John’s Blog

Alex Andrejev, for The Athletic:

Many baseball fans took to social media Thursday to report issues streaming Opening Day games on MLB.TV. Fans shared various accounts on X of encountering error messages while trying to watch games, with the issue lasting at least an hour during the early slate.

In my experience it lasted way longer than an hour. This was so disappointing! I couldn’t even finish watching the Orioles 12–2 win over the Blue Jays today it was so glitchy.

Not a good sign as more teams choose to have MLB.tv produce and stream games this year.

Interesting new feature from Cloudflare:

[We’ve] also seen an explosion of new crawlers used by AI companies to scrape data for model training. AI Crawlers generate more than 50 billion requests to the Cloudflare network every day, or just under 1% of all web requests we see. […]

[W]e have found that blocking malicious bots can alert the attacker that you are on to them, leading to a shift in approach, and a never-ending arms race. So, we wanted to create a new way to thwart these unwanted bots, without letting them know they’ve been thwarted.

To do this, we decided to use a new offensive tool in the bot creator’s toolset that we haven’t really seen used defensively: AI-generated content. When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them. But while real looking, this content is not actually the content of the site we are protecting, so the crawler wastes time and resources.

I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not, but seems like a very clever idea to combat the problem.

Steven Levy writing for Wired:

One of [Yahoo CEO] Lanzone’s canniest AI moves was acquiring Artifact, the AI-powered news aggregator created by Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. When the pair decided it would not become a viable business, they announced its closure and Lanzone was among multiple suitors vying for the underlying technology. It became the centerpiece of the homepage that Yahoo relaunched earlier this year. “Instead of incorporating their technology into our product, we did it the other way,” Lanzone says. “Essentially Yahoo News is now Artifact.” Systrom approves. “We partnered with Yahoo because they made a strong offer, but also because they planned on deploying our hard work to many millions of people,” he says.

Interesting update from Yahoo on its acquisition of Artifact last year.

Great story by Jonathan Margolis in this weekend’s issue of Air Mail:

Later, Leica helped Jewish employees and their families—along with other Wetzlar Jews who didn’t work for Leica—escape the Holocaust by sending them to New York as “employees.” In many cases, the jobs they were ostensibly leaving for didn’t exist. To this day, there are dozens of descendants of the “Leica Freedom Train” living in the U.S.

The story goes that the local Gestapo wanted to round up the Leitz family as traitors but were overruled by Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, who said Leitz’s contribution to the war effort was too important to close the company down. Another story that’s never been confirmed is that Leitz deliberately made optical products such as aircraft bombsights “a little bit off,” so German bombers would miss their targets.

Ernst Leitz II never spoke publicly about the Nazi period and said almost nothing about it, even to his children. “From Ernst Leitz’s point of view,” one friend of the family has said, “he was only doing what any decent person would have done in his position. The Leitz credo was ‘Do good, but do not speak about it.’”

The Pebble smart watch is back. I missed this announcement from founder Eric Migicovsky earlier in the year, but was stoked to see the announcement of new hardware this week.

This time around, Migicovsky is funding the project himself and learning from the mistakes of Pebbles past. His reasoning for creating new Pebble watches is simple and admirable:

Why are we making new Pebble-like smartwatches?

Pretty simple - because we want one! No company has made a perfect smartwatch for people like us, so we’re going to make the exact smartwatch we want. Read the full story on my blog, but it comes down to 5 key features:Always on e-paper screenLong battery lifeSimple and beautiful designPhysical buttonsHackable

No smartwatch on the market since Pebble offers this combination of features…until today!

The code is all available on Github.

And that white Core 2 Duo looks really nice. 🤔

Drew Lerner for Awful Announcing:

Tuesday’s MLB opener between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs in Tokyo, which featured several high-profile Japanese baseball stars including Shohei Ohtani, drew an audience of 25 million viewers in Japan, according to MLB PR. For reference, the total population of Japan is around 125 million, meaning one in five Japanese citizens watched the Dodgers’ win on Tuesday. […]

To put the game’s Japanese audience in perspective, 25 million viewers is larger than any American baseball audience since Game 7 of the 2017 World Series between the Dodgers and Houston Astros which drew 28.2 million viewers stateside.

Incredible numbers, and one man to thank: Shohei Ohtani. He’s the best player in the league by a mile, and probably the best athlete in the world.

Good take by Federico Viticci at MacStories:

In working with my iPad Pro over the past few months, I’ve realized something that might have seemed absurd just a few years ago: some of the best apps I’m using – the ones with truly desktop-class layouts and experiences – aren’t native iPad apps.

They’re web apps.

Great desktop web apps are also great on the iPad, especially when using a connected keyboard.

