IKEA just announced a suite of smart home products that work with the Matter standard, including a whole slew of smart light bulbs, five smart sensors, remote controls and a smart plug. I’ve dabbled with home automation before, and I’ll be looking at these carefully to see how well they work with HomeKit. Our AppleTV is ancient, and if we upgraded to a new 4K version I could use that as the hub for smart devices, including these.
A small glimmer of hope in an otherwise bleak world: Defector, the creator-owned website founded by former writers at Deadspin, is five years old and profitable, quietly publishing excellent journalism. I’ve been a member since they launched, and will continue to do so (as well as the Autopian). Today I’m adding the Baltimore Banner to this group.
Interesting: most of the staff of the dearly departed Deadspin have started up their own new site, called Defector, coming in September. They’re doing a subscription plan, and for $69/yr. I’d consider it.
Finn’s recollection of her time at camp typically begins with “I didn’t like it and I wanted to come home,” which makes me feel really good about the whole experience. She’ll go into exhaustive detail about what she didn’t like, starting with two annoying girls she was stuck with the whole week, and then list the mosquitoes, the food, the lousy mattresses, the snoring, and the cold.
Writing for the weekly mailbag at Defector, Albert Burnenko answered a reader question about this phenomena which put it into better perspective for me:
The funny thing here, Pete, is that the kids are enjoying themselves. Your daughter and nephew had a great time. They will remember that trip to Michigan for the rest of their lives. In their adulthood they will spend money and time trying to organize vacations that they will hope can replicate the simple and unspoiled joy that will be all they remember of that trip to Michigan. If you are lucky, you will hear them talking about it, and you will smile a private little smile at your memory of how they complained the entire time, and if you are wise and merciful you will know not to spoil their memory by reminding them of this.
I seem to be collecting a lot of open tabs lately. Here are some highlights:
- The Defector 2024 Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog is live! I look forward to this as much as candy in my stocking.
- How long does medication actually last before it goes bad? Vox looks into the matter and finds mostly what I’ve suspected all along.
That is to say, drug expiration dates aren’t “bad after” dates as much as they are “good before” dates. For most drugs, these dates are set to about three years after the day they’re produced…
- Stereogum does a list of its best Shoegaze tracks of 2024. Shoegaze, much like any other form of music, can vary from garbage to gem depending on who’s making it, but I’ve enjoyed revisiting the genre this year. I haven’t heard of any of these bands but this should keep me busy for a week or two.
As someone who has a collection of tube radios, I found this article interesting for a number of reasons. The author has a huge collection of tube amplifiers, and was looking for a way to resurrect them. He bought a device called a variac, which is basically just a power transformer with adjustable input. In the article he explains how he used a variac to slowly bring the capacitors inside old tube amps back to life by slowly increasing the voltage applied; this sounds like another interesting project.
Defector ran a very interesting article on TwitchCon, the annual gathering of gaming streamers, and the author did a very good job of breaking down the harsh financial realities of making money streaming online:
After data on Twitch’s payouts to creators leaked in 2021, one analysis found only the top 1,332 streamers on the entire platform made at least the US median household income. Streamers below that level are far less likely to have the sort of off-platform sponsorship or ad deals that can add significant income.
I keep getting emails, one every couple of days, where someone has subscribed to my YouTube feed. Many of the creators I follow there have subscription numbers in the hundreds of thousands; they are also posting new videos every day. I don’t think I could keep up with that schedule.
…he compared Defector to a neighborhood bar, no pun intended. “This is our little business—we just need to have these margins, pay our employees, and that’s it,” he said. “No one who owns a bar is thinking, ‘I can’t wait for NBCUniversal to come offer to buy my bar for a hundred million dollars.’
The Columbia Journalism Review does a great piece on Defector, the sports/commentary website born from the ashes of the old Deadspin blog. What an amazing concept: building a self-sustaining business to provide a healthy lifestyle for its employees, not to make the founder rich. Venture capital is a virus. I subscribed almost two years ago and I’ve never regretted it; the writing is that good.
