A public transit commuter's podcast recommendations

Five years ago I acquiesced and got a smartphone, upgrading from nearly a decade of using an old flip phone whose only purpose was to send and receive calls. Anyhow, fast forward to today. The smartphone is also a media player, calendar, ebook/RSS reader, fitness logger, camera, video recorder, stopwatch, etc. 

On a typical commute into downtown Portland, an activity that typically eats up to two hours per day, I could catch up on some Z's, listen to music, something else relaxing, or learn something new via podcasts. Apple's Podcast app is one of the best default installed apps I have used.

I get burned out on genres and I almost never listen to the same podcast episode twice, unless I happened to have fallen asleep and forgot what happened in the podcast. These are sorted in order of what you should listen to first before the others. Not everyone that I admire from their non-radio works is good at both podcast scripting for audio listeners and are a good podcast host. These are just suggestions of what I think make for pretty good commuter listening.

Non-fiction

Short podcasts (<30 minutes per episode):

• Planet Money

Longer podcasts (>30 minutes per episode):

• Freakonomics Radio
• How I Built This
• This American Life
• Agent Marketing Syndicate (for real estate but mostly business)
• The Tim Ferriss Show (mostly business and life-hacking topics)
• The Art of Manliness (really funny if you are a woman listening to this)
• The Moth
• S-Town (crime investigative reporting)
• Crimetown (crime investigative reporting)

Fiction / Fantasy / SciFi

Short podcasts (<30 minutes per episode):

• MarsCorp
• The Bright Sessions
• Lore (by Aaron Mahnke)
• Darkest Night
• The Deep Vault
• Welcome to Night Vale
• Terms
• Star Trek: Lost Enterprise

Longer podcasts (>30 minutes per episode):

• Star Trek: Outpost
• The Penumbra Podcast
• The Leviathan Chronicles
• The Cleansed
• Archive 81
• The Dark Tome
• The Bunker
• Drabblecast Audio Fiction
• Clarksworld Magazine
• Lightspeed Magazine
• The Black Tapes / Tanis / Rabbits

Home Depot In-App Augmented Reality

Home Depot rolled out a nifty feature inside their smartphone app. It allows users to imagine finished products in a space. It's also not easy to find and it certainly doesn't reside in the Tools section of the app, even though it could.

Let's say you are shopping for a replacement sink for the kitchen and you find one in the app, simply select the option for "See this in your home" in the product photo display. The rollout of this feature is limited to certain product groups. You cannot, for example, visualize the fit of the 3-person Infrared Sauna in your home using the app.

The only problem is that it only shows the faucet part, and not it's accompanying base. It would be a hassle for the homeowner to find that the base is what doesn't fit in the current sink configuration. Unless you have a diamond drill bit set, drilling the holes yourself through a porcelain sink might be difficult.

There are other tools in the app that you might not be aware of. Anyone could say "of course, that is obvious" but it really is not so obvious. The ones that I really liked are digital Caliper and the Nut & Bolt Finder, where you simply put the object you are trying to match onto your smartphone screen then using your fingers to drag a ruler and the app shows an estimate of the nut or bolt size. Really nifty. Especially when you go to any hardware store for replacement parts and the store assistant says, "What size are you looking for?" and then shows the aisle filled with shelves and boxes of a lot of nuts and bolts.

Home Depot In-App Tool: Nut & Bolt Finder

Bitly's Mobile App Refresh

Apps are suppose to make your life easier, not more complicated. You really know when an app's UI has changed before opening the app when you notice that its app icon has changed. And, Bitly's changed from an outlined orange logo to a dark orange background with the outlined logo in white. Certainly a noticeable change.

In the old Bitly app for iPhone, you really didn't have to do much to save, shorten, and share a link. You could be in another browser or in an RSS reader app and the order of operations used to be simple with few steps:

In a browser or RSS reader, copy the link
Bitly's app would automatically recognize that a link was copied, and take both the Title of the link and the link itself, packaged together on a screen that would allow you to edit or insert a new Title (if needed), then share the link to one or all of your connected social media accounts.

