YouTube’s revamped music subscription service bases its recommendations on your viewing history. How does it perform? Jefferson Graham reviews for Talking Tech. USA TODAY
LOS ANGELES — YouTube Music, which soft launched in May, is now available nationally and in 17 countries.
This is the latest attempt by the Google-owned video network to take on Spotify and Apple Music with a premium service based on the huge music library of YouTube, which beyond the hits and library cuts, also has live concerts, TV appearances, international songs and artist uploads.
YouTube charges $9.99 monthly for the premium version, which will eventually replace Google Play Music. YouTube execs haven’t given a firm data on when it will close Google Play Music. For now, Google Play Music subscribers also get YouTube Music at no additional charge.
YouTube currently is the No. 1 home for online music, but most of the 1.5 billion monthly visitors use it to listen for free, via music videos. Ad-supported YouTube also has deals with the major record labels to run complete albums and has a larger catalog of music than rivals, with more live, independent and band-uploaded material.
But YouTube and Google have lagged in attracting paying subscribers. Spotify is the No. 1 paid music subscription service with 75 million subscribers, followed by Apple’s 50 million.
Where YouTube Music is different from the other services: Google’s pitch is that since it knows where you go every day, when your next flight is and what websites you visit when you’re at home, the Google Assistant could then suggest more music you like.
But the current version hasn’t gotten there yet. Playlist suggestions, like on Spotify, offer “Groove Party,” and “Endless Summer,” playlists of hits and old favorites, it makes suggestions of other artists, based on ones you’ve listened to, there’s a collection of new releases, music videos and live performances.
YouTube Music, like Spotify’s “Discover Weekly,” which offers personalized playlists based on your history, offers “Your Mixtape,” and “endless personalized music.” The playlists can be updated instantly, but even a few weeks after launch, they’re still spotty.
When we did our First Look at YouTube Music, the instant playlists had a nasty habit of putting songs by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in-between seemingly every other song.
A quick test Tuesday showed little has changed. One playlist of 26 songs had four from jazz guitarist Pat Metheny; another had five from 1970s rockers Electric Light Orchestra. Still another included four from R&B singer Chaka Khan and three from soul superstar Al Green—including two Christmas songs, playing in June.
Which just goes to show that the computer doesn’t always know how to program music.
Pro tip: if you like a specific artist or song, YouTube will make instant playlists on the spot of them as well, with more specificity. Hit play after searching for pop stars Bruno Mars and Jason Mraz and you get non-stop songs by the artists. Search for the song “All About That Bass,” by Meghan Trainor, and it plays the tune, followed by similar sounding artists Katy Perry, Ariana Grande and Maroon 5.
Download the YouTube Music app at the Apple or Google play stores, or visit music.youtube.com
Follow USA TODAY’s Jefferson Graham (@jeffersongraham) on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
Troubling news for Fortnite-obsessives: The World Health Organization this week included “gaming disorder” as a new mental health condition in the 11th edition of its International Classification of Diseases. The WHO previously added the disorder in the draft for the ICD-11 earlier this year. Now it’s official.
The revision comes at a time when public concern over technology abuse is high and rising. Spurred by the burgeoning digital wellness movement, Apple and Google both unveiled tools in recent weeks designed to help users monitor and manage the time they spend staring at screens, including parental controls that restrict the time kids spend playing games.
But while experts generally lauded Google and Apple’s new tools as a step in the right direction, many of them have reservations about gaming disorder’s inclusion in the ICD.
“I don’t want there to be people classified with a mental disorder when they don’t really have one,” says University of Connecticut psychologist Nancy Petry, who in 2013 chaired the American Psychiatric Association subcommittee that considered adding “internet gaming disorder” to the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. At the time, her group concluded there was too little evidence to list gaming addiction as a formal disorder, adding it instead to a section titled “Conditions for Further Study.”
Today Petry, who is leading the first NIH-funded study on gaming addiction, believes the evidence is still insufficient. That puts mental health experts in something of a pickle. Truth be told, the most salient question isn’t so much whether some people develop an unhealthy relationship with gaming. (Most experts agree that concerns over the allure of videogames are justified, that the subject deserves further study, and even that a small percentage of people may develop clinically problematic gaming habits.) It’s whether the existing research is solid enough to warrant official classification from the WHO. Unlike the DSM, the ICD-11 has no provisional categories, no appendix in which to list potential disorders as requiring more research. It’s all-or-nothing: A condition either goes in the ICD-11 or it doesn’t. As such, critics argue, the burden of evidence for a disorder’s inclusion, characterization, and treatment should be very high.
And at least right now, critics contend, that evidence doesn’t exist for gaming disorders. Many existing studies on the subject are of surprisingly low quality. A large number of them are statistically underpowered, relying on small sample sizes, and do little do clarify whether videogames cause psychological problems or are merely associated with them.
“Some of these gaming habits are likely coping strategies to deal with other underlying psychological challenges,” says Lennart Nacke, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Games Group at the University of Waterloo’s Games Institute.
These shortcomings are compounded by a lack of consistency across studies, not only in what they’re measuring but how they measure it. “There’s well over 50 different self-report scales used to study gaming disorders,” Petry says. In a very real sense, many gaming disorder researchers aren’t even speaking the same language.
As a result, estimates of the extent of gaming disorders vary considerably. But studies that rely on the DSM’s provisional criteria, which Petry helped develop, suggest that gaming disorder might affect between 0.3 and 1 percent of the population.
In absolute terms, that could translate to millions of people. (For reference: The National Institutes of Mental Health estimates the prevalence of schizophrenia and related psychiatric disorders to range between 0.25 and 0.64 percent in the US.) In other words: People with gaming disorders could very well constitute a clinically significant proportion of the population—a fact that only underscores the need for clear diagnostic criteria.
Consider the problem posed by the abundance of scales for assessing gaming disorders, many of which put too much weight on the amount of time spent gaming. Of course, someone who plays at all hours of the day, seven days a week, is more likely to have issues than someone who rarely puts finger to D-pad—but many people game 10, 15, 20-hours-plus per week and still live happy, productive, socially active lives. In the absence of clear diagnostic guidelines, critics say, the WHO risks stigmatizing healthy relationships with gaming. Conditions, experts fear, are ripe for overdiagnosis. “The rush to pathologize a behavior that might otherwise be healthy—it’s risky,” Nacke says. If, in identifying that one person in a hundred with a serious gaming disorder, you misdiagnose 10 others, that’s a serious problem.
