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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. -
Choosing Physical Media
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.
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Bandcamp Playlists
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.
The new playlist feature from Bandcamp -
Pocket Closing
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.
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Bio Vinyl
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.
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The Precarious Fox
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.
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Hookmark + LinkDing
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.
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Amazon’s Rufus, which must be some kind of AI chatbot, wonders if I’ve got the following questions about Stereolab’s upcoming album Instant Holograms On Metal Film:
- Can it be used on any type of metal surface?
- Does it leave any residue after removal?
- Is it easy to apply without bubbles?
The future is cleaning your tub with space-age bachelor pad records.
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Vinyl On Roon
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.
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The Return of Googie
Five Points Car Wash sign via Davidag on Flickr 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.
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Dell Charm
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.
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Analogue Grand Diary
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.
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Roon Audio has a new feature that should delight headphone lovers — OPRA (Open Profiles for Revealing Audio). OPRA is an open-source repository hosted on GitHub that contains precisely crafted headphone curves for different headphone models (and you get an equalizer, and you get an equalizer…).
I love Roon, although I’ve had my share of technical challenges — today I need to bring up two issues on the Roon Community forum. The ability of the platform to continuously innovate ways to give audio enthusiasts a better experience is impressive.
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I disclosed my most fondest Christmas wish list item to my lady friend last night — a FiiO DM13 portable CD player. She laughed at me. You want a discman for Christmas?
How can I explain my love of single-purpose devices and high-fidelity to someone who lives on their iPad and sees no problem with lossy streaming music? I want something that doesn’t have a screen with which to focus on music and, for goodness’ sake, some time to part with my phone during the day.
Bluetooth codecs have progressed, but Apple hasn’t seen that as a priority in their annual device updates.1 Their hardware can’t even output the high-fidelity audio that you can stream from their Apple Music service. One could probably successfully argue that Apple is more of a mass-consumer device manufacturer now than the company that used to cater to creatives.
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Or even in their headphone updates. ↩︎
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The new anti-toxicity feature on Bluesky that allows a user to detach their original post from a quote post is ingenious. I can’t believe no one has shipped anything like this until now. In hindsight, it seems obvious.
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Substack Lock-In
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.
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Oh Spotify, All Is Forgiven
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.