It was:

Copy link / Bitly app automatically shortens / Share link

Now, it is:

Copy link
In the Bitly app, you now need to hit the + symbol to create a link (sadly no automatic detect)
Oops, no title at all. Go back to the browser and copy the title from the article
Go back to the Bitly app, edit the link and paste the title
Then, LEFT swipe (left to right) to share
But, sharing no longer brings up a list of your connected accounts, it just shows the default sharing options that the Chrome browser shows
Share / Scroll sideways through the list of options / Post

Alas, no more Bitly convenience for me. Looks like it is back to long URLs and the Feedly share button.

With Feedly, it's Share / Post, and you're done. No analytics. Twitter has some analytics but they're not terribly useful just yet.

Those 4 extra minutes every $5 reward cycle with Bing Rewards, I think I gain them back each time I don't use the Bitly app to share links.

Customer Loyalty Programs: Bing and Starbucks

This year two companies revitalized their rewards programs. The rebranding is probably working out great for their advertisers, but it really isn't working out for me. I mean heck, I really didn't expect to do more work to get something for free. Although, for now, the perks of using these apps are still a nice to have. The two in this blog post are Microsoft's Bing search app and Starbucks Rewards app.

Google Analytics + Google Data Studio

Saw a promo email for Data Studio today and thought I'd check it out...

Google Data Studio: Start Here page

One of the help files for this web tool reads as follows..

"A Data Studio report is a collection of components that inform the viewer using data derived from one or more data sources. Components include charts, annotations (text), and graphical elements (shapes and images). Data Studio components can be styled and configured to present exactly the view of your data you want. Data sources get their data from a data set, such as a Google Analytics view, a Google Sheet, a BigQuery table, etc."

Don't take this the wrong way, but I think Google is trying to get onto even ground with Salesforce Dashboards. None of this point and click setup is all that hard; nor too complicated to understand. I don't think user adoption would be that big of an issue for companies. It  also looks like Google is competing with Tableau's ability to aggregate and visualize data.

Google Data Studio - Data Viz of World Population (orange),
Internet Users (blue), and Mobile Subscriptions (yellow)

The intro email says it succinctly:

"No more requests for data. No more emailing around CSV files and spreadsheets. No more static and outdated reports. Finally, a reporting solution that works the way you work."

It was rather amusing that we were doing just that in a corporate setting, mucking around with CSV exports and spreadsheets to get a report to look the way we wanted it to. 

Spot on, Google Analytics team.

Amazon: Resizeable Inline Video

I log in fairly regularly to Amazon to purge my Kindle of its expired borrowed library items. But today, wow. I am flabbergasted at the video display ad Amazon has on its front page. I am sure Amazon is working some cookie magic on the back end for this new UI display. 

Ok, what caught my eye was a short clip of a woman wearing a blue dress, except it wasn't static nor choppy like a GIF. Actually, it looked like one of those in-screen presenters you see on some webinars; except she's modeling a dress and the dress moves! Or, she was slow dancing, who knows.

2016-08-23 Amazon Homepage

Looks good on Windows 10 desktop. I don't think I'd have the same shopping experience with their mobile app.

Personally, I would not have dedicated so much space to a secure login in the pre-login startup screen on Amazon's main homepage. But, it gets worse and it's probably a not-yet-fixed bug feature. Both login buttons (top and body left) open to a giant blank screen with Amazon's characteristic login box; except, there is zero branding on the page. No headers, no footers, and heck no header logo. Imagine a blank white web page featuring just a login box. Not even WordPress looks this minimalist.

Way to go Amazon.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Yelp: New restaurant search feature - PokeStop

Yelp shows it can be hip too by adding PokéStops as a searchable restaurant feature.