“After you come up with diagnostic criteria, then you can come up with tests,” Petry says. “But in the field of gaming-addiction research, we’re going about everything backwards. Most of the scales we use aren’t good scales to begin with, and they provide no cutoff point for diagnosis.”
The WHO, for its part, thinks mental health professionals are equipped to identify that cutoff point for themselves, in patients whose gaming habits have carried severe repercussions in their personal lives for more than a year. Perhaps they are. But whether they’re equipped to avoid misdiagnoses remains to be seen.
Every new Jurassic film brings a raft of new questions: Was Tyrannosaurus rex really that visually impaired? Could a Pteranodon really pick up a human with its feet? Why is Bryce Dallas Howard running in heels? One question fans might not have thought to ask, though, was whether or not the velociraptors were the correct size. Turns out, they’re not.
“In real life, velociraptor was a much smaller animal, probably about the size of a really big turkey,” says Nathan Smith, associate curator of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles County.
Velociraptors were, Smith says, close relatives to birds and were also probably partially covered in feathers—something scientists didn’t even discover until years after Jurassic Park was first released in 1993.
What about the other dinosaurs in the franchise? In the video above, Smith goes through each of the 22 creatures featured in the Jurassic films, including the ones in this weekend’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. How well do they score? Pretty high, actually.
“Jurassic Park and Jurassic World sometimes take a lot of flack from scientists for inaccuracies, like any films do when they’re trying to portray natural history,” Smith says. “But in reality, they’ve actually done a really great job of trying to focus on getting the anatomy of the animals right, getting inferences about their behavior, their vocalizations, and other things correct.”
We’ve got some simple tips you can take to keep Amazon’s Alexa from eavesdropping into your conversations and potentially sharing them. USA TODAY
SAN FRANCISCO — Alexa, what time is checkout?
This summer, guests staying in some Marriott International hotel rooms will have access to a new virtual concierge. Amazon announced Tuesday the release of Alexa for Hospitality, a new version of the Amazon Echo smart speaker with Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant, specifically designed for hotels and other hospitality locations.
Each Alexa for Hospitality assistant is personalized for its specific location, so guests can ask Alexa to call the front desk, order room service, request a housekeeping visit or adjust in-room devices like lights, thermostats, blinds and TVs. Regular Alexa features will also be available. The Echo will automatically delete guests’ recording daily.
Marriott International is introducing the Alexa for Hospitality at select properties in Marriott Hotels, Westin Hotels & Resorts, St. Regis Hotels & Resorts, Aloft Hotels and Autograph Collection Hotels. Amazon is also distributing Alexa for Hospitality to RedAwning, a vacation rental company, and boutique lifestyle properties within the Two Roads Hospitality portfolio.
Alexa for Hospitality won’t be as personalized as your own Echo quite yet. Guests won’t be able to connect their personal Amazon accounts until a later date.
When they can, Amazon says, hotel guests will be able to link their Amazon account directly with the Echo in their room so they’ll be able to play their own music playlists or listen to books through Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook service.
Amazon says once guests can link their Amazon accounts to their hotel room’s Echo, when they check out, so will their Amazon account. That way, the next guest in your room won’t be able to order groceries on your account after you leave.
The voice assistant is designed to only start recording snippets of conversations after it hears a wake word, usually “Alexa,” after which it sends those commands or queries to servers where an answer or response is crafted. But some users have been surprised by what Alexa has recorded when they don’t expect it, such as the Portland family whose conversation was sent to a family in their contact list. Putting an Echo in a shared public space may exacerbate those privacy worries.
Alexa for Hospitality will be available by invitation for hotels, vacation rentals and other hospitality locations, starting Tuesday.
Guests of Charlotte Marriott City Center and Marriott Irvine Spectrum will be some of the first to try out a curated list of the Alexa for Hospitality features.
In March, artist and programmer Brannon Dorsey became interested in a retro web attack called DNS rebinding, teaching himself how to illicitly access controls and data by exploiting known browser weaknesses. It’s a vulnerability that researchers have poked at on and off for years—which is one reason Dorsey couldn’t believe what he found.
Sitting in his Chicago apartment, two blocks from Lake Michigan, Dorsey did what anyone with a newfound hacking skill would: He tried to attack devices he owned. Instead of being blocked at every turn, though, Dorsey quickly discovered that the media streaming and smart home gadgets he used every day were vulnerable to varying degrees to DNS rebinding attacks. He could gather all sorts of data from them that he never would have expected.
“I’m technical, but I’m not an information security professional,” Dorsey says. “I didn’t reverse any binaries or do any intense digging. I just followed my curiosities and suddenly I found some sketchy shit. I was just sitting there thinking ‘I cannot be the only person in the world who is seeing this.'”
Between his own gadgets and borrowing others from friends, Dorsey found DNS rebinding vulnerabilities in virtually every model of Google Home, Chromecast, Sonos Wi-Fi speakers, Roku streaming devices, and some smart thermostats. Dorsey’s experimental attacks, which he outlined in research published Tuesday, didn’t give him full keys to the kingdom, but in each case he could gain more control and extract more data than he should have been able to.
‘I just followed my curiosities and suddenly I found some sketchy shit.’
Brannon Dorsey
For example, on Roku devices running Roku OS 8.0 or lower, Dorsey found that an attacker could use the streamer’s External Control API to control buttons and key presses on the device, access the inputs for device sensors like the accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer, search content on the device, and even launch apps. On Sonos Wi-Fi speakers, an attacker could access extensive information about the Wi-Fi network a speaker is connected to, useful for mapping out network attributes and broader recon. And by attacking the public API in Google’s connected devices, an hacker could trigger Google Home and Chromecast restarts at will. That result in essentially a denial of service attack, keeping users from being able to interact with their device, or sending it offline at strategic times. Attackers could also get Google Home and Chromecast to cough up information about the Wi-Fi network they are connected to, and triangulate it with the list of nearby Wi-Fi networks to accurately geolocate the devices.
In a DNS rebinding attack, a hacker capitalizes on weaknesses in how browsers implement web protocols. They craft malicious websites that can game the trust protections meant to block unauthorized communication between web services. From there, an attacker uses methods like phishing or malvertising to trick victims into clicking a link to their site, and then moves to illicitly access whatever controls and data are exposed on their device or network. One wrong click or tap and and attacker could take over your smart device.
Though DNS rebinding stems from some fundamental issues with how browsers mediate trust relationships online, sites and services can also limit their exposures using relatively simple mechanisms like authentication protections or HTTPS encrypted connections. This may be why this class of attacks hasn’t generated sustained interest or concern among security professionals.
