Five Links #043
Discover more from Bennett’s Five Links
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I have nothing clever to say or link to with regards to the situation in Ukraine right now.
The whole situation is awful.
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Gospel from the Guru..
I tend to be an early adopter of tech things. Surprisingly, I never rode the bitcoin train to ultra-wealth. No, no.. I tend to stand on the sidelines for those really life-changing trends; but I’m always willing to give things a go when they’re likely to keep me perpetually broke. Like iPhones and Fitbits and hey.com.
So anyways - I got into podcasts early. Like, 2010’ish. I’m sure there were some of you that saw the merit in serialised audio content earlier, but this isn’t a competition - certainly I beat the masses to the medium.
But I wasn’t so much interested in the format as I was interested in the views of one podcaster in particular. I tuned in every week on my commute to work. He was my guru. I hung on his every word. I savoured his every thought. I guess maybe like young people do today with Joe Rogan - except with more tech stuff than MMA stuff.
My guru was John Siracusa.
His podcast was hypercritical.
Siracusa has an extraordinary ability to distill very complex - very ambiguous - feelings about why something isn’t right and sequence his thoughts into a rationale take-down (note the MMA reference, young folk) that leaves absolutely no doubt he is absolutely right and all other views are absolutely wrong.
The podcast was him complaining for 100 episodes and I absolutely loved it.
Anyways - enough of my gushing - he wrote an article on streaming services. You should read it and then devour everything else he has ever created.
I subscribe to a lot of streaming video services, and that means I use a lot of streaming video apps. Most of them fall short of my expectations. Here, then, is a simple specification for a streaming video app. Follow it, and your app will be well on its way to not sucking.
This spec includes only the basics. It leaves plenty of room for apps to differentiate themselves by surprising and delighting their users with clever features not listed here. But to all the streaming app developers out there, please consider covering these fundamentals before working on your Unique Selling Proposition.
An Unsolicited Streaming App Spec
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I dunno, but if you get it for half price, it’s a bargain..
It’s really amazing what you can find on FB Marketplace these days.
What a great deal!
(via /r/Perth)
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Saying no, but in template form..
One of the really popular links of this newsletter was from Issue 006 (a mere 38 issues ago - it has been all downhill since then) in which I linked to 7 Email Templates for Saying No at Work.
This is a similar - with templates for saying no in so many more contexts.
Who knew saying no can be so much fun!
(via the Curious Bunch)
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New writing team perhaps? ..
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A few weeks ago we had a reply from a lovely reader, and it got me thinking many of you likely don’t realise you can reply to these newsletters. You can ‘like’ (which shows appreciation but perhaps one day will help a phantom algorithm put the newsletter in front of more people) by clicking the heart symbol and you can comment by clicking the.. speech bubble (?) .. symbol.
And you can contact me directly by replying to the email just like any other email. You could tell me, for example, ‘Hey Bennett - keep up the good work!’ or ‘Hey Bennett - when are you going to pay me that money you owe me?’. If I don’t reply it’s probably something to do with those tricky spam filters..
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If you enjoyed any of these links, the best way you can help me is by forwarding this email on to a friend. They can browse past issues and subscribe at this link.
- Bennett
Cover Photo by Alice Donovan Rouse on Unsplash