On this week’s episode of Encore I am joined by special guest Deanna Chapman. The main topic this week is all about our most anticipated albums of 2017. What made the list and what did we decide to leave off? Do we really have to mention Brand New … again? We also talk about movies we are looking forward to, discuss music on TV shows, and nerd out about comic books a little bit.
The Fidget Cube: A Vinyl Desk Toy
The Fidget Cube that started on Kickstarter is now up for order on their website.
An unusually addicting, high-quality desk toy designed to help you focus. Fidget at work, in class, and at home in style. Fidget Cube has six sides. Each side features something to fidget with: Click. Glide. Flip. Breathe. Roll. Spin.
This is devilishly clever.
OmniFocus Adds Global Search
OmniGroup have released OmniFocus 2.8 for Mac:
Happy New Year! After a quiet couple of weeks, we are back in the office today and releasing OmniFocus 2.8 for Mac, which includes one of our most requested features: Global Search.
Great new addition to the most important app I use.
Portland Gear
My girlfriend picked me up one of these shirts from “Portland Gear” for Christmas. I’m digging the little P logo. Really comfortable shirt.
HandBreak Leaves Beta After 13 Years
HandBreak, one of the best video transcoders out there, has finally left beta and hit version 1.0 … after 13 years.
After more than 13 years of development, the HandBrake Team is delighted to present HandBrake 1.0.0. Thank you to all of our many contributors over the years for making HandBrake what it is today.
Best of 2016 & Rogue One (Encore Episode 139)
This week’s super sized episode of Encore features a lengthy discussion about our favorite albums of 2016. We go through our top 10 and break down why those albums were important to us this year. The second half of the episode is all about Rogue One: A Star Wars Story — it is filled with spoilers so you can pause if you haven’t seen it yet and come back to it later. We wanted to give you a jam packed episode for the last two weeks of the year.
Hope you enjoy and have a great holiday!
A Computer for Everything: One Year of iPad Pro
Federico Viticci, over at MacStories, has a killer article about using the iPad Pro for a year and how it’s become his favorite computer of all time:
Much of the iPad’s strength lies in iOS and its app ecosystem. If Apple were to stop making iPads, I’d still prefer to work on a device that runs iOS rather than macOS. iOS is where app innovation happens on a regular basis with developers one-upping each other in terms of what software can achieve; I also prefer the structure and interactions of iOS itself. The iPad Pro is the purest representation of iOS: it’s a computer that can transform into anything you need it to be.
And:
There’s an important difference between the old iOS automation kin and the modern wonders of Workflow. Four years ago, URL schemes were the only way to turn an iPad into a passable work device for advanced tasks. Automation was an escape hatch from Apple’s limitations and the immaturity of iOS. Today, iOS is a stronger, more capable platform that, for many, is superior to macOS. There’s still work to be done, but, for the most part, iOS automation today is an optional enhancement – a way to speed up tasks and make them more accessible. In four years, and largely because of iOS 8 and iOS 9, iOS automation has evolved from a workaround into a creative optimization.
The entire thing is full of great insights and it got me playing around with some new automation techniques on iOS. I realized I haven’t been using Workflow and Launch Center Pro to their full capacity.
American Hi-Fi – “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” (Song Premiere)
Today we’re happy to help get you in the holiday spirit by bringing you a new Christmas song from America Hi-Fi. The band’s rendition of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” can be streamed below and contains an extra little gift … Mike Herrera of MxPx is guesting on it as well.
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Review: Acceptance – Colliding by Design
This first impression was originally posted as a live blog for supporters in our forums on December 19th, 2016. First impressions are meant to be quick, fun, initial impressions on an album or release as I listen to it for the first time. It’s a running commentary written while listening to an album — not a review. More like a diary of thoughts. This post has been lightly edited for structure and flow.
This is an album I really never thought we would be getting. A new Acceptance album basically a decade after the last one. I’ve spent quite a while listening to this one now, maybe 6 or 8 full listens (and I’ve had some of the songs unfinished for quite a while and had played them many, many times), so I’ll try and offer a little of that context with the first listen as well. I really do think that this album is best listened to three or four times before having too many thoughts on it. I think this for a few reasons:
- I think that following up a loved album 10 years later is going to be impossible. Expectations on the band and what the listener thinks the music should be or sound like take some time to shake off and really listen to what the album itself is.