But over past seven months, there has been a growing understanding in the security community that DNS rebinding bugs may represent a much larger group of vulnerabilities than people have previously acknowledged. Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy recently found DNS rebinding vulnerabilities in the Transmission BitTorrent client and the update mechanism for Blizzard video games, and researchers have also discovered the bugs in various Ethereum wallets—potentially exposing people’s cryptocurrency.
DNS rebinding bugs have a “history of being dismissed by developers, and many times it is left as an unaddressed issue,” Ariel Zelivansky, a researcher at the security firm Twistlock, wrote in a prescient February warning about the rise of DNS rebinding vulnerabilities.
In the months that Dorsey was looking into the topic, another researcher from the security firm Tripwire, Craig Young, also discovered the bug in Google Home and Chromecast, and published his findings on Monday.
‘This reflects an issue in a fundamental feature of the internet as it’s been designed.’
Joseph Pantoga, Red Balloon
One root cause of these vulnerabilities is that devices on the same Wi-Fi network generally trust each other, since they’ve all been admitted to the same club. But this assumption can lead to accidental exposures. Communication channels meant for use by other devices on a network can potentially also be maliciously accessed by remote websites with just a small amount of manipulation. Many of the bugs Dorsey found could be solved by adding basic authentication mechanisms to device APIs.
“This reflects an issue in a fundamental feature of the internet as it’s been designed,” says Joseph Pantoga, a research scientist at the internet of things security firm Red Balloon. “DNS rebinding attacks have been brought up many times in the past, but new features in Internet of Things devices including geolocation and collection of personal data make it something people should really be aware of. The problem is exacerbated by IoT devices having APIs intended for communication with other, unauthenticated devices on the network.”
Google, Roku, and Sonos have all patched or are in the process of patching their device operating systems to plug the vulnerabilities Dorsey described. “After recently becoming aware of the DNS Rebinding issue, we created a software patch which is now rolling out to customers,” a Roku spokesperson told WIRED. Sonos similarly added that, “Upon learning about the DNS Rebinding Attack, we immediately began work on a fix that will roll out in a July software update.” Google said in a statement that, “We’re aware of the report and will be rolling out a fix in the coming weeks.”
Despite the positive response, experts note that lack of awareness about avoiding these bugs in the first place has led to a situation in which millions and millions of devices are known to be vulnerable to some degree, with millions more likely vulnerable as well. Dorsey says that he hopes his research raises awareness about the ubiquity of the problem. “DNS rebinding has become the elephant in the room,” he says. “A ton of things are vulnerable to it and it’s become a systemic problem. So ultimately approaching vendors one at a time isn’t going to solve it. The whole industry needs to know to check for this and fix it.”
Verizon and AT&T have pledged to stop providing information on phone owners’ locations to data brokers, stepping back from a business practice that has drawn criticism for endangering privacy.
The data has apparently allowed outside companies to pinpoint the location of wireless devices without their owners’ knowledge or consent. Verizon said that about 75 companies have been obtaining its customer data from two little-known California-based brokers that Verizon supplies directly — LocationSmart and Zumigo
Verizon became the first major carrier to declare it would end sales of such data to brokers that then provide it to others. It did so in a June 15 letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has been probing the phone location-tracking market. AT&T followed suit Tuesday after The Associated Press reported the Verizon move.
Neither company said they are getting out of the business of selling location data. Verizon and AT&T are the two largest U.S. mobile carriers in terms of subscribers.
Chief privacy officer Karen Zacharia said Verizon would be careful not to disrupt “beneficial services” such as fraud prevention and emergency roadside assistance. In an email to the AP, AT&T spokesman Jim Greer cited similar reasons for cutting off the intermediaries “as soon as practical.”
Last month, Wyden revealed abuses in the lucrative but loosely regulated field involving Securus Technologies and its affiliate 3C Interactive. Verizon says their contract was approved only for the location tracking of outside mobile phones called by prison inmates.
Verizon notified LocationSmart and Zumigo, both privately held, that it intends to “terminate their ability to access and use our customers’ location data as soon as possible,” Zacharia wrote.
Location data from Verizon and other carriers makes it possible to identify the whereabouts of nearly any phone in the U.S. within seconds. Popular commercial uses for the information include keeping tabs on packages, vehicles and employees; bank fraud prevention; and targeted marketing offers.
The cutoff won’t affect users’ ability to share locations directly with apps and other services. Rather, it deals with the practice of providing data to third parties with which users have no direct contact.
Spell check was an early convenience for computers. Now there are millions of small utilities to make life easier. Here are Kim Komando’s top 5. Kim Komando, Special for USA Today
Starting your own business takes a whole lot of guts, optimism, and passion. Not to mention a ton of hard work and the need to pinch pennies anywhere you can. The Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit that supports education and entrepreneurship in Kansas City, says it also takes a healthy dose of cash: The new average investment needed to get a company off the ground is around $30,000.
Thankfully, there are a few genius tech hacks that can save money, time, and sanity.
1. Repair, don’t replace
Just about everyone needs a fast computer these days, but arming employees with the latest models can be a real budget breaker. While the newest ones are too expensive, second-hand or older notebooks can be painfully glitchy and slow. One inexpensive hack for this is a USB flash drive called Xtra-PC (prices start at $35) that plugs into — and speeds up — aged PCs or Macs.
“I’ve been a consultant for 13 years, and a big mistake a lot of (small and medium-sized businesses) make is to replace perfectly good computers. Not only is this unnecessary, but it also creates a lot of e-waste,” said Ron Forseth, CEO of Forseth Development, Inc. in Colorado Springs. “Most companies need their machines to run at maximum speed and efficiency, and Xtra-PC can prolong the life of a computer by about five years.”
Another option is to call-in quick help nearby. Aaron Watkins, founder of the Sacramento-based STEMtrunk toy subscription rental service, discovered a quick tech fix recently when his team needed a bevy of iPhone battery-replacements. “As an entrepreneur, your phone is your life. I called a service called Puls to fix our phones. These guys came to me within 24 hrs of me needing it, replaced my phone screen and battery in under an hour, and cost less than the Apple recommended vendors (who had appointments days out and wanted to keep my phone overnight),” Watkins said.
2. Go gig economy
Outsourcing quick tech help isn’t the only way to save money. Whether you’re getting a small business off the ground or sustaining a decades-old family enterprise, hiring staff has to be done very, very carefully. If you’re trying to minimize costs, the “gig economy” might just save you a bundle on everything from developers, designers, and finance experts — to people who write blog posts, translate, and even run errands for you.
