Six months after kicking off an initial Mastodon trial that saw it launch its own instance on the federated platform, the UK’s public broadcaster is not just extending the experiment by another six months, it’s also “planning to start some technical work into investigating ways to publish BBC content more widely using ActivityPub.”
It feels like a promising sign for the future of the fediverse.
Call me pessimistic, but I was sure Google would immediately slam the breaks on Christian Selig’s third-party YouTube app (especially now the company plans to make a YouTube app of its own). But Juno is still going strong, and Selig has just released its 1.1 version update. Improvements include a playback quality selector, drag and drop support, bug fixes, and other performance and UI tweaks.
[christianselig.com]
As of this week, Samsung TVs released between 2018 and 2021 can’t show a video feed from the Ring Doorbell Pro, according to a support page. The news comes after Samsung also announced it would be dropping its TV’s built-in Google Assistant support as of March 1st, 2024.
Between this and the subscription price increases, it’s been a frustrating week for Ring owners.
[Samsung Electronics America]
Today the European Commission decided against designating Apple’s iMessage and three Microsoft products as core platform services under the Digital Markets Act. “Excluding these popular services from DMA rules means consumers and businesses won’t be offered the breadth of choice that already exists on other, more open platforms,” Google spokesperson Emily Clarke tells The Verge.
Google, of course, lobbied for iMessage’s designation.
I missed its September launch, but Spotify can now auto-generate you a time-appropriate playlist based on your daily listening habits by searching for “Daylist.” Playlists even come with bizarre titles like “ska punch skateboarding tuesday morning.”
Another fun hidden Spotify feature? Search for a number + BPM to generate a playlist of songs at a specific speed. Handy if you’re trying to run with a specific cadence (aka steps-per-minute).
