in for half an hour and hourlong chunks of work: Billie knitting while I clack away on a keyboard. The longer I work, the more Billie can produce, and the better the decorations I can buy for their space. (I’m saving up for the gorgeous plant-covered furniture in the Greenhouse set.) The gamified nature of the app has helped quiet the static and improve my focus. I’m motivated to work because I want to unlock the best decorations for Billie’s home, and, like a Tamagotchi, I want to care for them.

Brown, who admits to struggling with attention for most of his life, found Focus Friend to be effective, but having blown through other methods of avoiding distraction, wonders if it will stick. Fortunately, Green is adding more pieces to the game to give its bean something else to work towards.

Microsoft made the Model Context Protocol (MCP) a major focus of their Build conference last week. Though the Microsoft engineer I spoke with, who is heavily involved in AI thought the emphasis was a little overplayed, it’s easy to understand some of the excitement. Seeing your favorite applications easily plug into agentic AI through a standardized protocol can open your mind to the possibilities. The first integration to spark my interest is with Readwise.

In simpler terms, setting up your own Readwise MCP server allows you to chat with your Readwise highlights using an external chat client (such as Claude), rather than the Chat function on the Readwise website.

I let my Readwise subscription lapse some time ago, after a bit of disappointment with their Reader app. However, as I mention in my blog’s bio, I am an inveterate notetaker and spend time searching through my saved articles, notes and highlights. Many of my searches end up being less-than-fruitful. So, while not particularly a showcase of agentic AI, the ability to chat with my corpus of articles is something that could prove to have significant utility.

Use case: My wife and I went to our first Orthodox Christian wedding yesterday. She remarked at how many young, single men she saw in attendance. I told her much ink has been spilled writing about the phenomenon. I promised to send her one of the articles I had saved on the subject. First, I said, I would have to hook up Claude to Readwise and Matter to Readwise so I could use the chat interface to find the article. “I don’t want to know what you are doing with your AI stuff,” was her response. She wants to eat the steak, but she doesn’t want to know how I’m slaughtering the cow.

Hunter Tice (a man after my own heart) writes for Christ and Pop Culture about the importance of physical media in a world that is increasingly detached from the material when engaging with art.

An increasing reliance on digital micro-conveniences results in digitality becoming a powerhouse vehicle of mindless consumption and physical disengagement. As our culture endorses digital consumption in more facets of life, it inherently devalues the significance of physicalness. That has incredible implications on how society functions, including how we perceive the world of media and artistic expression.

Flipping from album to album, song to song, I keenly feel that detachment. The absence of the physical makes everything so ephemeral, in many ways more forgettable. Like Tice, if you had told me in high school I would have access to most of the world’s music at my fingertips at nearly all times, I would have died of shock with a smile on my face. What could be better?

It turns out something is lost in unfettered access to everything. Meaning that is attached to objects that delight us with what they provide decreases. Memory is attenuated.

I just bought a new cassette player for the first time since the early 90s, when I had a Sony Sports Walkman. I adored that device, but it was stolen out of my locker with my friends' Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me tape inside (sorry Billy). Hopefully, the experience lives up to the fondness I recollect.

Source: christandpopculture.com

Bandcamp is finally adding a feature that I, and other like-minded enjoyers of music have been wanting for some time. The new ability to create playlists feels like it aligns with the ethics of the service, which is mostly a good thing, but the focus may be a bit too heavy in that area.¹ Bandcamp describes the feature as, “Like digital mixtapes.” There’s not much need to describe how it works, everyone is familiar with the concept of playlists and this feature appears to do exactly what it says on the tin.

Ultimately, I don’t think you’ll see these playlists proliferating. Though I would rather believe otherwise, I have to think that getting widespread adoption of playlists comprised of purchased music will be an uphill battle. The fact that all music comprising these digital mixtapes has to be purchased in contrast to the all-you-can-eat streaming models will limit their reach. I personally prefer to buy the albums I really like on Bandcamp.² My playlists usually contain tracks from albums that I’m not necessarily going to purchase, though. You can buy individual tracks on Bandcamp, but I’m not in the habit of doing that. Other profiles I visit seem to indicate most have the same patterns of buying. It may be a challenge to get users buying single tracks. We’ll see if this feature makes that method more appealing.