Some of the top picks include; Upwork, Toptal and Guru for helping find people with the skills many small businesses need. For fast and cheap help with just about everything else, there’s Fiverr, and for more specialized branding and design, several people recommend 99Designs.
“99designs connected us with a terrific designer who was a perfect fit for our needs and nailed our brand aesthetic in a fraction of the time. Using 99designs was a big time and money saver,” Dave Pributsky, founder of 2920 Sleep, wrote in an email.
3. Get a virtual personal assistant
The days of a business owner yelling out of the office door to tell the secretary to schedule an appointment went out with bell bottoms, and today it’s just as easy to use Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant to handle it.
No matter what platform you favor, these digital helpers can schedule reminders, keep lists, and look up phone numbers or other information as soon as you ask for it. Even if you don’t find these assistants all that helpful in your personal life, you’ll be surprised at how much they can help streamline day-to-day small business tasks. Schedule this, delete that, search my email for whatever — it’s a dream come true for a scatterbrained business owner just trying to keep it all together.
Gmail deserves a special nod here. “The new Gmail is amazing,” said Nick Desai, co-founder of health startup Heal. “It integrates calendar and email on the same page in a powerful way and makes search better. That power eliminates the need for someone to do my scheduling.”
4. Embrace social media and DIY ads
Several small business owners also rave about advertising and selling on social media platforms. Facebook, Instagram and other apps give you a direct line to your customers, as long as you know how to reach them.
Facebook Business lets you build a social hub for your company for free. You can set your hours, post updates and tell your followers about sales and promotions. Customers can review your business and help bring in new business with word-of-mouth advertising. Similarly, Instagram Business works a lot like its Facebook sibling, letting you create a social presence for your company within the app. You can also post stories and photos to build a conversation about your products or services, and give potential customers a behind-the-scenes look at how your company is growing.
How much does this all matter? Quite a bit, actually. “With one click, our audience can learn more about our products and go directly to our site,” said Shari Lott, Founder & CEO of spearmintLOVE. “Reducing search time and clicks improve conversion and revenue. When we launched Instagram Shopping, we experienced a 25% increase in traffic and an 8% increase in revenue attributable to Instagram Shopping.”
“Technology is the equalizer for small businesses on a budget to contend in the marketplace, said Natasha D. Oates, Founder of UpRetreats.com therapy and life-coaching in North Carolina.
Jennifer Jolly is an Emmy Award-winning consumer tech contributor and host of USA TODAY’s digital video show TECH NOW. E-mail her at jj@techish.com. Follow her on Twitter: @JenniferJolly.
On Saturday night under the shield of London Stadium, just as Beyoncé and Jay-Z brought their most recent “On The Run II” tour date to a close, a large sign announced itself with a playful wink: “ALBUM OUT NOW.” It was the latest message from two artists whose careers have been marked by public dramas both cryptic and blunt—they had again summoned their congregation; the long-anticipated joint album was finally, startlingly, here.
The days since have augured all manner of revelations: the project, titled Everything Is Love, is a measured exegesis on themes hauntingly mundane to the Carters—family and success, love and betrayal of the flesh. It is a fitting finale to the couple’s unofficial musical trilogy, which began in 2016 with Beyoncé’s Lemonade, an album of sheer grace and fury—which was also televised through an hour-long broadcast on HBO—and continued on 4:44, Jay-Z’s 2017 apology record, where he, at last, owned to his infidelity. “I apologize to all the women whom I toyed with your emotions/’Cause I was emotionless,” he rapped to his wife on the title track.
Still, one of the more remarkable aspects of Everything Is Love is its economy; spread across nine tracks, it clocks in at just under 40 minutes. The album—a lean and loud thing; puffed up but never obnoxiously self-important—descends as the omega of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s years-long saga of woe and redemption. It is, in every formulation, an album of the moment—one that slyly speaks to the evolutionary shifts befalling the music industry but also reconstructs that narrative into something new and strange and necessary.
To lacerating effect, the Carters—as they are officially billed on Tidal, the streaming platform the couple has a stake in, where the album was exclusively housed for 24 hours before coming to Spotify and Apple Music—chart the passageways of how they got to where they are, all while having fun along the way. New York Magazine‘s Craig Jenkins encapsulated the album’s all-embracing sentiment perfectly: “It’s the sweetest possible ending to the trauma of the last two records, husband and wife united in shade and shit-talk,” he wrote, concluding: “The message isn’t ‘Y’all could never do this.’ It’s that against all odds, two of us just did.”
The album, as genre, is currently undergoing a remolding. Along with Everything Is Love, a mostly unconnected string of releases from Tierra Whack (Whack World), Kanye West (ye), Matt & Kim (Almost Everyday), Pusha-T (Daytona), Nas (NASIR), and Kid Cudi and West (Kids See Ghosts), have adopted an intentionally spare framework—the 15-track Whack World, for example, runs just 15 minutes. They are projects that test the boundaries of how we come to understand what an album is, and what it ought to be. Of late, one central thesis has taken hold: In an overstuffed music landscape, where, according to the New York Times, “woozy, blown-out rap albums” govern the charts, moderation has become an antithetical form of self-optimization. As it turns out, by doing less—slender track arrangements, compact running times—these artists have done and said more than their contemporaries.
One of the more remarkable aspects of Everything Is Love is its economy. It is an album of the moment—one that slyly speaks to the evolutionary shifts befalling the music industry but also reconstructs that narrative into something new and strange and necessary.
The album as we know it—a loose or tightly-woven collection of audio recordings that, per rules outlined by The Recording Academy must be either 30 minutes in length, or 15 minutes in length with a minimum of 5 tracks to qualify as such—has experienced radical alterations in the last decade, fragmented into three distinct categories: The album as album, the album as playlist, and, more recently, the album as EP.
Historically, albums were statement pieces for artists—the culmination of weeks, or months, or years of work siphoned into a cohesive, crackling exposition. Think Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, Beyonce’s Lemonade, or even West’s 2016 mantlepiece The Life of Pablo. These albums were meant to exist in the multiple, registering as events and as cultural tentpoles: constantly played and constantly argued over. It was the album at its most maximalist and moutwhwatering.
