John Martellaro and Adam Christianson join host Kelly Guimont to talk about Siri’s grading program and the end of John’s MacBook repair saga.
Apple Music Alternative Playlist Renamed 'ALT CTRL'
Apple is slowly rebranding Apple Music, and its latest efforts include renaming the Apple Music alternative playlist to ALT CTRL.
The playlist, which features 50 songs, will change every week. Each song is hand selected by a group of curators. The songs featured have less to do with genre, and more to do with overall feel and themes.
«ALT CTRL, formerly known as The A-List: Alternative, is where you’ll find the best of those new left-of-center tunes.» reads the Editors’ notes on the new ALT CTRL page, «Alternative is more an attitude than a sound—music that colors just a bit outside the lines.»
Meet America's Phone Farmers That Commit Ad Fraud
People are setting up multiple phones to create a «phone farm» to fake engagement with ads to earn money from certain apps. Vice spoke to several farmers and built their own setup.
With a marketing strategy called «incentivized traffic,» app developers take advertisements or other content that companies want to get in front of an attentive audience, and pay that audience to watch or interact with them.
Rather than actually watch ads, these phone farmers use as many as a hundred phones and sometimes automate the process to make it seem like someone is watching the ads in order to generate income.
What to Know About RTF vs. RTFD Files on a Mac
The Eclectic Light Company writes:
Macs and iOS devices have the benefit of not one variety of Rich Text documents, but two: RTF and RTFD. This article explores some of their features and limitations, and considers the problems of working with them alongside one another.
This is a very readable and helpful article that explains the nature of RTFD files and their history going back to the origins with NeXT Corp.
Quickly Charge 2 Devices at Once with This 40,000 mAh Power Bank: $29
We have a deal on the ChargeMe Portable High Capacity Dual Input Power Bank, a portable battery with 40,000 mAh capacity. It offers dual inputs (USB C and microUSB) for faster charging, and four standard USB ports for charging your devices. It’s $29 through our deal. There’s also an option in the deal listing for a 30,000mAh model that has a fast charging port for the same price.
StubHub Apple Pay Rolls Out to iOS Browsers
Starting today, StubHub Apple Pay will be available on the web for iOS devices so that fans can buy tickets easily and safely.
Fans will begin to see Apple Pay as an available payment option for MLB mobile web transactions on the iPhone this week. For more on how to use Apple Pay and connect it with your StubHub account, visit StubHub’s customer help center.
Good to see Apple Pay being offered in more places.
Last Month Google Play Had 205 Malicious Apps With Over 32M Installs
In July alone, Google Play had 205 malicious apps with over 32 million installations, most of them containing hidden ads.
The bulk of the suspicious software – 188 to be exact – contained hidden ads, accounting for 19.2 million installs. The rest of the offenders fell under the categories of subscription scam, ad fraud, stalkerware, fake apps, fake antivirus tools, adware droppers, and software with built-in backdoors, according to data compiled by ESET malware researcher Lukas Stefanko.
Neato Robot Vacuums Can Use Siri Shortcuts
Neato robotic vacuums can use Siri Shortcuts and HomeKit, like starting, pausing, and stopping cleaning later this year.
Zone cleaning lets you deploy the vacuum to specific, targeted areas of your house so they get cleaned more readily, and it sounds like you’ll be able to set up Siri shortcuts for specific zones. That should let user use voice commands to send the vacuum to different parts of the house, a pretty handy feature. And if you’re not so much into the voice commands, Siri Shortcuts will enable the Neato app to learn and suggest times to send out your vacuum with lock screen suggestions.
CBS vs DirecTV, Microsoft Ad Deconstruction – TMO Daily Observations 2019-08-01
John Martellaro and Bryan Chaffin join host Kelly Guimont to discuss the evolution of the CBS/DirecTV standoff, and a new ad from Microsoft.
Future Apple Headphones Could Tell Which Ear They’re In
New patents reveal that future Apple headphones could tell which ear they’re in using machine learning.
Apple notes that «During operation, capacitive sensor electrodes may be used by the control circuitry in capturing capacitive sensor ear images that are processed by a machine learning classifier. The machine learning classifier may be used to determine whether the headphones are being worn in a reversed or unreversed orientation.