Unless I’ve missed it, there doesn’t seem to be a way to embed these playlists in webpages, which is one of the most useful features of Bandcamp, and one of the best ways to evangelize your favorite tunes. Not to mention that it’s probably one of the primary ways to get people to the site to purchase music.

My hope was that when Bandcamp finally got around to adding playlists, they would be creative about the capabilities they could offer. This implementation is about as straightforward and bare bones as it could be. It seems they’ve focused more on protecting the IP to force people to open their wallets than making a compelling feature that will spur usage.

Mozilla made a surprise announcement today that they are closing the Pocket read-it-later service. With nothing but a bland, corporate statement to go on, I imagine users have a fair amount of confusion about the move. I was actually looking at the Pocket entry on the App Store earlier in the day to see if it had been updated lately. I always had dreams of the service/app being improved, so I could go back to using it with a Kobo, which is a quite delightful combo. I had a Kobo a few years ago, and the sync with Pocket, while it could use a few features (like highlight sync), was key for me. I probably read more articles than books on the device. I kept this option in the back of my mind for a possible switch back.

I would have been extremely frustrated if I had bought another Kobo under the assumption that I could fulfill my use case of synchronizing with my saved articles from Pocket.

It is well known that Mozilla is going through financial troubles, but Pocket seemed like a successful part of their overall strategy. I enjoyed seeing the articles curated by the service when I opened a new tab in Firefox. The direct integration with the browser made both apps more appealing. The algorithm was good about learning from my reading activity and recommending articles that drew my interest. I’m sorry to see the demise of Pocket, even if I wasn’t a full user.

I noticed that The Cure was advertising their heavily praised new album Songs From A Lost World in a bio vinyl format. I was curious about what that meant. Fortunately, I had my good buddy Claude to help answer the question. He responded with this:

Bio vinyl refers to vinyl materials manufactured using bio-based or renewable raw materials instead of traditional petroleum-based ingredients. This type of vinyl is part of a broader category of sustainable alternatives to conventional plastics.

Key features of bio vinyl include:

1. Renewable sources: Bio vinyl is typically made partly or fully from plant-based materials like corn, sugarcane, or vegetable oils instead of fossil fuels.
2. Reduced carbon footprint: The production process generally creates fewer greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional vinyl manufacturing.
3. Applications: Bio vinyl is used in various products including flooring, wall coverings, upholstery, records, fashion accessories, and packaging.
4. Performance: Modern bio vinyl products are designed to match or exceed the durability and functionality of traditional vinyl while being more environmentally friendly.

These materials represent an important development in sustainable alternatives for industries that have traditionally relied on petroleum-based plastics, helping to reduce environmental impact while maintaining product performance.

I have a feeling this would interest my sister and brother-in-law, who are both involved in environmental sustainability. It would be nice to make this a standard for records.

It seems that being a Firefox user means being in a constant state of trepidation about whether the app will last the year. For a long while now, it has been well known that the browser’s very survival depends on the largesse of its search partner, Google. The Mozilla Foundation, which develops Firefox, is a non-profit, but it gets 85% of its funding thanks to the commercial interests of the biggest beneficiary of ad revenue on the internet.

Once again, the threat of the infusion of cash from Google in exchange for placement as Firefox’s default search engine disappearing is imminent. The latest risk for Mozilla is thanks to the Department of Justice case against Google.

The DOJ wants to bar Google from paying to be the default search engine in third-party browsers including Firefox, among a long list of other proposals including a forced sale of Google’s own Chrome browser and requiring it to syndicate search results to rivals.

The sad irony is that the pursuit of the DOJ to expand user choice in the area of search would limit user choice in the browser space. I have some sympathy for the argument against doing that. For all the bluster from the DOJ over the last few decades about bundled browsers, it’s easy enough for a consumer to switch if that is what they want to do. The choice is free for the making.