Naturally, that all changed with the rise of the streaming marketplace, which again revamped the album’s algorithm. The album was no longer solely occupied with the statement it was trying to make; albums were now optimized for playlists. They’d become bloated experiments in global fusion (Drake’s 22-track, 81-minute-long More Life) and creative anarchy (Future’s HNDRXX and FUTURE; 17 tracks each and released a week apart), ceding authority to streaming overlords, whose business models, in part, prioritized artists with the most spins (in 2017, streaming accounted for two-thirds the music industry’s revenue). Albums of a such repute heralded a permanent shift in the calculus of pop power.
Even Cardi B’s brilliant and ferocious Invasion of Privacy, released in April, translated more as a collection of singles than a unified album, spurred in part by the playlist-centric projects of 2017 and 2018. Cardi’s ascent started with the placement of “Bodak Yellow” on Apple’s A-List: Hip Hop playlist and later on Spotify’s Rap Caviar, where it skyrocketed. “It doesn’t feel like a hit, it feels like a moment,” Apple’s Carl Cherry told Billboard at the time. In our new song-based economy, albums had become a kind of dead weight. Just look to Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles” and Migos’ “Bad and Boujee”—tracks that accrued an incredible amount of viral currency and nearly eclipsed each group’s respective album (both songs peaked at Number One on the Hot 100).
Lately, though, the album has evolved into a slight, willowy offering—it’s the EP all grown up. The batch of releases out of GOOD Music—West, Cudi, and Pusha-T, with a Teyana Taylor project set to follow—demonstrate a new configuration for the genre. Particularly Daytona and Kids See Ghosts, which adopt the song-craving appetite of the streaming era and apply it to a condensed album format: expertly curated with no clutter, just seven songs that demand rotation. Whack, a 22-year-old singer and rapper from Philadelphia with an absurdist bent, took the concept one step further with Whack World—each song is exactly one-minute long but feels a galaxy wide—telling the Times: “I have a really short attention span, but I have so much to offer. I wanted to put all of these ideas into one universe, one world. I’m giving you a trip through my mind.”
Even in such an unsteady industry, the album has remained a constant, and malleable, asset. What the Carters have essentially done with their latest is reconstruct the before into the now. It is a lean, pluralistic Megazord of an album—a statement EP suited for every kind of playlist. For two artists who have an appetite for grandiosity, Everything Is Love—for all its swagger and self-praise—reads as a decidedly controlled piece of art. It is Beyoncé and Jay-Z doing what they have always done: giving us what we didn’t know we needed until we had it.
For years, Android users have had plenty of options for listening to podcasts. The Google Play store offers perfectly competent apps, like Pocket Cast, Stitcher, and Player FM’s simply named Podcast. But Google hasn’t had a homegrown option since 2012, when it discontinued Google Listen just before the Serial-led podcast boom. Tuesday, it corrected that oversight. Google Podcasts is here, and it’s a very promising start.
Much like the recently launched Google Tasks, the Podcasts app feels fairly minimalist at launch. It greets you with section called For You, which includes new episodes of podcasts you’ve subscribed to, a separate tab for any episodes that are currently in progress, and another tab for any that you’ve downloaded. I occasionally use Google Play Music to listen to podcasts—you still can, if for some implausible reason you prefer it over a dedicated app. When I opened the Podcasts app, I was happy to find that the “All 8 Unicorns” episode of Story Pirates was marked at the timestamp where my daughter had left off.
Google
Continue to scroll down, and you’ll see fairly anodyne sets of recommendations: top podcasts overall, trending podcasts, and then the most popular among categories including Comedy, Society & Culture, News & Politics, Sports, Religion & Spirituality, and Arts. There’s a whole lot of public-radio content in that initial mix.
When you search for and click on a given podcast, you can scroll through recent episodes, as you might expect. The Podcasts app will also recommend a related podcast underneath the one you chose. Individual podcast pages is also where you’ll find one of the app’s few fun surprises: Tap on the menu icon in the upper-right corner, and you’re given the option to add the podcast to your homescreen.
As for playback, there’s not much that stands out. You can play, pause, skip forward 30 seconds or skip back 10. The only real granularity comes in the ability to control the speed of playback, with literally 16 speeds to choose from ranging from half to double-time. You can’t rate episodes or series yet, or make playlists, much less enjoy more advanced options like the Overcast app’s recent Smart Resume feature, which ensures that when you pick a podcast back up after taking a break, it starts during a pause in talking.
Even the settings menu could almost be singular instead of plural: It only lets you choose when to auto-remove completed and unfinished episodes.
None of this should register as a complaint. It’s more of a warning to power-podcasters, who might want to stick with Pocket Cast until Google builds out its native solution a little more fully. Personally, I don’t require a ton out of a podcasting app in the same way I don’t make many demands of an FM radio. It makes the sounds I want, when I tell it to, and that’s plenty.
Besides, the real allure of Google Podcasts comes from the broader freight of Google itself. First, the app offers AI-powered recommendations based on what you already subscribe to and your listening patterns. As you continue to use it, the home screen will dynamically change, zeroing in from generic suggestions to more specific ones, like Top podcasts by WYNC Studios, and Popular with listeners of How Did This Get Made? Those nudges seem mostly on point at launch, although you do run into some seeming outliers: Apparently, Real Time with Bill Maher is popular with listeners of Story Pirates, which again is a show that turns children’s adorable, nonsensical stories into scripted radio plays.
Still, Google has built one of the world’s most powerful companies off of recommendations. Hopefully, as it continues to fine-tune its algorithms in Podcasts, it creates real opportunities for discovery, rather than merely surfacing the same top-tier podcasts under different headers.
“The recommendation is helpful and useful, and given the company’s lineage, pedigree, and history of using data to make recommendations, I think we should assume it’ll get better and better at that,” says Erik Diehn, CEO of Midroll Media, a podcast advertising network that works with major shows like Freakonomics Radio and WTF with Marc Maron. “That’s going, I think, to do good things for discovery, and bring new users into podcasts who might think oh, there’s nothing there for me.”
‘I think there’s no question that it will help bring more people into the podcasting world.’
Erik Diehn, Midroll Media
It helps that broadening the horizons of the podcasting world is one of Google’s stated goals here. “While there are more podcasts than ever before, there continues to be an imbalance in who is creating them,” wrote Google Podcasts product manager Zack Reneau-Wedeen in a post announcing the app. “Looking at top charts, only about a quarter of the most popular podcasts tend to be hosted by women, and even fewer by people of color.” He went on to say that Google is partnering with the industry to “increase the diversity of voices and remove barriers to podcasting,” with more details apparently to come this summer. Google did not respond to a request for further comment.
