Steve Mould just shared a very interesting video explaining how the LED lights on smart watches are able to measure your heart rate (and in some devices, SpO2) through the skin, in human-understandable terms. It's a great sumamry of the complexities involved in quantifying biological data non-invasively with the power of physics.

Worth a watch, go check it out on Mould's channel; though I am a bit sad that my favorite protein in all of the human body — hemoglobin — did not get an explicit shout-out.

As I have spent the last couple weeks warming my hands and roasting marshmallows over the Elon-Twitter Dumpster Fire, the most-riveting campfire stories have primarily been scoops from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer at Platformer. Their summary of today's particularly chaotic happenings over at Twitter HQ is an especially enamoring play-by-play of Elon Musk's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Some key snippets from the excellent piece...

On remote work:

Speaking of the value of in-person work, he said: “If you can physically make it to an office and you don’t show up, resignation accepted.”

On the state of Twitter's remaining employees:

Around that time, someone put a poll into Twitter’s Slack channel: “Is it too early for vodka?” the poll asked. (It was a little after 1PM PT.)

On Twitter's survival:

Depending on the length and severity of the recession, he said, the company could lose several billion dollars next year. He would not speculate how much runway Twitter had left. "Bankruptcy isn't out of the question," he said, as we were also first to report.

On cleaning up the mess he himself had made:

Seventeen minutes later, Musk followed up with a one-sentence email to the team labeled "Top Priority." "Over the next few days," he wrote, the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam."

That tidbit just brings to mind this spot-on assessment from Kieran Healy:

[Me standing in the flames of the burning house I don't want but recently had to buy because I signed a piece of paper saying "I promise to buy this house" and which I myself doused in gasoline and set on fire ]: I have done everything I could to appease the activists

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) November 4, 2022

And, the key take-away:

Musk’s whim-based approach to product development, his rapidly depleting executive ranks, and the very real likelihood of hundreds or even thousands of additional departures at the company in coming weeks threaten to leave Twitter a shadow of its former self. And much of the reason for that is Musk himself: the way he treated his employees and the product they built; the sage advice he ignored; the business fundamentals that he misunderstood.

How Casey and Zoë have managed to secure all of the insider details a few weeks ago was at the time extremely impressive to me. Now? Well, based on how they've been treated thus far, I imagine most Twitter employees would relish the opportunity to share a "day in the life" under Elon Musk.

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Now is probably as good a time as any to let anyone reading this know that I am now on Mastodon @mvo@mastodon.social — you can follow me there if you'd like. And, of course, I still maintain Peer Reviewed and write from time to time. There's something to the idea of "owning your own platform", after all.

In a piece today in the Wall Street Journal, Joanna Stern lays out a frustration that so many of us have: the entirely intolerable state of iMessage spam — from the article:

Me: So sorry! I totally missed these. They got buried by texts from the pediatrician, the electrician and the dog groomer.

No, those three people didn’t walk into a bar. Instead, they were congregating in my Messages app—along with texts about appointments, 20%-off sales, two-factor codes and the whereabouts of my FedEx packages.

Stern then goes on to list a variety of strategies to mitigate the notification hellscape that iMessage has become, thanks to spam messages and a dozen one-time verifications codes. Perhaps I'm just a bit heated on the subject because I read Stern's piece while actively rebuilding after a fresh Windows install and had to re-sign-in to every website and service I use...meaning I was quickly inundated with about 15 iMessage verification codes! Surely Apple could take the tech that helpfully detects one-time verification codes and auto-populates them on your iOS keyboard for quick entry and use it to delete those same iMessage threads after a fixed duration? Let's say 24 hours, since most of those one-time codes are time-limited in their use anyway. Why leave them sitting around for the user to clean up (or not) when you could tidy up automagically?

Another triage tip, shared helpfully by Matt C in the Relay FM Members Discord: You can manually add all of the phone numbers that send you one-time verification codes to a contact called "Robots" to sequester them in a single iMessage thread. This is a really clever solution to a problem that we shouldn't even have, but alas.

Corralling one-time codes, one robo-text at a time.

John Siracusa, in his roughly-annual blog post, lays out a list of table-stakes featuers for modern streaming apps:

Most streaming apps aim for mass-market appeal, so they can’t get too complex. But today, they’re at the far opposite end of the spectrum, missing basic functionality rather than being bogged down with fancy features and customization. These apps need to walk before they can run. I hope, someday, at least one or two of them can fly.

Siracusa's streaming spec is spot-on. The 2015 promise that "the future of TV is apps" was apparently a monkey's paw, ushering in nearly a decade of mediocre TV apps designed more to promote shows than to watch them. This post should be required reading for every streaming app's UI team — because, let's be honest: they can do better.