It’s hard to believe that I hadn’t heard of Hookmark until recently. The crowd I follow online doesn’t tend to miss Mac productivity tools, but this one seems to have escaped mass publicity within that community. The premise seems like a powerful one:

Hookmark is the standalone contextual bookmarking app. It complements your launcher by also being the contextual launcher. Hookmark enables you to create and link robust bookmarks to files, emails, tasks and more, making it easy for you to access information without needing to search.

Hookmark came to my attention via the lovely Ellane W, who blogs about her affinity for plain text and the tools supporting a digital lifestyle rich with the simple format.¹ From there I read about the recent integration between Hookmark and linkding at Brett Terpstra’s blog.

Linkding is a more modern take on bookmarking in the style of Pinboard (to which I have a perpetual subscription - but that hasn’t been updated in years). Linkding is self-hosted, and you can spin up a PikaPod for the service for as little as 2 bones a month. I’m tempted to give it a go. I haven’t had any problems with Pinboard, but I’m wary of keeping so many of my treasured bookmarks in a service that doesn’t seem to be very active. Plus, I’ve had such a positive experience with PikaPods from standing up both Ghost and WordPress instances there. As Luc Beuudoin, the Co-founder of CogSci Apps (the creators of Hookmark) notes, “If you self-host Linkding, you maintain full control over your links—with zero dependence on third-party services.” That is a compelling value proposition to a nerd like me.

The integration is still developing and CogSci has specific plans for future improvements, such as adding the ability to add a note to a bookmark and sync the note with Linkding. Honestly, this is the kind of relational instumentation I’ve been dreaming about for years.

I tend to place a great deal of emphasis on harmony between the different parts of my life. When there is some sort of discontinuity, it vexes me. This can play out in pretty serious cognitive dissonance.¹ It can also filter down to less consequential choices. One struggle I’ve always had is around media formats for music.

I like to be able to experience my music in the same way for any given release. At times, this has been very difficult. Back in the 90s, for example, it was common for indie bands to put out 7" record singles but only release their albums on CD. That drove me nuts. Occasionally, I was placated when labels would collect a group of previously vinyl-only singles on CD. There were gaps, though, and when you wanted to create a playlist listening experience, you had to turn to the versatile cassette tape. Vinyl, compact disc and cassette all had their strengths and weaknesses. It always felt like there were tradeoffs to be made with any choices.

One of the major changes in the musical landscape recently (apart from the overabundance of availability due to streaming) is convergence. Just about everything is now available in a digital format, residing on a hard drive somewhere. Digitization has been a great equalizer and been a great enabler for the musically promiscuous among us. However, there are still reasons to prefer analog recordings and physical media.

Roon’s announcement of the Roon Relay technology and its compatibility with the Victrola streaming series of turntables adds a bridge between the digital and analog worlds. The implementation is laid out in a review of the Victrola Sapphire, the flagship turntable in the streaming series.

Roon Relay allows you to stream your vinyl in hi-res Flac format. This enables use cases like listening to your records streaming from your phone on a set of headphones in an entirely different space from where the vinyl is spinning. It also allows you to put all of your music into the same format.²

In the early aughts, my perspective on music media was that vinyl would become the premium format, with CDs unable to differentiate themselves from what came across the intertubes. This is indeed what happened, but now it seems easier than ever to combine the strengths of physical media and cloud assets.

It’s worth noting that you don’t have to shell out $1300 for the Sapphire, as Victrola has other turntables in its streaming lineup that have the same capabilities.

Anna Kodé has a piece in the New York Times (gift article) about the early Space Age Googie style of architecture. The article is filled with eye candy and visual delights from the style, some prominent artifacts of which were still around when I was young. It brings a tremendous sense of nostalgia.

Kodé examines why people now seems so attracted to buildings that were, just a few decades ago, disparaged as being garish.

The sense of excitement for tomorrow that fueled Googie is hard to find in general these days. If anything, today’s mainstream culture wants to go back in time, not forward. Consider the surge in vinyl record player sales, the endless stream of film remakes or the slogan that won the election, “Make America Great Again.” Even the contemporary obsession with Googie could be viewed as part of this nostalgia boom.