Podcasts has another key advantage in its ability to sync up with other Google Assistant-powered devices, like Google Home. Start a podcast during breakfast on your smart speaker, and you can seamlessly pick it up on the subway from your smartphone. If you’ve bought into the Google ecosystem, it removes another dollop of friction from your day.
Google has already tipped future features, and a commitment to building out Podcasts from here. The company says it’s working on automated subtitles for reading along, and its acquisition of popular podcasting app 60db last fall hints at more to come in the recommendation space.
Beyond your own interest in Podcasts, its very existence amounts to a sea change in the podcasting world. The majority of people who listen to podcasts do so on an iPhone, largely because Apple launched a dedicated Podcasts app all the way back in 2012, and gave it prime real estate on the home screen. A Podcasts app with the full weight of Google behind it could rapidly close that gap just by existing.
“It would have to be an absolutely horrendous experience to not move the needle. They’ve clearly delivered a solid baseline product,” says Diehn. “I think there’s no question that it will help bring more people into the podcasting world.”
Just how many people depends on another open question: Whether Google will make Podcasts part of the bundle of Google apps that ship on Android smartphones by default. Even if not, though, it signals that Android is a platform where podcasts belong, and wraps in the tantalizing prospect of a few AI-powered innovations along the way. Sure took long enough.
Microsoft defended its contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that’s separating families at the U.S.-Mexican border, after a social media uproar over its ties.
“In response to questions we want to be clear: Microsoft is not working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Customs and Border Protection on any projects related to separating children from their families at the border,” it said.
Microsoft didn’t back down from its ties with ICE, whose contract is worth $19.14 million, according to Bloomberg. But the software company said it’s “dismayed” by new actions by the Trump administration to jail immigrant parents who attempt to come to the U.S. without going through legal channels and put their children into detention facilities.
“As a company Microsoft has worked for over 20 years to combine technology with the rule of law to ensure that children who are refugees and immigrants can remain with their parents,” it said.
In a January blog post, Microsoft touted a contract with ICE for its cloud-based software Azure, saying it would help ICE process data faster. The line that resonated with social media over the weekend was Microsoft saying it was “proud to support” the work of ICE in the post.
On Twitter, Microsoft drew outrage in posts that mention how CEO Satya Nadella was also an immigrant and asked Microsoft to take a stand on what’s happening on the border with families being separated.
Microsoft employees chimed in. Larry Osterman, a Microsoft engineer, asked company President Brad Smith how working for ICE jibes with “our ethical stances. … Not cool.”
Agreed. @BradSmi, how on earth does this align with our ethical stances w.r.t. family separation and our public stance on using AI for only ethical purposes. This seems completely antithetical to our public stances. Not Cool.
As a former @Microsoft employee, I’m appalled to see this news. The projects we take on matters, they have real world implications. We can’t hide behind code without thinking about the ethical implications of our work. Do better. https://t.co/PuXQX5oBqS
Tech Workers Coalition, an advocacy group, urged on Twitter for Microsoft employees not to “be complicit” in working with ICE.
If you are a worker building these tools or others at Microsoft, decide now that you will not be complicit. Then, talk to a trusted coworker. Begin building power. If you don’t feel like you know how to begin those conversations, our DMs are open. https://t.co/I6dScfxqlb
— Tech Workers Coalition (@techworkersco) June 18, 2018
Tech CEOs have chimed into the debate as well, decrying the family separations at the Mexico border that have captured national attention with photos and audio of children removed from their parents.
The CEOs of Airbnb, SmugMug and Twilio took to Twitter to speak out against the actions, part of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy. Through the end of May, almost 2,000 children were separated from adults who said they were their parents or guardians, the Department of Homeland Security said last week.
Tech companies are finding themselves in the crosshairs over government contracts as employees increasingly vocalize their disagreement over the far-reaching consequences of their technologies.
The American Civil Liberties Union and civil rights groups recently demanded Amazon stop selling a facial recognition software tool, called Rekognition, to police and other government entities because they fear it could be used to unfairly target protesters, immigrants and any person just going about their daily business. And Google employees successfully pressured the company to not renew a contract with the Pentagon that some employees feared could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes.
Microsoft, after being contacted by media organizations about the statement of support for ICE, amended the blog post to take out the “proud” reference. It later updated it to the original statement,
On LinkedIn, Microsoft’s Smith penned a Father’s Day post in which he said the news of migrant children being taken from their families was “especially poignant.”
“When we keep children with their parents, we not only follow in the footsteps of one of the world’s oldest and most important humanitarian traditions, we help build a stronger country,” he wrote.
LOS ANGELES – Google released a new podcast app, Google Podcasts, that it claims will double the size of the podcast listening audience within two years. It eventually will let Google search users see podcasts alongside article and video results when they look up a topic.
Google backs up its ambitions by noting its Android mobile operating system Android has an 85 percent share of mobile. At the start, the mobile version of the Google search app will surface podcast links next to web, image and video links.
“Eight out of 10 smartphone users have an Android phone, and there are over 2 billion Android users,” says Zack Reneau-Wedeen, a product manager for Google. “So the potential to have an impact here is really huge.”
According to market tracker Edison Research, some 50 million people tuned into podcasts monthly in 2017, mostly via the Apple Podcast app on the iPhone. Apple got a head start: Podcasts have been around since 2004 as a vehicle to originally help Apple sell iPods.
Android users have turned to apps such as Stitcher, Spotify, iHeartRadio and Pocket Casts.
Nick Quah, who writes the “Hot Pod” newsletter about podcasting, says Apple’s market share on most podcasts is 70 percent. “It stands to reason that the overrepresentation of Apple suggests an underutilization of Android,” he says.
Google Podcasts is available for free at the Google PlayStore. After downloading it, start by finding shows and subscribe to them. Google also will make suggestions, based on top listening charts and categories such as tech, news, arts and culture.
Google says that for now, the podcast app is Android only.
Once you start listening to a bunch of shows, Google will sense your listening history and suggest new podcasts for you. Another feature, if you have the Google Home connected speaker: You can listen to a podcast on your phone, pause it, and ask Google Home to play it at home, where it will pick up where you left off.
Reneau-Wedeen says that down the line, Google is looking to add automatic transcription of podcasts to enable better search via its index. So, if a comedian on Gilbert Gottfried’s podcast were to discuss hypothetically slipping on a banana while doing his or her comedy act, and somebody searched for “comedians who slipped on bananas,” the Google mobile app could potentially offer a link to listen.