This three-minute clip from a 1995 interview with Steve Jobs is making the rounds today given Apple's intransigent greed in the face of Dutch regulation of the company's app store payment processing policies. The clip features Jobs bemoaning what greed had done to Apple in his absence. Steve Jobs, from the clip via "Rusk86" on Youtube:

They cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place, which was making great computers for people to use; they didn't care about that anymore...They cared about making a lot of money.

Meanwhile, Apple responded today to Dutch regulators on the subject of alternative app store payment methods with a jarring series of requirements. From the horse's mouth:

Apple will charge a 27% commission on the price paid by the user, net of value-added taxes. This is a reduced rate that excludes value related to payment processing and related activities.

Jobs of course passed away only three years after the launch of the App Store, and in very different times. I wonder what choice words he would have for the company — which today sits just under a $3 trillion in market cap and regularly posts $100 billion quarters — as they shamelessly wring every loose nickel they can out of the developers on their platform.

Federico Viticci writing on MacStories:

Like others, I hope that the new owners of Wordle won’t ruin the game; like others, I’ve also learned my lesson with such things on the Internet before, which is why I created WordleForever. With this shortcut, you’ll be able to play Wordle’s collection of thousands of words for years to come. That is, assuming the Shortcuts app will still be around or that you’ll still want to play this game.

The entirety of Wordle in a 182KB HTML file, delivered via a home screen Siri Shortcut. Peak Viticci.

Merlin Mann has been collecting nuggets of wisdom, and you can read those nuggets here. I’ll spare you any puffy prose and provide a short bulleted list of some of my favorites instead:

• People think about you much less than you either hope or fear.
• Buy the nicest screwdrivers you can afford.
• If you have cool stickers, use them. Put them on things. Be joyful about using your stickers. If you die with a collection of dozens of cool stickers you never used, you did it wrong.
• Whenever you meet someone new, ask them what they're most excited about right now. Everyone interesting is excited about something right now, and they'd probably love to tell you about it.
• Treat everyone you encounter like they're having a way worse day than you.

Read these (and so, so many more) in Merlin’s Gist (but leave your glassware and flammables at the door).

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

The problem is that most people don’t buy a new iPhone every year. The primary upgraders to the iPhone 13 will be coming from the iPhone 7, or 8, or X, or XS, or XR.

Here’s an attempt to provide a little more of a big-picture overview for owners of older iPhones who are wondering what’s new in the iPhone 13.

This is probably the most useful overview of the iPhone 13 and 13 Pro I’ve seen, primarily because I myself am upgrading from the three year old iPhone XS. I think Jason hits the nail on the head: most iPhone reviewers are doing year-over-year comparisons and may accurately describe this crop of iPhones as “just an S-year” or a “small spec bump”. But most iPhone purchasers (like me) are inheriting the cumulative advancements of the last two, three, or even four years of Apple’s “incremental” updates. That context is important, and Jason lays it out quite nicely for everyone making the multi-year iPhone jump.

Friend of the blog Zach Knox took my rudimentary Python code from my Pyto home screen widget and vastly improved upon it using JavaScript and Scriptable. A prettier progress bar, more data points, and overall better code (shocker: Zach is a developer by trade, and I am not!). You should absolutely go read his post, or skip right to the good stuff and download his JavaScript code and install his widget on your iPhone!

Zach’s widget is delightful.

Brent Simmons with some tough task manager truth on Inessential.com:

There’s no perfect system for anybody. All of these apps are pretty good, and you may find one fits you better than another, but you’re not ever going to make it the perfect system for you. Even if you started from scratch and wrote your own, you’re not getting the perfect system.

He is, of course, absolutely right: OmniFocus, Todoist, TickTick, Things, Microsoft To Do, Reminders...name 50 more productivity systems and they will all share in common their infuriating imperfection. Luckily, none of us need perfection — what we ultimately need from our tools is for them to measurably assist in whatever work we are doing with an acceptable assortment of trade-offs. This stretches well-beyond task managers: I certainly don’t have the “perfect” table saw — in fact, I’m sure that such a saw doesn't exist! But the one I do have adequately addresses my needs (as they are now), but constantly requires me to work around its limitations.

That’s life in a nutshell: Imperfect people making imperfect things with many, many imperfect tools. The tools might improve, sure, and you might stumble upon a better one from time to time — but never the magic bullet. So stop chasing the dragon of the “perfect” task manager (or the “perfect” anything, really) and instead take a moment to be content with what’s working for you right now.