Own your data

Marco Arment on owning your data:

For something as important as email, I’ve never trusted everything to a proprietary provider. My email address has never ended in someone else’s domain name, and has never been hosted in any way that would preclude me from easily switching to another provider.

I’ve always been pretty blasé about my mail, and about where my other web content is. But recently I’ve been pondering whether that’s a good thing. My limited amount of tweets are somewhere in Twitter, my email is on Google, and even this blog is in a tumblr black hole.

Twitter in particular is getting attention, as commentators are seeing that all the content they’re creating on that service is increasingly unavailable, especially the older data that is outside the API reach. My own tweets are totally disposable, but the concept applies - how do you get at your content if it’s on a 3rd party?

If any of those services were to up and disappear, so would all my data. Not that it would matter too much, but maybe it’s time to start thinking about owning my own stuff.




Men’s programming

One Sports to abandon, um, sports? Bugger:

Among the key changes announced was a refocusing of Ten’s multichannel, One HD. It will no longer focus exclusively on sport, but will instead become a sport-entertainment-documentary proposition focused on the male audience aged 25-54, not unlike Seven’s multichannel 7Mate.

Just what we need, more pap. I blame the Ice Road Truckers fans. There goes the free NBA, NFL, and MLB. And it seems the dire rumours about the Packer buy-in to Network Ten were correct: get in, shut down the sport on One, which drives people to pay via Foxtel. Evil.




9 reasons Amazon should scare GoogApple

Music Machinery on Amazon eating into the GoogApple:

Google has accidentally  built the largest music destination on the Internet, but try to use YouTube to as a place to go and find music and you are faced with the challenge of separating the good music from the many covers, remixes, parodies and just plain crap that seem to fill the channel.  iTunes has gone from a pretty good way to play music to becoming something that I only use to sync new content to my phone. It is bloated, slow and painful to use.  In the ten years that Apple has been king of the digital music hill they’ve done little to help improve the music listening experience. Apple has moved on to video and Apps. Music is just another feature.

Contrast that with what Amazon has done with the Kindle - they’ve made a device that arguably improves the reading experience. They chose eInk over color display, they keep the non-reading features to a minimum, they give a reader great discovery tools like the ability to sample the first few chapters of any book.  I’m hopeful that Amazon will apply their same since of care for books to the world of music.




Option paralysis

Tweetage Wasteland:

These options are everywhere. Amazon just launched a Cloud Drive for storing and streaming music. Please, not another potential way for me to interact with my music. I spend so much time trying to decide where to download, store and stream my music collection that I don’t have any time left to listen to it.




Let’s get this party started, right

The inimitable Fireland with one reason why we’ll miss LCD Soundsystem:

Around minute four people might be all oh good lord is this song still going zzzz. Around minute five they’ll all be crammed in your crappy little living room, waving their hands in the air and literally not caring. Around minute seven they’re engaged in reckless, unsafe intercourse with each another. Around minute nine they’re ululating to their God in the hopes that He will make this song never end, ever.




Baseball boss fight

Why baseball is for gamers:

Baseball is a 9-stage boss battle, and the pitcher is the boss. To defeat him, you must hit him repeatedly or gradually wear him down. He has strengths and weaknesses you must identify and exploit. If you can successfully guess what he’s about to cast, you can use it against him and deal damage. Near the end of the game, he may be replaced by an even stronger boss with a higher ATT, but much lower HP.