He notes that more than 1 billion people search on Google daily, mostly via the mobile app on Android.
“When they search, they get articles, videos and images but don’t get audio stories,” he says. “Since there has been an explosion in audio, it’s important we start to treat audio as a first-class citizen throughout Google.”
Google, which makes money based on selling targeted ads to advertisers, is always on the hunt to know more about us and our interests, so the Podcasts app provides another opportunity for sales.
Quah says it’s not inevitable that Google really can double the podcast audience just by using its power. “Simply making something more available within an actively-used platform isn’t any guarantee of greater usage,” he says. It needs to be followed by push from publishers as well, he said.
Follow USA TODAY’s Jefferson Graham (@jeffersongraham) on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent an email to all employees on Monday morning about a factory fire, and seemed to reference possible sabotage.
Now, CNBC has learned that Musk also sent an e-mail to all employees at Tesla late on Sunday night alleging that he has discovered a saboteur in the company’s ranks.
Musk said this person had conducted “quite extensive and damaging sabotage” to the company’s operations, including by changing code to an internal product and exporting data to outsiders.
In 2016, after a SpaceX rocket exploded while being fueled up before an engine test, Musk and SpaceX COO and President Gwynne Shotwell also looked into the possibility of sabotage.
Several employees, from different divisions within Tesla, confirmed receipt of the e-mail to CNBC.
Tesla is currently ramping up production to make its previously stated goal of 5,000 Model 3s per week by the end of June. Last week, Tesla announced a broad restructuring, slashing at least 9% of its workforce. Workers who are actively involved in Model 3 production would not be affected, the company said.
Tesla declined to comment on the e-mail.
Here’s the full email:
To: Everybody
Subject: Some concerning news
June 17, 2018 – 11:57 p.m.
I was dismayed to learn this weekend about a Tesla employee who had conducted quite extensive and damaging sabotage to our operations. This included making direct code changes to the Tesla Manufacturing Operating System under false usernames and exporting large amounts of highly sensitive Tesla data to unknown third parties.
The full extent of his actions are not yet clear, but what he has admitted to so far is pretty bad. His stated motivation is that he wanted a promotion that he did not receive. In light of these actions, not promoting him was definitely the right move.
However, there may be considerably more to this situation than meets the eye, so the investigation will continue in depth this week. We need to figure out if he was acting alone or with others at Tesla and if he was working with any outside organizations.
As you know, there are a long list of organizations that want Tesla to die. These include Wall Street short-sellers, who have already lost billions of dollars and stand to lose a lot more. Then there are the oil & gas companies, the wealthiest industry in the world — they don’t love the idea of Tesla advancing the progress of solar power & electric cars. Don’t want to blow your mind, but rumor has it that those companies are sometimes not super nice. Then there are the multitude of big gas/diesel car company competitors. If they’re willing to cheat so much about emissions, maybe they’re willing to cheat in other ways?
Most of the time, when there is theft of goods, leaking of confidential information, dereliction of duty or outright sabotage, the reason really is something simple like wanting to get back at someone within the company or at the company as a whole. Occasionally, it is much more serious.
Please be extremely vigilant, particularly over the next few weeks as we ramp up the production rate to 5k/week. This is when outside forces have the strongest motivation to stop us.
If you know of, see or suspect anything suspicious, please send a note to [email address removed for privacy] with as much info as possible. This can be done in your name, which will be kept confidential, or completely anonymously.
Looking forward to having a great week with you as we charge up the super exciting ramp to 5000 Model 3 cars per week!
Will follow this up with emails every few days describing the progress and challenges of the Model 3 ramp.
Thanks for working so hard to make Tesla successful,
If effortlessly paying with your iPhone or Apple Watch easy enough to scare you, don’t worry: This is the normal and healthy response. I, too, was incredibly spooked the first time I used Apple Pay.
The process is much safer than its simplicity would suggest.Tweet It
Fortunately, the process is much safer than its simplicity would suggest. Apple Pay’s inclusion of biometric certification—whether in the form of a fingerprint or a facial scan—is a rock-solid security measure that goes a long way in securing your finances.
When you add a card to the Wallet app using your iPhone’s camera, Apple does not save the photo anywhere on your phone. All of the corresponding information—the card number, expiration date, et cetera—is encrypted, sent to Apple’s servers, and re-encrypted before heading back out to its payment network. In fact, the merchant you happen to be buying from will never actually see your credit card numbers. You can read more about Apple’s dedication to Apple Pay privacy on its website.
Additionally, Apple does not track your purchases, nor does it collect your shopping habits.
Simply put, the security flaws that exist within the Apple Pay ecosystem are on par with the vulnerabilities present in most forms of electronic payment.
— Our editors review and recommend products to help you buy the stuff you need. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today’s newsroom and any business incentives.
Happy Tuesday! As we slowly move into the full summer season my mind definitely starts to wander. To distract myself from the fact that I’m not outside right now, I like to do a little online shopping. Each day, Amazon has some incredible deals and price drops, so you can buy the things you actually want without breaking the bank. I sifted through today’s deals and found a few hidden treasures like my favorite blender and a waterproof phone pouch.
1. A robot vacuum for under $200
Vacuuming sucks (pun intended). It’s one of the most tedious chores out there, but if you want your home spic and span, you’re going to have to do it every day. Luckily, robot vacuums exist to do the dirty work for you in between deep cleanings. Typically, the Eufy Robovac 11+ with BoostIQ goes for $250, but right now you can get it for just $180. We love this model because it got a few upgrades from its predecessor with more dirt pick up and more shock absorption, so it won’t be knocking around your furniture. At this great price drop, it’s worth it for some solid cleaning power.
Not to be dramatic, but the NutriBullet changed my life. I couldn’t imagine my mornings without my daily smoothies and this compact blender makes it so dang easy to make them. Not only can I drink straight from the “blending cup,” but it’s super quick to hand wash or I can put it in the dishwasher and be out the door. Right now, NutriBullet Pro is at its lowest price for today only. This upgraded NutriBullet has a higher wattage (900), which makes it even easier to pulverize through fruits and veggies, and it comes with two colossal cups, an emulsifying blade, two flip-top lids, two handled lip rings, two comfort lip rings, and hardcover recipe book for all your blending needs.
Styling your hair can be a real drag and can seem futile in the summer heat. But with the right products, you can get gorgeous locks in no time. Right now, one of the best curling wands we’ve ever tested is down to its lowest price. We love the GHD because it has a subtle taper and a textured finish that helps grip hair in place. Although you can’t adjust the heat from the preset temperature of 365ºF, it only takes 30 seconds to heat up and that temp is great for most hair types.