The CR-V is back on the road and running happily, but we’ve got a Maintenance light on the dashboard, which could mean any one of a number of things. Typically this means she’s reminding us to change her oil, but that was done less than 1500 miles ago and the alert shouldn’t be coming back up. I figured I’d bite the bullet and buy a cheapo OBD2 scanner to hook up to the car and see if it threw any codes; in typical Amazon fashion I ordered the unit over morning coffee and it arrived later this afternoon. Plugging it in to the car, it took a minute to talk to the car and revealed no codes. It is probably just the oil maintenance light coing back on, in which case I can reset it in 10 seconds; knowing it’s not about to explode for other reasons is a good thing.
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In the car on my way home from karate this evening we heard about Bitcoin dropping in value because of some exchange doing something or another, and Finn asked what Bitcoin actually was. I started out by asking her about the concept of money, and then explained government-backed securities, and stocks, and then tried to explain Bitcoin to the best of my abilities. I think I got it about 60% correct, and ended with an explanation of what a Ponzi scheme is, which I figure at least puts me in the ballpark. Finn listened and answered questions and was very interested to know if all of our bank accounts were FDIC insured. Defector did a very good explanation of what all the fuss is about, and I suddenly understand a lot more about what NPR had been reporting on.
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One of my favorite podcasts, You’re Wrong About, did a format change last year when one of the hosts, Michael Hobbes, left for greener pastures. I like the other host but I don’t dig her new format all that much, so I ended my subscription. He’s now doing a new podcast called If Books Could Kill, which reviews single-serving pop nonfiction books you see in airport newsstands. The first episode is about Freakanomics, and it’s an excellent takedown of a factually bullshit narrative. As someone who has made a big part of his professional life about producing and promoting factual scientific information, I found this fascinating. Subscribed!
The update from downtown Baltimore is thus: my white blood cell count is still below average, trending slightly downward since a post-surgery high point in August of 2020. Everything else in the bloodwork seems to be leveled off and within normal ranges, with the exception of lymphocytes and eosinophil, which are specialized white blood cells. We are told that my lymphocytes may never rise to pre-cancer levels as a result of chemotherapy, and I’d guess eosinophil is probably the same. The CT scan showed no new passengers, and my oncologist seems pretty positive about everything. So, that’s good! I’ll take it. If I make it to the five year checkup in October with a clean bill of health they say the chance of any new tumor drops dramatically; let’s hope my rare surprise doesn’t return.
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I’ve been wearing my Vaer watch almost exclusively the last couple of months, but knowing I was going to start welding class regularly I figured I should switch to one of my utility watches. I wore my LL Bean watch, and during class I was wondering why time was moving so slowly—until I realized the minute hand was stuck and not advancing. This is not the first time this watch has been in the shop for repairs. I’ve been waiting on having the Ollech & Wajs diver tuned up, but now that I have two that need servicing, there’s more of a push to visit a repair shop. For now, my Timex will work just fine for shop use.
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A couple of months ago, two writers from one of my favorite sites, Jalopnik, quit that site and started up a car blog of their own: the Autopian. David Tracy has always been a great read; his exploits with busted jeeps, insane wrenching projects and cross-country shitbox trips are the stuff of internet legend. His partner Jason Torchinsky was the weird beating soul of Jalopnik from its inception, writing about taillights, strange Chinese electric vehicles, and his Nissan Pao, as well as being the illustrator for many of its articles. They have assembled a crew of writers covering odd engineering history, daily car news, bizarre car-related videos, and other random stuff—basically a better version of Jalopnik with more personality and less corporate bullshit (as well as many fewer ads). I don’t see a subscription system set up yet, but when it comes (as it is for Defector) I will gladly send them money. More of this, please.
I’ve long been a fan of the Onion A/V Club, a website dedicated to pop culture and home to a ton of excellent writers from the early days of the web. Some time ago they got merged into Gawker and when that family of sites imploded they were able to hang on, most likely because of the quality of their work. G/O Media, the new corporate owners of the old Gawker sites, are now basically pushing the longest tenured writers at the A/V Club out in a pretty blatant move to bust up their union and hire cheaper workers in a race to become yet another middling entertainment site. I can only hope they follow the lead of the writers at Defector and build their own thing together.