We’ve reached the point of 90s nostalgia that I’m shocked when there’s something from the era has escaped the capitalistic urge to sell the memory back to me. One random toy/gadget recently popped back into mind and it seemingly will remain in the dustbin of the 90s, the humble Yak Bak. This was a solid state voice recorder that let you play back a short recording. The later models added effects and had build-in sounds. Much like the low end samplers of the era, you were required to put fart sounds on them.

I think the ads at the time tried to play off the novelty of the tape recorder from Home Alone 2. I got one for Christmas as a kid and was both fascinated by it and never quite knew what to do with it. One of those gadgets they can sort of make look cool in the commercials but ends up in a junk drawer.

However I recently had the urge to acquire one for my son. He loves when audio gets cut off when you’re turning off the TV or music. He thinks its hilarious and will repeat it for days on end. So he might actually get some enjoyment out of the short recordings from a vintage Yak Bak.

Sadly I was surprised to see that the Yak Bak revival has never come to pass. There were surprisingly few models on eBay and not even a ghost brand to sell me a Alibaba knock-off could be found online. I can completely see why. Even when I had one in the 90s, I knew the voice recorded in Windows 95 did the same thing much better. When you have a voice memo app on every phone, it’s hard to make a nostalgia case for the Yak Bak.

So Yak Bak, I only sort of mildly liked you back in the 90s, and now you’re a utility phone app. So I guess I should give my son an old tape dictaphone instead.

Amazon re-released a Fire TV Cube as an AWS thin client. It costs $199, while you can pick up a Fire TV Cube for $109. While I’m sure there’s some cost of developing a new software stack for enterprises, this says much more to me about how the consuming-facing platform is subsidized by ads.

Replying to a text with a voice memo is a profound breach of the social contract

Teenage engineering has justifiably gotten flack for creating designer audio gear that is ridiculously expensive for what it does. Their recent Field series saw them a long way from the entry level price point of Pocket Operators. Glad to see them making something much more approachable with their new EP-133.

One, it looks awesome, like a Famicom meets a Speak and Spell. But more importantly, for a $300 sampler, it seems to check a lot of boxes. Stereo sampling, lots of effects (including for external sources), velocity sensitive pads, deep sequencer, not completely crippled I/O, there’s a lot to love!

Now it’s Teenage Engineering, so there will assuredly be a weird UI, frustrating limitations (64MB of sample memory to start), and likely quality control issues. But it’s way cheaper than the SP-404, which is I’m guessing its main competition. Nice to see them making functional things that I can actually afford (that isn’t a weird wooden chorus).

The Verge published a nice piece talking with TE co-founder David Eriksson with some more thoughts on how they designed it. Hopefully we’ll see some other Pocket Operators “upgraded” to the EP lineup. Would love to see a dedicated drum machine with this form factor.

I though this would seen Altman start a new venture and then Microsoft eventually acquire it. But they must have given him a Scrooge McDuck vault of money to hire him directly

My son got this from the school library and I hope he gets the series

I am evidently a podcast hoarder

I’ve been using Artifact as kind of a recreational news reader. I don’t like it for breaking stuff but it’s pretty good for lighter fare. But I’ve been completely spoiled by its clickbait headline rewriting feature. It’s changed the way I engage with that type of content.

I love Descript but it has no chill

Microsoft’s Copilot Studio announcement makes how it will differentiate itself from OpenAI more plain. I feel like the underlying LLM models will reach an even greater degree of parity, so then it becomes about the tools to operationalize the tech in an organization. Microsoft’s specialty.

It’s a bummer that my kid’s school PTA uses Facebook Groups for everything. Not even an anti-Meta thing, I just don’t think to go on the platform anymore. Would much prefer a WhatsApp chat or a Discord server. But I’m not volunteering to migrate it or convince everyone its worth it. The thing is, Facebook Groups is a good product.

The class system in Beauty and the Beast is messed up because my reaction to getting turned back into a human after a decade as a candle stick would be to quit that job.

Using Continuity Camera on macOS is a better option than a dedicated mirrorless camera. Where you lose out is not having any settings (it doesn’t always handle backlighting well), and it doesn’t play as well with some prompter hardware (camera is too wide). A settings panel would make it perfect.

I’m ripping a CD to my computer for the first time in at least 7 years. Middle Cyclone by Neko Case. Picked it up at a library sale, so let’s see if it’s not scratched beyond repair.

Just realized the Humane AI pin has strong iPhone 5 vibes.

My kid just won a Kindle Paperwhite from our library. Last time I had one was my 2nd gen kindle. The refresh rate and overall responsiveness is impressive. Although the physical controls on my old one were so much more intuitive. Had to search how to exit a book…

The spatial video aspects of the Vision Pro have been a big question for me since Apple previewed the headset. John Gruber wrote up the most detailed look at how the feature will work with footage shot on an iPhone, so I was intrigued. But it leaves me thinking how Apple will actually market this.

Now I have no doubt in Apple’s marketing machine. It’s made Titanium a major selling point for the iPhone 15 Pro, so anything is possible. But I think the company may have something of a HomePod problem with the device and spatial video specifically. How do you get people to experience it?

I was never bullish on the HomePod because audio quality is remarkably hard to sell to consumers. Everyone can say their stuff sounds great, and when you’re in Target looking at a speaker or buying online, there’s no way to compare sound quality. Similarly, how do you show the spatial video of the Vision Pro?

