ElevationLab’s Apple Watch dock, NightStand, is currently on sale:
Just set your watch on, from out of the corner of your eye, no careful alignment required. Locks to your bedside table so you never have to hunt for the cord. Undocking is one-handed. Solid, soft, seamless construction. Low-profile, minimal design.
I looked at a few different charging/docking methods and this is by far my favorite.
When I learned about Nomorobo from readers and saw how creepy it wasn’t, I deleted Truecaller immediately and subscribed to Nomorobo, and it works great.
A few days ago, after a 100% success rate for a couple of weeks — every spam call (and zero non-spam calls) identified before I answer — I enabled the option to send spam calls directly to voicemail.
Now, from my point of view, I just don’t get spam calls anymore.
To me, that’s $2/month very well spent.
I must have been put on some list somewhere because I’ve been getting one or two robocalls a day for the past month.1 I finally signed up for Nomorobo after hearing Marco talk about it on the latest episode of ATP and it’s been money well spent.
I love the fake “oh I was just putting my headset on” call the most.↩
Ever wished you could save a video from the Internet? Search no more, Downie is what you’re looking for. Easily download videos from thousands of different sites.
I’ve been playing around with this app the past couple of days to see how well it works and have come away impressed. I’ve tried a few of these in the past and they never quite work right for me — but this one has been solid so far.
Pied PíPer is a Safari 10 extension that will add a PiP button for Netflix, DailyMotion, Youtube, and the Plex web interface.
On Friday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that stops all refugees from entering the United States for 120 days, and those fleeing the brutal war in Syria indefinitely. It also gives Christians fleeing persecution priority over Muslims, inserting a religious test into our refugee program. It bans all visas from seven countries whose populations are mostly Muslim.
This order is an act of evil.
Pod Save America sat down with Obama for his last interview as President.
Voltron: Legendary Defender’s second season far surpasses any expectations I had for it. I was worried going in that the show would suffer from a sophomore slump, but Legendary Defender manages to capture the magic of the first season and expand the universe. In the three episodes Netflix provided to me ahead of the show’s release, there are more characters, more worlds and the backstories we got a glimpse of last season are explored more at length.
We just started the second season last night and I’m hooked again. I love this show.
David Remnick, writing for The New Yorker:
The reason so many people are having fever dreams and waking up with a knot in the gut is not that they are political crybabies, not that a Republican defeated a Democrat. It’s not that an undifferentiated mass of “coastal élites” is incapable of recognizing that globalization, automation, and deindustrialization have left millions of people in reduced and uncertain circumstances. It is not that they “don’t get it.” It’s that they do.
Since Election Day, Trump has managed to squander good faith and guarded hope with flagrant displays of self-indulgent tweeting, chaotic administration, willful ignorance, and ethical sludge. Setting the tone for his Presidency, he refused, or was unable, to transcend the willful ugliness of his campaign. He goes on continuing to conceal his taxes, the summary of his professional life; he refuses to isolate himself from his businesses in a way that satisfies any known ethical standard; he rants on social media about every seeming offense that catches his eye; he sets off gratuitous diplomatic brushfires everywhere from Beijing to Berlin. (Everywhere, that is, except Moscow.)
Tooth Fairy is for macOS:
Single click away from your favorite bluetooth device. Tooth Fairy helps you to switch connection of a selected bluetooth device, for example, AirPods, directly from menu bar or even global hotkey. You can do it with the system bluetooth menu bar but Tooth Fairy can save you a few clicks.
Recommended: Control + ESC to quickly connect your AirPods.
Vanity Fair has an excerpt from a recently released book with the oral history of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
My wildest dream for The Daily Show when I started was “This will be fun. Hopefully we’ll do it well.” Success for me would’ve been feeling like I figured it out. That I got to express the things I wanted to. It was never “I want this to be a cultural touchstone … but only for a very small portion of America.” And I was hoping to stay on TV longer than nine months this time.
What a great read. I’ve already added the full book to my Amazon wishlist.
President Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was asleep in Washington, D.C., when the phone rang. His military aide, General William Odom, was calling to inform him that two hundred and twenty missiles launched from Soviet submarines were heading toward the United States. Brzezinski told Odom to get confirmation of the attack. A retaliatory strike would have to be ordered quickly; Washington might be destroyed within minutes. Odom called back and offered a correction: twenty-two hundred Soviet missiles had been launched.
Brzezinski decided not to wake up his wife, preferring that she die in her sleep. As he prepared to call Carter and recommend an American counterattack, the phone rang for a third time. Odom apologized—it was a false alarm. An investigation later found that a defective computer chip in a communications device at NORAD headquarters had generated the erroneous warning. The chip cost forty-six cents.
A terrifying read.
I’ll remember 2016 as the year I migrated from AbsolutePunk to Chorus and the year where The 1975 pretty much dominated my music listening from start to finish. My goal this year was to try and spend more time with the music I loved instead of trying to listen to everything. In the end, I felt like devoting more time to each album let me discover more about each one without worrying about needing to move onto the next thing until I was ready. I’m glad I did it.
I included a bunch of movies, TV shows, books, and apps I enjoyed over the year as well.
Aj LaGambina ranks his top albums from 2016.
Say what you want about 2016, but the music was fantastic. It would have been damn-near impossible for this year to top last year in terms of albums I loved—simply because 2015 completely reconfigured my tastes and taught me entirely new ways to love music. Even still, 2016 brought its fair share of riches. Butch Walker, Jimmy Eat World, and Green Day all released their best records since 2004—a miraculous feat, given that 2004 remains my all-time favorite year for music. Dawes continued to redefine what their sound could be, with a record so adventurous it cost them a few long-time fans. Discoveries like Parker Millsap and Lori McKenna wowed me with their songwriting prowess and became potential new favorite artists. Sturgill Simpson and Maren Morris led the vanguard of country music’s renaissance, following in the footsteps of what Chris Stapleton and Jason Isbell were able to accomplish in 2015. And Yellowcard, one of the most important bands in my personal musical development, decided to call it quits.
2016 was such a great year for music. My output considerably slowed down here due to work and life, but I’m very happy to be a part of Chorus.fm. It’s been incredible to see the transition from AbsolutePunk.net into such a beautifully designed site and community space. I’m truly excited for Jason and everything he will accomplish with this site and feel honored to be on board. As always, these are my favorite albums of the year.