Twitter Auto-Sharing Feature Discontinued in Jetpack WordPress Plugin

Kristina P, writing on the official Jetpack blog, in a post titled “The End of Twitter Auto-Sharing”:

Twitter decided, on short notice, to dramatically change the terms and pricing of the Twitter API. We have attempted to work with Twitter in good faith to negotiate new terms, but we have not been able to reach an agreement. As a result, the Twitter connection on Jetpack Social will cease to work, and your blog posts will no longer be auto-shared to Twitter.

This was bound to happen, and we’ll be seeing many more such announcements in the coming days.

May 2, 2023 ✚ Permalink

Pocket Casts Mobile Apps Go Open Source

Yael Rubinstein, writing on the Pocket Casts blog:

We’ve been eager to take this step since we joined Automattic last year — after all, the company’s creed includes the phrase “I know that open source is the most powerful idea of our generation.” We believe that podcasting can not and should not be controlled by Apple and Spotify, and instead support a diverse ecosystem of third-party clients.

It was just a matter of time when this would happen, as anyone who knows Automattic knows their love for open source. The only surprising thing to me is that Pocket Casts is only making their mobile apps open source, the Desktop and Web versions are not included in this anouncement and the company says it has no plans to do so either.

This announcement has generally been received positively by users and developers of other podcasts apps.

The iOS repository as well as the Android repository are up on GitHub with a Mozilla Public License 2.0.

October 21, 2022 ✚ Permalink

Riders Report Serious Issues with Ola’s Electric Scooters

Pradip K. Saha has a fantastic article up on The Morning Context about the issues plaguing Ola’s Electric Scooters:

At least 10 people The Morning Context spoke with complained of the scooter switching off with more than 20, 30 even 50 km range left. “You will never get the last 10-20 km. No one gets it,” says Karthik Varma from Visakhapatnam. “I am part of multiple Ola owner groups and I haven’t found a single person who hasn’t faced this issue.” 

These are not experiences any automaker worth its salt would want its customers to go through. But barely two months since deliveries have started, Ola Electric is bursting at the seams. Multiple groups on Twitter, Facebook and Telegram are packed to the brim with complaints from aggrieved consumers. There are obvious issues around range—many customers complain that they aren’t getting even 100 km per charge, compared with the promise of 181 km—and delays in delivery, registration and insurance processes.

I have heard similar things from a few different customers. Almost every single customer I’ve spoken to has mentioned the issue where the range available displayed on screen is never in sync with how much juice is left in the scooter itself. Ola’s handling of the release of its S1 Pro has really put a dent into how prospective customers are going to perceive the EV market, with many already calling it “not ready for practical use.”

Meanwhile, I have to give major props to Ather. I’ve owned the 450X (in the form of a Series 1) for about 14 months now and I’ve never had an issue with the battery or range. If it says 25km on the display, it’s what I’m roughly going to get. The only real annoyances I’ve had are with its software stack, which thankfully works independent of the scooter. I’ve ran into a couple of instances where the display would go off and the screen would restart, but the scooter continues to run without issues. You don’t get to this behavior without having tested and re-tested for months in a row.

February 21, 2022 ✚ Permalink

Google Discontinues 'Legacy' Free Edition of G Suite

Google has announced that starting May 1, 2022, its G Suite legacy free edition — the original version of what is now rebranded as Google Workspace, will no longer be available. This means that everyone who signed up for a free “Google Apps” account as it was known back then and continues to use it for free will have to switch to a paid Google Workspace account.

If you have the G Suite legacy free edition, you need to upgrade to a paid Google Workspace subscription to keep your services. The G Suite legacy free edition will no longer be available starting May 1, 2022. Starting May 1, Google will seamlessly transition you to Google Workspace, which you can use at no cost until July 1, 2022.

I’m surprised that it took Google this long to come to this decision. The legacy free edition already lacks several features that the company now offers in the Workspace offering, but it was perfectly fine if you just wanted to use the basic Gmail/Email features. I personally have about 5-6 different legacy accounts that I still use for Gmail, something I’ll have to switch away from very soon.

As some of you may have probably guessed by now, I’d be switching over to Fastmail — a service I’ve been using to host my personal email account. It’s a fantastic service, and I highly recommend them. It costs just $5/inbox/month and comes with an amazing set of features. This is also cheaper than Google’s base plan “Business Starter” which costs $6/user/month.

For those in India, Google does offer regional pricing starting at ₹ 210/user/month, which is further discounted to ₹ 125/user/month for the first 20 users added, for 12 months.

If you sign up on Fastmail using this link, you get 10% off your entire first year.

[Via 9to5Google]

January 20, 2022 ✚ Permalink

Tonga Could be Without Internet for Two Weeks

João Tomé, writing on the Cloudflare blog:

The latest Internet outage, in the South Pacific country of Tonga (with 169 islands), is still ongoing. It started with the large eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, an uninhabited volcanic island of the Tongan archipelago on Friday, January 14, 2022. The next day, Cloudflare Radar shows that the Internet outage started at around 03:00 UTC (16:00 local time) — Saturday, January 15, 2022 — and is ongoing for more than four days. Tonga’s 105,000 residents are almost entirely unreachable, according to the BBC.

James Vincent, writing for The Verge:

Like many island nations, Tonga relies on just a single undersea cable, about the thickness of a garden hose and filled with fragile fiber-optic filaments, to get citizens online. But on Tuesday, the government of Tonga said “communications both international and domestic were severed due to damage sustained by the submarine cable.”

According to the BBC, repairs coule take upto two weeks.

“It could take up to two weeks to get it repaired. The nearest cable-laying vessel is in Port Moresby,” he added, referring to the Papua New Guinea capital, more than 4,000 km (2,500 miles) from Tonga.

January 19, 2022 ✚ Permalink