stephen.news

hypertext, words and more

2019

  • Sonos is bricking old devices with ‘Recycled Mode’

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    2 min read

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    Chris Welch reporting at The Verge writes:

    Late last week, Sonos was called out on Twitter by Devin Wilson for its practices around sustainability. The company drew particular attention for a “Recycle Mode” software feature that, once activated, begins a countdown that eventually renders older Sonos devices basically inoperable. Recycle Mode is part of the trade-up program that Sonos announced back in October, which lets customers get a discount on newer Sonos speakers like the One, Beam, or the Port that Nilay just reviewed.

    At first glance, the Recycle Mode seems like a good idea. Except for this one crucial feature of the Sonos App:

    Recycle Mode is a state your device enters 21 days after recycling confirmation in the Sonos app. In Recycle Mode, all data is erased and the device is permanently deactivated so you can safely and securely dispose of it. Once a device is in Recycle Mode, it cannot be reactivated.

    Wait. What the fuck? This is so fucked. I’m all for reducing, reusing and recycling. But, I prefer to do the reducing and reusing first.

    Forcing customers to brick their devices, to force them to recycle is not ideal. In fact, forcing consumers to brick their devices should be illegal. It turns out that recycling isn’t even the most effective way to recover materials. Simply put, shipping our recyclables to China (or elsewhere) for processing isn’t working. As a result, many cities are moving away from recycle programs. In fact, many are forced to recover energy from plastics and trash by burning it in furnaces, and in many cases this is the most green scenario. So, why on Earth is Sonos doing this? To edge up profits in this fierce smart-speaker market of course.

  • Curbed Marfa Travel Guide

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    2 min read

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    Executive Editor at Vox, Mercedes Kraus, penned a travel guide for would-be visitors to Marfa. Marfa is located in West Texas. Heck, even the Simpsons visited Prada Marfa:

    The Simpsons, S30E11: “Mad about the toy”

    Texas, is well known for many things. A couple of venerable and memorable characters from Texas’s past include Sam Houston and Lyndon B. Johnson. A few of my personal favorite things about Texas: the tall skies, grassy hills, semi-arid desert landscapes, swell thunderstorms, quiet dive bars, and loud honky-tonks. It’s easy to forget that Texas has a substantial art culture in Marfa. But, its there damnit! It has frequently been overshadowed by larger-than-life subjects such as Austin’s tech boom, and of course Texas oil booms.

    You can read the entire travel guide here at Curbed. But, I loved this pro-tip on arting and getting to know locals in Marfa:

    For art: Don’t let anyone tell you to skip Chinati. I recommend either the full tour ($25) or all three self-guided tours ($30). The self-guided are “the sheds” (where I experienced a visual symphony), the Dan Flavin buildings (for your Instagram fulfillment), and the new Robert Irwin—an artwork and experience that is in fact an entire building. The thing that I think you, a fan of this newsletter, would really miss if you don’t do the full tour is the arena. If you are unable to take the Judd Foundation tour (see above), you must do the full Chinati tour so that you can experience the arena. (Pro tip: get to know your docent—locals in Marfa are super friendly, will give you great tips, and might even invite you to a local party or happening.)

    For context, The Chinati Foundation was founded based on Donald Judd’s ideas and principles. Honorary Texan, Donald Judd is essentially Marfa’s Patron Saint of Art. For good reason too. If not for him, Marfa would look a helluva lot different.

    Mercedes is on-point about getting to know your locals too. Don’t be shy. Texas’s state motto is, after all simply, friendship. You might just make a friend. Having a Texan in your contact book is like personally knowing a hobbit. Cherished, magical and kind.

  • John Krasinski breaking character on The Office

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    1 min read

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    The Office was pure gold. The Jim Halpert and Michael Scott characters were the unstoppable dyads in the series. Behind the scenes, when the comedy dam breaks, John Krasinski’s laughter is contagious as the flu. I love hearing Steve Carell completely lose it over Krasinski’s wincing high-pitched giggles and his explosive belly laughter explode like Bart Simpson. Two whole minutes of raw uncut comedy:

    https://youtu.be/V9I1-c9o1LM

  • Drought-stricken Queensland struggles as a Chinese company moves in to bottle its water

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    1 min read

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    Marc Bain writes at Quartz:

    Drought has been a chronic issue in southeastern Australia for years. In regions such as southern Queensland, months can pass without rain. Local communities have to ration water or risk running out.

    Yet a company owned by Chinese investors based in Brisbane still got approved last week to run a commercial water-mining operation in the area. It plans to transport the water to a facility where it can bottle and sell it.

    This reminds me of the Nestlé Bottling company which continues to bottle clean water near Flint, Michigan as the city of Flint continues to suffer from tainted poisonous lead-tainted water. Thanks to the egregious and violent extremes of climate change, we can expect more and more of these sorts of stories. Simply put, water is the new oil in this new era.

  • How Baseballs Are Made

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    1 min read

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    From the winding of twine around the rubbery-core, to the wrapping of the stretched leather, to the hand-sewn red stitching — it’s a miraculous process to behold. Kind of romantic that they’re still hand-sewn nowadays:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBr2tR5pjrE

  • Jim Shaugnessy’s 60-Year Odyssey Photographing the Evolution of the North American Railroad

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    2 min read

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    Jim Shaughnessy, “Central Vermont local freight switches cars in wintry scene, Bethel, Vermont” (1955) (source: the artist and Thames & Hudson)

    Allison Meier at Hyperallergic:

    “Always restless, even daring when he had to be, Shaughnessy worked hard to get in and around the railroad, in all conditions, in all settings,” writes Kevin P. Keefe, former editor-in-chief of Trains magazine, in a book essay. “If the life of a crossing watchman was important, then Shaughnessy shuddered through a subzero night until the perfect moment when his subject dashed back into the warmth of a shanty. If the guts of a steam locomotive were interesting, then he’d insert himself into the depths of roundhouses and sidle up next to the hostlers in order to record the oily intricacies of valve gear and side rods.”