One example: I’ve been running GitHub Codespaces in a browser on my iPad a ton this year. It’s really great for reviewing Pull Requests, running a console, and making some light code changes. Plus I can add it to my home screen to remove any Safari browser chrome from around the window. It’s really quite amazing that this is even possible.

I’ve moved this site over to use Ghost as a CMS moving forward. Previously I was using a static site generator called Hugo, which I also really enjoyed.

The issue I had been facing is that a static site builder like Hugo, or any other site builder, typically requires me to be at my computer and at my desk. Yes, I can sometimes publish remotely through various means, but it was surely cumbersome. That feels like doing work. I don’t want blogging here to feel like work.

I’m becoming more of an iPad user lately and I often reach for the iPad when I’m not doing real “work” things, or if I’m on the go and don’t need a full laptop.

So now I can post from the iPad (and the computer!) which I’m hoping will mean I post more about what I’m thinking and reading. Here we go.

Apple has dropped the latest video in its “immersive experiences” category on the Vision Pro. This time it’s a short concert film featuring Metallica. Here’s the teaser on YouTube.

I haven’t watched all of the other immersive videos, but I have been more than a casual Metallica fan over the years so I had to check this one out.

It’s phenomenal. Absolutely an incredible use of this platform. This is what the Vision Pro should be. I was locked in to the entire 25-minute or so performance. This event sets the bar for what entertainment in an immersive environment can be.

I watched the same event(s) without the immersive video afterward, and it’s night and day. Watching this on the Vision Pro, you feel the raw energy of this band and its fans. So cool.

But why can't we get a full length concert? I'd to see the whole show from these perspectives, without the automatic cutting between cameras. The beauty of this platform is the ability to get completely immersed yet every time the camera changes automatically it takes me out of that immersion.

Also, nit picking here, but whoever produced this film clearly isn't a musician. Anyone remotely familiar with playing in a band or an instrument would highlight the performer that's actively playing at the time. There were several guitar solos that would have been really cool to watch played but instead the camera was panning around the crowd or showing one of the other band members that wasn't doing anything interesting.

Really lovely visualization from ESPN noting how the car design and technology has changed from 1950’s first season until today. Nicely designed and implemented here.

New album, officially available to stream today, from Jason Isbell. This album is just Isbell himself, without his great band The 400 Unit. Excited to give this a listen this morning!

As soon as the game play for the Super Bowl started this weekend, I couldn’t think about anything but the new “Fox Box” scorebug graphic at the bottom of the screen. I took some photos of it on my phone so I could come back later and talk about it.

Thankfully John Gruber noticed it as well, and has a brilliant piece on Daring Fireball summarizing the changes and the history of these style of graphics.

So I started studying and considering the changes to Fox’s scorebug. I quickly not only warmed up to the new scorebug, I decided I really like it. It’s better than Fox’s old one, and better than every other network’s (which all largely look the same), in almost every single regard.

I really like it as well.

Bigger and bolder typography adds clarity. But removing the background chrome lets viewers “see through” to any game action that happens at the bottom of the screen. To me, after just one game, the old Fox scorebug looks hopelessly dated; old-fashioned without any nostalgic charm. If anything, the new typography-first design is the one that looks timeless, evocative of the graphics from classic NFL Films productions.

The bigger and bolder text also has two major benefits: 1) visibility from far away, such as in a bar or restaurant and, more importantly I think, 2) better visibility when viewing on small mobile device screens.

It was a dominating win for the Eagles in last night’s Super Bowl. They clearly were the better team, and the result was never in doubt.

The Chiefs had no answers and were out classed in every aspect. Quite shocking, really. One would think that the Eagles were the team going for a three-peat, not the other way around.

Congrats to the city of Philadelphia. Grease those light poles and enjoy.

Jamison Hensley, for ESPN:

In the biggest surprise of Thursday night’s NFL Honors ceremony in New Orleans, Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen overcame the prevailing trend to beat Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson for The Associated Press’ NFL Most Valuable Player award.

Allen is the first player in 21 seasons to win MVP without being selected first-team All-Pro. Since MVP was first handed out in 1957, the only other players to win the award despite not being a first-team All-Pro were Broncos quarterback John Elway (1987, when Joe Montana was first-team All-Pro) and Titans quarterback Steve McNair (2003, Peyton Manning).

Congratulations to Josh Allen and the Bills Mafia. I’m so happy for him, what a great player and an amazing year.

Sad that neither Allen nor Lamar Jackson will be playing this weekend. (next year!)

Tapestry, The Iconfactory’s brand new unified timeline app is out today. It’s been about a year since I backed this Kickstarter and I’m so excited to give it a spin.