Now, there’s a pervasive sense of despair, rather than hope, about technology’s ability to solve our problems. Social media was supposed to make us feel connected, but in fact we feel lonelier. Artificial intelligence was supposed to make our jobs easier, but it’s put them at risk. We’ve lost faith in the future, and Googie represents a time when we still had it.

I believe Kodé touches on something that now is an almost universal feeling: that we have been let down by technology. Some of us grew up with this great sense of optimism about where technology would take us. We would be living in space, perhaps getting around in flying cars, like The Jetsons. Computers would not only be advanced and ubiquitous labor saving devices, they would also allow us to indulge our creativity, curiosity and capabilities like never before. We were promised jet packs, as they say. 

To be fair, technology is vastly expanding our horizons. In that way, it is fulfilling its promise. It’s just that we now know that achieving utopia is more than a matter of making a better widget.

Nick Heer from Pixel Envy points out that Dell hasn’t lost its branding charm. When configuring a laptop on the website, he got an error message, “Composite Rule Error: Invalid selection in Processor Branding.” He was further informed about the error:

The Chassis Option requires the matching Memory size. The 16gb Memory is only available with the Ultra 5 236V/226V and Ultra 7 266V. The 32gb Memory is only available with the Ultra 5 238V and Ultra 7 268V.

I have often marveled at the challenging model names that PC manufacturers give their products, which starkly contrast to those from Apple. Everyday people can remember the names of their Apple devices. Not so for most of what PC manufacturers come up with.

When I worked at Best Buy, I realized there is a kind of security in obscurity involved with these naming conventions. For instance, if we carried a Compaq laptop model called something like CP1256V, and that laptop had a common issue with the motherboard overheating, virtually no one would know about it.¹ Those of us at the tech bench/Geek Squad would see the pattern, but you wouldn’t have a piece in Engadget on the Compaq CP1256V having motherboard issues. If the same thing was true of an Apple Powerbook, well, you would know about it. The tech press would be all over the story.

The PC makers benefitted from this strategy of flooding the market with different models under different inscrutable names. Typically, PCs are lower quality than Macs, and the proliferation of models ensures that no one particular model can attract too much attention for its faults.²

Maybe it’s a bit early to be making New Year’s resolutions. Though this used to be a popular practice, many now don’t even believe in setting stretch goals just because the calendar changes. I confess that I have waxed and waned in my observance of making annual resolutions. This year, though, I have something lined up that I think will actually improve my life in meaningful ways.

I’m trying to go more analogue after the Christmas holiday. My Christmas list consists of items to help me do that. Now, before I reveal what is on the list, I have to admit that I’m fudging the idea of analogue a bit. In this context, analogue may contain a bit of digital, as long as it keeps me disconnected from the great network. I’ve been developing the idea that the internet is a place to go for a specific reason.

When I worked in retail, I was introduced to the concept of destination shopping. The idea consisted of the belief that customers were in your store for a particular reason. If you worked at a “destination,” the theory went, customers were there to buy rather than to look around. If you bought into it, you had reason enough to disregard customers quick responses of “just looking” when you asked if you could help them. It could mean being an obtrusive sales associate, but that was sometimes encouraged.

I want to treat the internet as a destination. Too often, I’m logged on to browse around and look for whatever may catch my fancy. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it lacks intent. When you have no intent, and no focus, you quite often end up wasting time which would have been better spent in other activities.

If I can work with tools that help me to avoid mindless internet browsing, I think I can improve my attention span and spend time more intentionally.

Here is the list of tools (some of which made it to afformentioned Christmas list):

1. Bullet Journal - I didn’t start a new one last year, and it’s always hard to begin off-cycle. I missed it, even if my cat is my enemy here because he loves to attack the placeholder strings.
2. FiiO DM13 portable CD player - This is what I meant when I said I was bending the definition of analogue. Sure, technically the CD player is digital, but it will keep me from going to an internet-connected device when I want to listen to music.
3. The Orthodox Study Bible from Ancient Faith Ministries - This was just gifted to me by a close friend for the Nativity. I plan to make good use of the apocryphal books and also footnotes in areas that I thought I had great familiarity with (like the Gospels).
4. Kindle Paperwhite - My favorite reading device. Loaded up with books from the Amazon store as well as classics from Standard eBooks, this is an extremely useful tool.

