Podcast Roundup – The Daily, Missing Richard Simmons, and more

Last fall I enjoyed listening to the New York Times’ The Run-Up podcast. It provided an “in-the-newsroom” perspective to last year’s Presidental election. Now the show’s host, Michael Barbaro, has followed that up with a new show, The Daily.

Each morning around 6am, the latest episode hits my podcatcher. The show features interviews with Times staffers reporting on the day’s stories along with interviews of the news makers themselves. It’s a facinating start to my day with a perspective straight from the people reporting the day’s news. Give it a listen, it will make a great addition to your podcast lineup.

Where is Richard Simmons?

Have you been missing Richard Simmons lately? If so (and even if you haven’t), Dan Taberski’s new podcast Missing Richard Simmons is for you.

On February 15, 2014, fitness guru Richard Simmons disappeared. He stopped teaching his regular exercise class at Slimmons, cut off his closest friends, and removed himself from the public eye after decades as one of the most accessible celebrities in the world. Nobody has heard from him – and no one knows why he left. Filmmaker Dan Taberski was a Slimmons regular and a friend of Richard’s. Missing Richard Simmons is Dan’s search for Richard – and the deeper he digs, the stranger it gets.

~ Missing Richard Simmons

Amazon Prime Members: Are you using your free Audible Channels?

There are so many cool perks that come with Amazon Prime that I can’t keep track. One that I’ve started enjoying lately are Audible Channels. Under Audible Channels you’ll find original audio series like Presidents Are People Too! which provides real-life insights into the men who’ve held the office, there are hand-crafted playlists of the day’s news, comedy, talks, and more, and my favorite are the audio books. I’m currently listening to Fighter Pilot, The Memoirs of Legendary Ace Robin Olds.

If you’re an Amazon Prime member and you haven’t taken advantage of this perk yet, just download the Audible app on your mobile device. Then click on the Channels tab.

Sortd Smart Skin for Gmail

Use Gmail? Looking for a way to optimize your time in your inbox? Sortd is a nice looking organizational layer that you can add to your Gmail.

Sortd expands your Inbox into a flexible set of lists for important email and other stuff. Your emails, tasks and priorities now live together in one easy-to-use drag and drop workspace. It’s still good ol’ Gmail, only so much more!

Source: Sortd Smart Skin for Gmail

WordPress Theme Roundup: 2 for Writers, 1 for Business

Today I happened to be browsing through the WordPress Theme directory, and I came across three themes I just had to share:

Kent

Kent is reminiscent of the early days of Medium. It features a clean layout, nice typography, and an overall design that makes me want to crank out a couple of new posts.

Dyad

Dyad‘s excellent pairing of images and content makes the foodie in me want to start a new food blog. If you have words and pictures to go with them, it provides a great pairing.

Emmet

Emmet is a clean business oriented theme. Check out the preview provided by MotoPress. I love how this theme has a lot of design patterns and visual features without seeming cluttered. It’s big and bold with just the right amount of whitespace.

Links of Interest: Super Bowl Edition

During last night’s biggest Super Bowl comeback ever, Stranger Things fans were treated to this fabulous teaser for Season Two:

Getting back to the game: I was initially pulling for the Falcons; however, as New England’s comeback began to seem more and more inevitable…take this catch for instance:

…I switched my rooting interests, and enjoyed the ride. In case you didn’t notice, the overtime finish was the first one in the history of the Super Bowl.

 

When will this happen?

This past quarter, Netflix added over 7 million new subscribers surpassing its estimates by 2 million. This coincides with their decision to add 600 hours of original content this past year at a production cost somewhere north of 5 billion. This year they plan to add 1000 hours of content with a budget of over 6 billion. All this growth has many speculating that someday they’ll have the power and capital to enter the live sports market. [Source: BBC News]

All this speculation has me wondering if we’ll ever see something like you see in the graphic I made for this post.

Rename Email – Chrome Web Store

You ever hate it when you receive an email with a poorly crafted subject? For example, “Hi”. Looking at that subject gives you no indication of the email’s contents.

Until now, the only option you have in Gmail for renaming a subject is when you reply. That does nothing to the name of the original thread. That’s where the Rename Email Chrome Extension comes in. It lets you rename your emails without replying:

 

Curated collection of the Best Non-Apple Watch Bands

I’ve had my Apple Watch Series 2 for about a month now, and I must say that I love it. I hope to share more thoughts on it soon. In the meantime, I’ve been interested in getting an additional band for it, but I can’t justify the cost of the Apple brand bans. That’s why I’m bookmarking this great curated list of third-party Apple Watch bans from Watchaware.com.

In particular, I discovered this Milanese loop band with good reviews for $13 on Amazon. That’s a far cry from Apple’s version which costs $149.

WP LCache — WordPress Plugins

I’ve got a couple of WordPress sites that would benefit from an LCache implementation. The WP LCache plugin will make it possible. Looking forward to checking this out.

For sites concerned with high traffic, speed for logged-in users, or dynamic pageloads, a high-speed and persistent object cache is a must. WP LCache improves upon Memcached and Redis object cache implementations by using APCu, PHP’s in-memory cache, in a way that’s compatible with multiple web nodes. Under the hood, WP LCache uses LCache, a library that applies the tiered caching model of multi-core processors (with local L1 and central L2 caches) to web applications.

Source: WP LCache — WordPress Plugins