- It’s a different vibe of an album as a whole. It’s … slower? more melodic … more Coldplay, Young the Giant, Tears for Fears, Mutemath at times, some early JEW sort of stuff going on. It’s a very layered album that is thick, lush, and has a sound that sounds, to me, like the band had made three albums during the last 10 years and this is the progression that comes out at the end. Basically, there’s a big leap from what Phantoms was to this. It’s not Phantoms part 2.
- The songs find their own footing with more listens. They separate themselves and you can appreciate the small details and what the band was going for and how they really did put a lot of thought and intentionality into this album.
- I liked a lot of these songs on first listen, loved a couple, but it really did take me listening to the album as a whole multiple times for me to really sink into this release and discover how much I really do love it.
Nerdy T-Shirts
I’m kinda loving these super cool looking (and nerdy) t-shirts. I just may have to pick up the retro looking Star Wars one.
The DraftTable for the iPad Pro
I don’t have an iPad Pro but the DraftTable from ElevationLab looks quite clever. If I ever upgrade to an iPad with Apple Pencil support I’d probably think about one of these.
P.S.: Their Elevation Dock, my favorite iPhone dock, is currently also on sale.
2016 Holiday Gift Guide
With the holidays rapidly approaching, I wanted to steal an idea I’ve seen on other websites and put together a few gift ideas that I think are pretty great to give and receive. Since I already have recommendation posts for albums, movies, tv shows, books, software, podcasts, blogs, audio-equipment, and random miscellaneous tech and around the house items, this list is focused mostly on things not included in those posts and more geared toward things I’ve come across in the past year or so that I think are worth checking out and that I think would make good gifts. As always, I only recommend things I’ve personally used and loved.
I used my Amazon affiliate link when the product showed up there, which gives our website a slight percentage back if you make a purchase, and therefore helps fund our continued existence. I hope you’ll find something cool, and feel free to drop your own recommendations in the comments.
Quarter Life Crisis (Encore Episode 138)
This week’s episode of Encore has us making plans to see Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, talking a little bit about Thanksgiving, and then looking at A Day to Remember’s lawsuit, a screenplay based on The Menzingers, Brand New’s TDAG 10-year anniversary, and some listener questions about ticket scalping, Christmas/holiday music, and our favorite holiday cover songs.
Review: Yellowcard – Yellowcard
With goodbye comes reflection. This reflection is often bittersweet as it drifts between that which has filled us with joy and that which has caused us pain. There’s a cauterization of once open wounds that necessitates a search for meaning in the steps that led us here. And it’s within this reflection that we try and attach understanding to our history. Why does saying goodbye make us feel this way? What is it about this specific action that leads to an emotional cluster-fuck? A perceptible and undeniable bond between love and sadness? I keep asking myself these questions as I prepare to say goodbye to one of the best bands that ever came from our music scene. A band that has soundtracked my highs, soundtracked my lows, and has been a constant musical mirror to the love, and sadness, that life has brought. As I walk into this realization, I can’t help but reflect on just how many of my goodbyes have been punctuated by a Yellowcard song. Goodbye to friends, goodbye to family, goodbye to relationships, goodbye to states, goodbye to innocence, goodbye to youth. And with that I realize that I don’t want to become numb to goodbyes. I want them to sting. I want them to hurt. I want the goodbye to be a remembrance of everything that led to that moment. Yellowcard’s final self-titled album is that pinprick. It’s that puncture against the consciousness that reminds me why I listen to music, it’s the melodic pull that has dominated my life for all these years. It’s between this intense feeling of familiar and new that I find the closing Yellowcard album lays itself to rest.
The Constitution Lets the Electoral College Choose the Winner. They Should Choose Clinton.
Lawrence Lessig, writing at The Washington Post:
The framers believed, as Alexander Hamilton put it, that “the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the [president].” But no nation had ever tried that idea before. So the framers created a safety valve on the people’s choice. Like a judge reviewing a jury verdict, where the people voted, the electoral college was intended to confirm — or not — the people’s choice. Electors were to apply, in Hamilton’s words, “a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice” — and then decide. The Constitution says nothing about “winner take all.” It says nothing to suggest that electors’ freedom should be constrained in any way. Instead, their wisdom — about whether to overrule “the people” or not — was to be free of political control yet guided by democratic values. They were to be citizens exercising judgment, not cogs turning a wheel.
I agree, but the odds of this happening are infinitesimally small.