My bed will no doubt be littered with items at the end of the night, as opposed to just my iPad, but I need to detach myself somewhat from the full-featured tablet.

Probably the closest publishing platform to the one I'm using — Ghost — is Substack. Although Substack is much more popular for a few reasons, not the least of which is the low barrier-to-entry (it's free if you are not charging for your publication), it has come under quite a bit of scrutiny lately. There was a big push to get writers to abandon the platform after The Atlantic posted an article asserting that there were many Nazi publications using the platform to spread and even monetize their ideas. A prominent tech journalist named Casey Newton, who was using Substack, led the charge to get the company to amend its content moderation policies. After not achieving complete success with his campaign, Newton took his publication, Platformer, to Ghost. Substack did, however, remove five accounts (out of the six that Newton reported) that were distributing Nazi material, in accordance with its existing policies about violent speech. Many writers opined that this was the bare minimum that Substack could do to quell the outrage that was being directed at them.

Despite the outrage, though, no one (that I'm aware of), including Newton, ever really came out with compelling evidence that there was a major content problem on Substack. The six accounts that were reported to Substack were among hundreds of thousands on the platform. Nor did the people criticizing the moves that Substack took ever really specify what concrete actions they were seeking. Others fretted that Substack making content moderation decisions was a slippery slope and that writers who weren't associated with Nazi speech would be the next targets. So the furor eventually died down.

Now, the latest source of upset with Substack is that they recently created a separate category of followers for blogs that are not tied to subscriptions. People are worried that this will create lock-in, as a publisher can export their subscribers, but cannot export their followers. Andrea Grimes (presumably no relation to Elon Musk's mistress and baby mama, Grimes) writes about the change, comparing the move with something Twitter would do.

But when Substack tanks — and I think its right-wing, Musk-flavored, tech-bro-brained management indicates that it will — it won’t just mean losing the audience for our 280-character late-night gummy jokes and covfefe memes. It won’t just mean losing a huge community of colleagues and readers. It will mean losing a substantial portion of the audience for content that takes a hell of a lot more effort to produce — the thoughtful rants, the reported deep-dives, the serial fiction, the smart criticism. And without access to “follower” lists and emails, there will be no way to find them again. Writers will, once again, have to rebuild from near-scratch elsewhere.

It does seem like a concern, and some major publications are reporting that their subscriber growth has dropped off since the changes were made. It's also the latest controversy about the company to get people all riled up (a trend that started way before the Nazi scare). Given the reactive nature of many writers who are terminally online, I think it's safe to suggest a wait-and-see approach.

Neil Young put his catalog back on Spotify. He was moved to do so by the fact that Apple and Amazon are now serving the podcast he objected to (The Joe Rogan Experience) and that led him to remove his music from the streaming service. He reasons that he can't remove his music from all of those services, so apparently the next best thing is to make it available on all of them. As befits Young, he does advocate for Spotify updating its offering to include hi-res, something that most music streaming services are now doing.

Young concludes his post by stating his hope that Spotify “will turn to Hi Res as the answer and serve all the music to everyone. Spotify, you can do it! Really be #1 in all ways. You have the music and listeners!!!! Start with a limited Hi res tier and build from there!”

Young doesn't address that Spotify is now paying Rogan more than ever to shoot the breeze with his guests, while paying artists less than ever for their music.

Chris Welch from The Verge cancelled his Spotify subscription after waiting for years for the company to offer hi-res.

But I’m also an audio nerd who owns a handful of very nice headphones and earbuds. And sometimes I just want to plug in my USB-C dongle, lay on the couch, and truly sink into a new album. And it’s those moments where I’m inevitably disappointed with Spotify, because I know what I’m hearing isn’t the best it can be. I’m paying for an objectively inferior listening experience. Well, I was. A couple months ago, I got tired of waiting, so I let my longtime Spotify subscription lapse and purchased a year’s worth of Apple Music.

I much prefer my Roon + Qobuz setup to Apple Music, but I can see Apple's offering as the next logical step when moving from Spotify to get higher quality music.

The Verge also has a guide to Spotify alternatives.