Whether you’re heading to the beach or the pool, your phone is at an increased risk of getting water damage. To save yourself the trouble of putting your phone in a bag of rice and praying that it will dry out, invest in a waterproof pouch to keep your phone in when you’re near the water. This one from Anker has a watertight seal and you can still use the touchscreen while it’s in the pouch. Plus, it’s less than $10 right now, so you won’t have to spend much to keep your phone dry.
When you have the A/C blasting this summer, you’re going to want a nice down comforter to snuggle up with at night. This one from Utopia is super soft, hypoallergenic, and machine washable. Right now, you can get a queen-sized comforter for less than the cost of a twin-sized one. At this price, it’s perfect to pick up for a guest room or to replace your current comforter, especially if you’re still using the same dirty one from college.
I was already an Apple junkie when HomeKit came out, and its easy setup and Siri control made it a natural fit for my home. But sometimes HomeKit can’t do everything you want it to, or you’ll find a cool product or service you’d love to use but it doesn’t support HomeKit natively. Thankfully, there’s an easy way to get better control of your HomeKit.
The answer to your smart home customization prayers
IFTTT, which stands for If This Then That, is an easy automation platform for connected devices and social media services. IFTTT uses these things called “applets” to perform an action based on a trigger, which gives you new ways to connect to your devices.
You can find hundreds of already-made applets on the IFTTT website or in the mobile app, and you can even create your own. For example, if you add a photo to Instagram, there’s an applet that will automatically tweet it for you. Apple fans even get some iOS-specific channels of supported triggers and actions to use, such as actions that happen when your iPhone is in a certain location.
And if you own smart home devices like security cameras, smart locks, lights, and more, you may be able to create custom iOS-based applets that help you get even more out of your tech. Here are 7 fun ideas to get you started.
1. Turn an old iPhone or iPad into a security camera
Credit: Reviewed / Susie Ochs
Put your retired devices back to work.
If you have an old iPhone or iPad that still works but is just collecting dust, you can make it useful by transforming it into a security camera. Just install the Manything app on it, and leave it recording. Then, you’ll want to set up this IFTTT applet, which will email you a video clip when motion is detected.
Bring your iPhone and your Alexa speaker together to get more done.
Lord knows I do not need more to-do lists. Apple’s Reminders app can be a good place for everything to go, because it’s so accessible. You can view and manage reminders on a Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, and add them by speaking to Siri on any of those devices or the fancy new HomePod speaker, and even send copied text and links to reminders via the iOS Share Sheet.
So if you’re a mostly iOS house but you have some Echo or other Alexa-compatible devices around—and you might, Alexa is everywhere these days—you can speak your reminders to Alexa and have them dumped into your iOS Reminders too. Just use this IFTTT applet to send Alexa’s reminders to iOS reminders, and this one for Alexa’s shopping list.
3. Find your phone without asking for help
Credit: Reviewed / Susie Ochs
Stop bugging your roommates to stop everything and help you track down your missing phone.
I have a huge, embarrassing problem with losing my iPhone inside my own home. The Apple Watch has a button in the control center that can page the paired iPhone, and after fitness tracking it’s probably the feature I use most. Of course if someone else is home, you could sheepishly ask them to call your phone so you can find it.
But what if no one’s home and you don’t have an Apple Watch? The inexpensive, HomeKit-friendly Logitech POP can be your backup, because it supports an IFTTT applet that calls your phone when you press the POP button. Now only if it could locate the Apple TV remote…
4. Welcome home family members with August
Credit: Reviewed / Susie Ochs
Create custom routines for everyone that comes to your home.
August’s Smart Lock Pro (one of our favorites) has HomeKit support to let you lock and unlock the door by voice. And you can have Siri check that it’s locked as part of a nighttime routine. Plus, August has an IFTTT channel, and applets can be triggered by specific people unlocking the lock, either with their smartphone or by using the optional August Smart Keypad.
That means different things can be programmed to happen when different people unlock the door, even if they haven’t programmed their own HomeKit scenes and automations. For example, I could have IFTTT turn on my LIFX lights when the dogwalker pops in, while family members coming home from work or school get both lights and climate control.
5. Keep an eye on your home
Credit: Reviewed / Susie Ochs
Automate your home climate control simply.
This handy little iHome monitor ($49.95 from Apple) has five sensors—motion, temperature, light, sound, and humidity—that can trigger notifications or HomeKit automations. The iHome app can send you push notifications, but if certain people in the house would rather get an SMS text message, email, or even a phone call about a drastic change in temperature, motion being detected, and so on, IFTTT has applets for that.
6. Use Siri to log meals in Apple Health
Credit: Reviewed / Susie Ochs
Now you have no excuse not to track your calories.
This IFTTT applet lets you log meals into Apple’s Health app by just quickly typing the name of the food and the calories (or just the calories) into IFTTT’s own Note Widget. Better yet, you can do this with Siri, for a hands-free way to add up the day’s calorie count.
You’ll need to download the IFTTT app and grant the applet access to the Health app before you can use this service. You can activate the applet on IFTTT’s website, but to customize it, switch to the mobile app. There, you’ll find the option to enable Siri, and you can even add a button to your iOS device’s home screen.
You can also add a shortcut to your device’s home screen. When you tap that icon, a window pops up where you can type in the name of each food item and the calorie count, separated by commas, or even just the calorie counts. That data will be synced to the Health app as calories consumed.
For Siri control, say, “Take a note with an applet,” and then pause. Siri will ask what the note should say, and you tell it the name of the food, say the word comma, and then the number of calories: “meatloaf comma 200.” Unfortunately, Siri does get confused if you have too many Siri-enabled IFTTT applets, so don’t go crazy.
7. Remember to keep your Arlo cameras charged
Credit: Reviewed / Susie Ochs
Take better control of your home security.
Arlo, our favorite indoor security cameras, support HomeKit, and like most battery-powered connected devices, they send you a notification on your iPhone when the camera’s battery needs to be charged. But the last mile—from seeing the notification to taking action on it—is up to you.
Luckily, IFTTT has an Arlo channel, and its most useful applet adds a to-do to your iPhone’s Reminders app to help you remember to actually do it.
If you don’t use Reminders, don’t worry—it has its own IFTTT channel. The right applet will automatically sync new Reminders to another IFTTT-supported list, like Todoist, Toodledo, Remember the Milk, Trello, and more.