    Born in Troy, New York, in 1933, Shaughnessy published his first photograph in Trains in 1952. While the detailed captions in Essential Witness are those of a true rail enthusiast (the “Pennsylvania Railroad 11-class 2-10-0” is identified as chugging over an elevated bridge), his images have a broader appreciation for how people exist with the railroads in North America, and how these systems altered the landscape. The silhouette of a tunnel in Canaan, New York, in 1989 reveals its jagged edges, framing the train with this rock that was blasted through for progress. Sometimes the trains are tiny against the mountains or waterfalls, sometimes the focus is elsewhere, like a 1953 photograph that concentrates on the cows in a Vermont pasture, unperturbed by the freight train zooming behind.

    Jim Shaughnessy, “Pennsylvania Railroad operator hoops up train orders to crew of a northbound coal train, Trout Run, Pennsylvania” (1956) (source: the artist and Thames & Hudson)

    I love this photo. Train orders, are largely obsolete here in North America. But sometimes, it still happens. Traditionally orders get hooped to the conductor at the front, and the operator(s) at the caboose. Nowadays, operations are radioed or even downloaded.

    Locomotive transport is and continues to be one of the most important means of transporting goods across land. It’s fun to look back and understand where we’ve come from, and to see where we’re headed.

  • Word on the Water, a Floating Bookshop in London Kings Cross, Regent’s Canal

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    1 min read

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    The whole idea of a floating bookstore is just so quaint and charming. The interior of Word on the Water is probably exactly what you are imagining. Bobbing up-and-down in London, England at Regent’s Canal, is the utterly unique Word on the Water bookshop.

    It’s has cozy corners, thick carpets and a complimentary hardwood interior. The dimly lit hull interior is stuffed with tall stacks of books for reading. My idyllic nap decor if we’re being completely honest. The exterior features planks that over-extend over the canal sidewalk for laid-out books for passerby customers. I wonder if the unique bookstore has a book on boat speak?

    You can read more about Word on the Water at Atlas Obscura, here.

  • Every Two Weeks, a Language Dies

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    2 min read

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    Nina Strochlic at National Geographic writes:

    Between 1950 and 2010, 230 languages went extinct, according to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. Today, a third of the world’s languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers left. Every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker, 50 to 90 percent of them are predicted to disappear by the next century.

    In rare cases, political will and a thorough written record can resurrect a lost language. Hebrew was extinct from the fourth century BC to the 1800s, and Catalan only bloomed during a government transition in the 1970s. In 2001, more than 40 years after the last native speaker died, the language of Oklahoma’s Miami tribe started being learned by students at Miami University in Ohio. The internet has connected rare language speakers with each other and with researchers. Even texting has helped formalize languages that don’t have a set writing system.

    Other languages have not been so lucky in a post-internet world. Many, will never return from extinction. But it’s true that being more connected, we have more opportunities to connect and preserve our ancestral dialects and languages. In National Geographic’s article, they share a video of two surviving speakers of Gottscheerish:

    For more information, check out WikiTongues, the seed bank of the world’s languages.

  • Lab-grown Meats will be the future

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    1 min read

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    Chase Purdy at Quartz writes:

    On Oct. 7, it was announced that astronauts on the International Space Station had successfully grown their own meat from microscopic animal cells, using a process called cell-culturing. The bit of cow muscle they produced was small, but it was a historic accomplishment nonetheless.

    The ISS project was part of a joint venture by San Francisco-based Finless Foods and Israel-based Aleph Farms, just two of many startups pioneering the concept of cell-cultured meat. Their technology isn’t just a sci-fi fantasy, conceived to nourish future space colonies: It has very real implications for our food systems right now.

    The omnivore’s dilemma deepens. Cell-culturing is a pretty straightforward, and interesting solution for decreasing our carbon-footprint while keeping us well-fed. For the rest of us, vegetarianism seems to be the best way to reduce your carbon-footprint. Not into that idea? Even just cutting beef from your diet alone can reduce your carbon footprint a sizable amount. But, replacing farm-grown meats with lab-grown meats? This introduces new wrinkles into an already complex problem our society needs to solve I we want to end climate change.

  • The Nike Air Force 1 x Colin Kaepernick Sneaker Sold Out

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    2 min read

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    The shoe is an insanely popular design which bears Kaepernick’s iconic name (and Afro). It’s a really cool shoe. Marc Bain for Quartz reports:

    The sneaker, a version of Nike’s popular Air Force 1, quickly sold out in adult sizes on Nike’s site and its SNKRS app after dropping this morning. Nike also released child and toddler sizes, and launched the sneaker first in North America, with global releases to follow.

    The shoe comes about a month after Kaepernick once again made headlines for a new confrontation with the NFL. Since kneeling during the national anthem in 2016 to protest police brutality and other injustices against black Americans, the quarterback has effectively been shut out of the league. In November, having finally settled his lawsuit against the NFL, Kaepernick was meant to take part in a league-approved workout demonstrating his readiness to return to play, until a dispute over terms led him to hold his own alternate workout instead.

    The real story here is the success of Kaepernick’s successful Nike shoe launch in the shadow of a confrontation with NFL league politics and lawsuits. That’s a very impressive feat, for anyone. I’m proud of Kaepernick and his steadfast uncompromising ideals. I hope Kap continues to press forward as a free-agent (or NFL player), because athletes like him are a rare breed. In general, we need more leadership like Kap.