Last night I tweeted that I dislike podcast apps advertising playback speeds that are not the real ones. I feel like they are stealing my time. Imagine you have a 15 minutes break or you want to exercise for 15 minutes. You choose one episode whose playtime is around 30 minutes so you’re able to finish it. Surprise! That’s not going to happen, as what is written on the can as 2x is actually a completely different playback speed.
Two iOS podcast apps that are doing this are Instacast and Downcast. These are very popular iOS apps, so I assume that either nobody really cares about real playback speed or that there is some inherent iOS limitation that doesn’t allow them to do it or that podcast publishers are in some sort of coallition with app developers (maybe even Apple?) to disallow listeners to consume the podcasts at high speed.
Downcast comes with a wide range of speed options, but except the normal 1x, there rest are not real. Here is the conversion table for Downcast:
| Conf speed | Real speed |
|---|---|
| 0.5x | 0.8x |
| 1.25x | 1.15x |
| 1.5x | 1.3x |
| 1.75x | 1.42x |
| 2x | 1.55x |
| 2.5x | 1.67x |
| 2.75x | 1.73x |
| 3x | 1.8x |
Instacast comes with only 4 options: .5x, 1x, 1.5x, 2x. But once again, except the 1x, the rest of the playback speeds are not the real ones:
| Conf speed | Real speed |
|---|---|
| 0.5x | 0.75x |
| 1.5x | 1.25x |
| 2x | 1.5x |
In conclusion, don’t rely on your podcast app to estimate the time spent listening to the podcast.
Federico Viticci for MacStories:
In my workflow, there is a distinction between apps “for writing” and tools for quick “note-taking”, but in order to minimize the effort required to keep everything in sync and tied together, I set out to make sure the differences of such tasks could coexist within a single ecosystem.
Read the post to learn about some applications you might not be aware of.
But when thinking about workflows, if I’d have to choose every time between 10 applications to transform the input into the desired output, I’d invest some time into simplifying and automating the process. The way I’d start would be answering some basic questions:
Charles Arthur for guardian.co.uk:
And what did Google say? Initially, that the data collection happened “mistakenly”. No, it didn’t. Initially, that only “fragmentary” data was collected. No, it wasn’t: the first page of the FCC report says that: “On October 22 2010, Google acknowledged for the first time that ‘in some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords’.” That it was the work of one engineer acting alone, and not in any way part of how Google rolls.
Think if you don’t want to revisit the Google Drive Privacy.
Ed Bott about Google Drive privacy for ZDNet:
Google used those exact same words, with absolutely no awareness that a direct competitor had already made the exact same mistake just a few months earlier.
It’s a perfect example of Google’s inability to pay even the slightest bit of attention to anything that happens outside the Googleplex.
Your most reliable work will always be within your range. Go just a bit outside of that to show your passion and stretch yourself. But go too far beyond that and you’ll be so strained that ultimately the work will suffer.
Don’t follow your passions, follow your effort. It will lead you to your passions and to success, however you define it.
Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.
When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide licence to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights that you grant in this licence are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This licence continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing that you have added to Google Maps).
I was planning to write that this is just the usual user unfriendly legalese. Then I stopped for a second to imagine how could a sync service become better by creating derivative work, publishing, and publicly displaying and distributing my files. I have no ideas.
One of the Mac utilities I run into very often is Keyboard Maestro : a powerful macro program for Mac OS Lion and Snow Leopard. But even if I’m a tenacious reader of MacDrifter’s posts about this app, so far I haven’t seen any examples that couldn’t be implemented using Mac OS services or workflows.
Instead of giving up finding Keyboard Maestro’s sweet spot, I thought of a challenge: give me a Keyboard Maestro idea or example macro that cannot be achieved using Mac OS services/workflows. Actually I’ll relax the rules even further: share a Keyboard Maestro macro that is much simpler than the corresponding service/workflow.
Nate Weiner:
We decided to make the move to a new revenue model last year and today is just the first step in that process.
Just a couple of observations:
So you have two superlatives: biggest phone manufacturer and biggest TV manufacturer. Add in some tablets, some washing machines, and some acceptable software and you have a real and vibrant ecosystem.
Adding crap on top of even the greatest thing makes it crap too. So, at most, you get an acceptable ecosystem.
Quickly identifying the type of a prediction will help you either create your own list or going through others’ much easier.
There are 4 types of predictions.
Truism. This category should be obvious. Already confirmed facts, sometimes in a new packaging that is supposed to make them sound new, carrying no actual value, no new or interesting information.
PR-esque. There are types of roles—think C-level management—requiring people to formulate some predictions characterized mostly by unjustifiable optimistism. These predictions usually take the form of: “this is the year of our product”. Sometimes there are facts or some truth behind them, but most often these are given an unbalanced weight or emphasis compared with reality.
I told you so or It was me that said this firstly. There are jobs—think analysts or journalists—that require people to throw out the most phantasmagoric predictions in the hopes that at some point in the future they’ll get any form of confirmation thus justifying their titles.
Gibberish. These out of thin air predictions are formulated for making the numbers. Having 5 instead of 4, or 10 instead of 8 bullet points is more marketable.
Update: After some more thinking I’ve concluded there is a form of predictions that could be considered valuable or at least interesting.
It all started with searching for and experimenting with different monospaced fonts in IDEs. But then reading and writing so much slowly transformed me into a font maniac. For a while the Personal and then Portfolio Typekit plans offered me comfort.
The last episode of Andy Ihnatko’s podcast introduced me to the ComicBookFonts and their special offer on each year’s Jan. 1st: every font for $20.12[1].
So even if I know I’ll not be able to get them, I’ve put together the list of fonts I’d like to have:
Nine fonts isn’t much, right? But I couldn’t stop here and I have a second list of nice to haves:
Andy Ihnatko posted his 10 picks here.
If you are a font addict too, I bet this whole thing will make you waste a bit of time. But hey, it’s the holiday season so we’re allowed to relax and dream of gifts.
The offer price is actually the year in cents. 2012 means $20.12. ↩
