| Good morning. Or it would be, if Daylight Savings hadn’t just ended and messed with all of our sleep cycles. I know we "gained" an hour, but only because we "lost" one earlier. Time is a flat circle, sort of like a penny. Also like a penny, Dayling Savings is a waste. If you know anybody who has small children, please buy them a $5 coffee shop gift card and give it to them today. I am not kidding. Daylight Savings is Hot Garbage, especially for parents. Also, am I the only one who can never remember which months are "savings" and which ones are "standard?" Cancel all this noise, I say. I would like to see an omnibus bill in Congress that gets rid of Daylight Savings, the penny, and just for the hell of it those hard plastic blister packs that you can only open with a pair of hedge clippers. Somebody run for office on that platform and you will have my vote. Daylight Savings and the penny: two things that everybody hates and that have a measurable drain on our economy -- yet inertia keeps us from ending. You have my permission to be grumpy about Daylight Savings, the penny, and our collective inertia today. Be a grump, but not a jerk. It’s a fine line, I trust you’ll find it. Right, this a newsletter about computers so let’s do that. - Dieter Apple TV Plus launches We’ve got reviews: + The Morning Show explores abuses of power, but not really + Dickinson is the wildest, weirdest, and most earnest show on Apple TV Plus + See is a funny TV show, but not on purpose + Apple TV Plus is basically free because Apple’s end game is replicating Amazon Prime Great video with Julia Alexander to go along with this piece. Completely agree: When it comes to Apple TV Plus, stop thinking about Netflix, at least for now. There are going to be at least two different kinds of successful streaming models, and maybe more. Julia is doing a better job of explaining The Streaming Wars from a consumer perspective than anybody else. + Don’t cancel your Apple TV Plus trial until it’s almost over I wish that free trials didn’t have gotchas like this, but I know it’s too much to ask for. It’s still weird to see Apple engaged in such shenanigans, though. But there’s a catch: claiming the free trial automatically signs you up for a monthly subscription that kicks in once the free trial ends, which will continue to automatically renew until you cancel it. Try to opt out of the auto-renewal, and your free trial will instantly end, with no way to get whatever months you have left of the free trial back. We reviewed the AirPods Pro + Apple AirPods Pro review: perfect fit Excellent review and video from Chris Welch. This comports with my experience after just one day. I can’t use AirPod Amateurs because they fall out of my hear and I have to turn the volume up way too high to overcome the screeching hell that the is noisecape of the San Francisco BART train. These new AirPod Pros don’t completely eliminate the high-pitched metallic squealing, but they do mitigate them enough that I can leave the volume at a level that shouldn’t damage my eardrums. The noise canceling works very well for this form factor. It’s not miraculous; there’s no beating Bose or Sony over-ear headphones on a plane. But on the day to day, the Pros do a great job of quieting your commute, city streets, train rides, and the coffee shop. I think they’re neck and neck with Sony’s WF1000X earbuds in terms of effectiveness. Video Games had a big Friday + Death Stranding is a long, bizarre journey that’s both breathtaking and boring + Diablo IV announced at BlizzCon 2019 This is very, very grimdark. I came to Diablo III fairly late, but eventually ended up grinding on it for quite awhile. I will admit that the surprise unicorn level sometimes helped break up the monotony. I don’t need rainbows, but I do hope Blizzard is thinking about ways to not have this be oppressively depressing for hours and hours on end. + Blizzard announces Overwatch 2 Co-op and Story Modes feel almost quaint these days, but they also are the things I enjoy most in these types of games. I will check this out for sure. + Blizzard says ‘we failed in our purpose’ after Hearthstone Hong Kong controversy Then again, maybe I don’t want to support a company that can’t even get an apology right, much less do the right thing by players who happen to have political opinions. Google bought Fitbit + It’s official: Google buys Fitbit for $2.1 billion + Google is buying Fitbit: now what? Now that the news is official, here’s a follow up piece with a small bit of news in it: that Fossil acquisition from earlier this year? It didn’t end up in the hardware division, but instead on the software side. Transportation news + Autonomous flying taxi startup Ehang files $100 million initial public offering It’s not a question of “if” but “when” somebody dies in one of these new-fangled people-carrying drone thingies. That’s not necessarily a reason to stop trying to make them part of our transportation mix, but it’s something we should be planning for. Ehang acknowledges that one crash or fatality could upend its entire business. This risk factor, in particular, should be read and absorbed by anyone who thinks flying taxis will become a common sight in cities in the future. It’s a fairly substantive reality check + Electric skateboard startup Inboard is for sale and all employees have been laid off Sean O’Kane: “The strange thing about Inboard’s demise is how different it is from the WeWorks of the world. As the startup trained its sights on e-scooter fleets, you could make the argument that it didn’t grow fast *enough.*” + I mean this is just facts: ‘Busted e-scooter’ was the best Halloween costume of 2019 Fun Stuff + How to customize the look of your Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controllers This looks like fun to me! We talk about repairability in terms of sustainability all the time, but it’s also useful because it makes people smarter when they can take stuff apart. The satisfaction of putting something back to together and having it work again is palpable -- and afterwards it feels more like its *yours* than before. + Microsoft unveils new Edge browser logo that no longer looks like Internet Explorer If you try to see the “e,” it looks kind of awful. If you just look at it like a wave, it’s pretty good. If you look at the negative space, it’s a slightly bendy AirPod. + How I made the yawning face and waffle emoji Our very own Jay Peters is responsible for the two best emoji in the new set. It is very exciting! Unfortunately, he has incorrect opinions on the proper shape and toppings for waffles. Sometimes your heroes dissappoint you. For the record: waffles are square with butter and syrup. I will not be taking questions nor accepting comments on this issue. The waffle’s design is more... controversial. My proposal had a round waffle with butter on top, but most platforms opted to make a square waffle with butter on top. The designs look fine, but this isn’t how I make waffles — mine are round. Apple’s waffle is round, like my proposed design, though it has no butter — but I never have butter on my waffles anyway. (It’s too much work to spread, IMO.) | 
