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A just launched product (September 5, 2012) that is essentially a stand for your Apple TV and its remote control. It’s made out of one piece of wood and I actually have a prototype (of sorts) that I have been using for quite some time now.

The Bloc seeks to solve one main problem (for me at least): keeping your Apple TV squared up with the edge of the surface that it is on. My Apple TV was always being pulled to one angle or another and while this doesn’t effect the operation, it sure bugged the crap out of me.

I’ve since switched to a new stand for my TV, with glass shelves that hold the Apple TV in position, so I don’t use my Bloc anymore, but it certainly is exactly as described. I think the stand looks nice, but I always wanted it to be a bit thinner. However, I am not sure if that would keep the Apple TV still or not, so I assume this thickness was chosen for a reason.

One last note: I think this could be a nice stand if you use an Apple TV in a conference room setting, because it keeps the remote nicely docked next to the Apple TV.

Gabe over at Macdrifter:
>It’s called an acknowledgement. It’s not just about having good manners. It’s about establishing a shared perception of reality. I sent you freaking electrons through a five-thousand miles of wire and air and I’d like to assume they made it, but I can’t. The “thanks” email works for me.

Personally, unsurprisingly, I hate the “thanks” emails. There is a time and place when you need confirmation that an email was received — I do that by adding a small bit of text at the end of the message: “please confirm receipt of this document/email/whatever”. Otherwise I expect — hope — that I get no response to most emails that don’t otherwise contain that bit of text, or a question.

Likewise I only respond to emails that absolutely require it — the last thing I ever want to do is fill up an already full inbox with an email that says “thanks.” It’s nice, but it’s also pointless most of the time. So please, don’t send me these emails and I won’t send them to you.

David Bieber’s created some code that folds a paragraph of a blog post and instead of showing all those cumbersome words, you get a short and concise summary of that paragraph. This, he says, is done to make blogging more skimmable.

It’s a neat trick, but do we really need Cliff’s Notes for blog posts? I think not. Besides one can already use the Summarize tool in Mac OS X to do this same thing for the entire post. You know what you get when you do this? An incomplete blog post, which are already — by nature — very short. If there’s a blog post you want to read, but you don’t have time to read it, [I suggest you save it for later reading](http://instapaper.com).

If you don’t know the answer to the above question, you shouldn’t be backing things on Kickstarter. As Aarti Shahani points out:
>As entrepreneurs come online, Kickstarter and hundreds of similar platforms will have to sort out if each transaction is a donation or a purchase.

It’s actually best to think of every Kickstarter “backing” as a donation and not a purchase, if that isn’t what you intended then you might be in for a surprise. As I, and many other backers have found out, the more ambitious the project, the more likely it is to be delayed indefinitely.

The example used in the article is Ouya, which always sounded neat, but equally dubious in the ability of it to be made through a Kickstarter campaign. It’s one thing to make a great one-off product, and another to try and crowdsource funding a device that should rival the Wii.

What I really hated in reading this article was the wishy-washy nature of the response from Kickstarter — they (unsurprisingly) want to stay out of the debate of whether funds should be refunded if a project fails. I think Kickstarter wants to stay out of the debate because typically the money will have been spent by the time a refund should have been given.

I think a happy middle ground would be Kickstarter, in no uncertain terms, stating that you are donating to the cause — not pre-ordering a product. I also think it would massively help by removing many rewards that don’t matter — such as t-shirts and stickers — forcing the project creators to actually focus on the bigger items and not the smaller rewards.

That’s just me though…

Marco Arment:

>For instance, this is exactly the information that an ad network would want to collect. And in order to get stats from 12 million devices, it would probably need to be from a set of popular, free apps… where you’d probably see ads.

What was that I kept hearing from people that argued *for* free, ad supported, models? Something about “no real cost to them”, “not caring about what the advertisers do with their info”, wonder if those same people don’t care about this as well?

That probably sounded like a thinly veiled “I told you so”. Let me restate: [I told you so](https://brooksreview.net/2011/03/fragility-free/).

It likely won’t matter soon, as Arment points out, this is something that Apple is patching up — so that such data cannot be unknowingly siphoned off.

Christine Chan reviews the first App.net client to hit Apple’s App Store:
>Rhino still has a long way to go before it can replace the beta software that I’ve been using on my iPhone, but I guess it’s a start for ADN users who haven’t gotten into a beta.

I’d agree with her assessment of the app, it’s a nice app, but it has a long ways to go. There are tons of beta ADN apps floating around and many have many more features than Rhino currently offers. What’s most intriguing to me is that the app is free — why be first if you have no way to make money?

Regardless, if you use App.net (and you should) and don’t have any beta iOS apps to use — Rhino is leagues better than using web apps.

[At the beginning of August Fred Wilson posted about the absurd notion that AirPlay is bad in comparison to Bluetooth](https://brooksreview.net/2012/08/bluetooth-v-airplay/). Now he has an update about his Bluetooth stereo setup, in which he says:

>Bottom line. It’s fucking fantastic.

He’s elated that he can replicate his car stereo in his home. ((Also he notes “I got some super high end RCA cables”, which actually explains a lot about his illusions of grandeur.)) And then Wilson gets to the negatives:

>First, it can only pair with one device.

Yeah, my wife is also dumbfounded why our car can only pair with one cellphone at a time to use the handsfree setup — I bet she’d love it if I brought that “experience” into our home.

>Also, bluetooth has limited range so the phone has to be in the same room as the Logitech Adapter to play music.

I mean, if I want to listen to music with a setup that can stream the audio to any room in my house, there’s no way I would want to carry my phone with me to change the song. I mean mix tapes are great, never need to skip a song on them.

But still, “fucking fantastic”.

I needed to charge my laptop the other day and out of sheer laziness I didn’t want to move it from my home office to the living room, but still I wanted to AirPlay over a video I was streaming from a website — I mean it still worked just fine in my office — I’m just telling you that I was lazy and didn’t want my computer tethered to one room to make ancient technology work.

That’s all I’m saying.