I’ve never liked Twitter threads.

If one wants to write a longer piece, there are better ways than to make readers either navigate around interstitial comments or use a 3rd party service — old school web posts immediately leap to mind.

Also, reading longer pieces on Twitter was never good. They were in a narrow space meant for 140 characters. The expansion to 280 characters felt wedged in when read in Twitter’s tools.

If EMu is genuine in taking Twitter to 4000 characters, then welcome to a web product you likely abandoned. I will not join you.

Getting my pair when I did was a great move, but better now:

Why the HomePod? That’s a good question. It’s a piece of Apple history, perhaps; you need two of them for stereo or more for whole-home audio; and unlike its more affordable successor the HomePod Mini, it’s acoustically quite good. My colleague Jen Tuohy has also explained that the smart home is one of the few places where Siri actually excels. She thinks people are realizing it’s the only other option besides the worse-sounding HomePod Mini.

(Via Sean Hollister at The Verge)

Siri is.. not bad on the iPhone either? Or the Watch? Possibly this is because people do want a good-sounding speaker and are willing to spend a little more because they aren’t finding what they want. (Marco Arment complained about this on the most recent ATP podcast.) How ironic if the big HomePod finds its market only after being discontinued, like Sony’s AIBO robot dog.

( Via Charles Arthur at The Overspill)

While living in my sister’s guest room during the pandemic I decided to take a flyer on an OG HomePod. They dropped to a more reasonable $299 and I was tired of listening to things on tinny speakers. I knew from hard earned experience that Sonos was not the way to go. I was in the Apple ecosystem, so it seemed a better investment than another Sonos disappointment or the tin-can-on-a-string acoustics of an Amazon device.

Two key items, both unexpected, sold me on the platform: it sounded good and crisp at low volumes (important as my nieces’ rooms were on either side of mine) and the Siri integration proved more useful than expected. My Siri & HomePod journey has not been without frustration and doubt, however.

Today I have a stereo pair in my family room for home theater audio from my Apple TV. The lesser HomePod minis are in my living room and bedroom for low stakes audio. When I need real sound upstairs, I have my actual stereo setup with wired speakers that plays actual physical media. Before I got the second pair of Minis I looked on eBay for the OGs. They were already at what I’d consider a premium in January. I almost bought another pair when they went end-of-sale, but I had other priorities. I kind of wish I had now, but speculating on what tech becomes lamented and prized is a fool’s errand.

… bratwurst should never be placed directly on the grill without bathing it in said beer first. “Only a fool would just put the brats on the grill to cook them,” I was told by every single one of my fellow campers.

But as someone who doesn’t make brats on a regular basis, letting encased meat soak in a vat of beer before cooking it wasn’t exactly the first thing that came to mind. So while this might disgrace my Midwestern upbringing, should you really boil brats in beer before grilling them? 

(Via Quinn Myers in MEL Magazine)

One of the theories as to why boiling brats in beer helps is that it makes the collagen in the casing tougher. While that might be true, I don’t know of anyone who eats a brat that says, “Boy, I wish that was tougher!”

Will boiling the brats help them cook faster? Sure. But the beer imparts no flavor to the process. Why? The afore mentioned casing. Modern casings won’t absorb additional flavor any more than old school intestines will. However, particulates and impurities might stick to the casing and that might end up with a tasty char.

If you want to boil brats in advance so they will be cooked through, do it in water.

I’m not a food scientist, so don’t take my word for it. Check out other sources or run a blind test of brats boiled in beer or water and both grilled. See if there’s a difference.

YMMV

The reasons [for the new music market shrinking] are complex—more than just the appeal of old tunes—but the end result is unmistakable: Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact. In fact, the audience seems to be embracing en masse the hits of decades past. Success was always short-lived in the music business, but now it hardly makes a ripple on the attention spans of the mass market.

(Via Ted Gioia’s The Honest Broker)

Based on the expense I’m incurring to reestablish my physical media library, especially with music, this rings true.