Gruber described the fitting process for the headset as significantly refined but still cumbersome:

There are a few steps where you’re presented with a series of dots in a big circle floating in front of you, like the hour indexes on a clock. As you look at each circle, it lights up a bit, and you do the finger tap gesture. It’s the Vision Pro’s way to calibrate that what it thinks you’re looking is what you actually are looking at. Once that calibration step was over — and it took just a minute or two

That’s not the worst and the Wii sold millions of units with a much worse calibration experience. But still, the retail experience needed to get someone to try out spatial video seems steep. That’s non trivial for an extremely expensive device.

I thought at first the iPhone 15 Pro spatial video feature would be significant for the Vision Pro. But I didn’t realize the feature would be limited to landscape video. While I can be a snob and say that’s the only way to shoot video, the reality is vertical has won. It’s the de facto standard. When I’ll shooting with a phone, it’s now weird to shoot landscape. It makes sharing video harder since it will invariably be consumed on a phone.

The idea with special video capture on an iPhone is that you’d create this library of content that you’d get a value add experience when buying a Vision Pro. It solves the content problem. But not when it requires you to shoot in a way that has less utility now.

That being said, the Vision Pro is clearly being positioned as an early adopter device. But I’m curious how Apple pivots the device to a general market. Outside of the high launch price, I’m not sure what’s the feature that grabs people. Apple has overcome this before. The Apple Watch launched without a real use case and then doubled down on health and fitness tracking to great effect.

I guess I don’t see spatial video being the thing that gets people to buy the device. Generally people care much more about convenience than quality. Smartphones decimated the point and shoot camera market not because they were better but because they were supremely convenient. Spatial video (and the Vision Pro in general) seems inherently inconvenient.

Well I’m done with Beeper for messaging. Seeing messages across services failing and not getting any error messages for undelivered messages. I’ll take it if one service occasionally bugs out but suddenly completely unreliable.

The Humane AI Pin is genuinely weird. I don’t want to diminish it because of that. In fact, it’s incredible rare in the tech gadget space. This seems like something genuinely novel in an age where everything is a glass slab. I am genuinely confused by it because we rarely get to grapple with anything truly unique.

Introducing Humane Ai Pin from Humane, Inc. on Vimeo.

Which is not to say that is seems good. In fact, I’m struggling to see the use case. Because in its current state, it’s an accessory, not a phone replacement. And then at that point, what is it doing better than my phone? The camera will assuredly be worse (video is unavailable at launch is a major red flag). I suspect the battery life will be bad (you don’t ship multiple batteries with a device unless users will need them). It is a worse entertainment device since it cannot do video by its nature and I imagine streaming service support will be lacking at launch.

Those are major issues.

The benefit is you get a device optimized to work with an LLM. Any notably in a space evolving so fast, not any LLM, but rather OpenAI’s GPT-4. Which if I had to pick one, is the one I would pick. But it seems to be betting on a winner in a very quickly moving space. To be fair, so is Microsoft, so it’s probably not that big of an issue.

But effectively the device argues its optimizations to get content in and out of GPT-4 will be worth $700 and a monthly service contract. When you are almost assuredly going to have to already still maintain that same pricing model for a phone. A phone which can also already access these same model through apps, and increasingly voice assistants. And maintain all the advantages I’ve already outlined above.

But I don’t want to say that the device is a surefire flop. I don’t want to be the Windows Mobile guy in 2007 pointing out that the iPhone can’t even do copy-paste. Every piece of coverage about Humane goes on at length about the legacy of their founding team, particularly their deep roots at Apple. Since I haven’t played with it, maybe LLM integration is truly groundbreaking, seamless to the point that I don’t need a phone in my pocket.

But then I think about how does that Pin keep me entertained in a waiting room. Will it track my health information? Do I want to dictate every interaction? I can’t answer those questions.

The thing is, I want this to be a start of more hardware innovation. I don’t want the smartphone to be the terminus of every software innovation. I want weird wearable to find their market until I find one that blows my mind. I just don’t think this one is it… right now.

Always love a good Windows error screen on a ticketing kiosk

The Instagram share sheet is weirdly the last bird site holdout

I really hope this isn’t the start of the end for Final Cut on desktop. While I’ve got editor friends that sneer at it for their pro work, it’s been one of the best deals out there for an advanced user. I spent $200 on it back in 2016 and I’ve gotten constant updates, new camera support, and optimizations. All in an editor that’s sufficiently advanced for my needs and worked well across a variety of Apple hardware.

It seems weird that they would kill it on desktop so soon after it launched on iPadOS But then again, the company just made over $2,800 per second in revenue on services in Q4. So maybe it only makes sense to keep investing on it for that platform. Still a sad day for those avoiding subscription encroachment.

Recently I’ve seen more engagement on Threads, even though I post there way less. There may be a lesson there for me :)

I’ve gotten my feeds on BlueSky, Mastodon, and Threads to each have a certain degree of utility, with a lot of crossover. None are a ghost towns anymore.

When I bought my MacBook Pro 14, I was coming off a Thinkpad. I’d used the USB-C only MacBooks for work, and I definitely loved having a SD card reader and HDMI port on my personal machine. I accepted that I needed to pay the Apple tax to get those features on a “pro” body, even if the performance boost wasn’t strictly needed.

So it’s interesting to see Apple effectively giving me what I would have wanted with the new base model MBP. It’s their consumer grade chip, but the niceties of a great display and the dedicated IO. It’s what I said I wanted. So why do I feel like I still would opt for a M3 Pro version today? I guess because for that money, I would pay a little more for the extra RAM as future proofing.

This edition of the Idaho Times News sounds amazing