TAN: Texas man who ran cryptocurrency scam supposedly backed by blue-chip art worth $1bn sentenced to 23 years in prison

Apple is adding a new App Store subscription option that lets developers offer lower monthly prices in exchange for a 12-month commitment. "This model will allow developers to offer discounted rates to customers in exchange for more predictable long-term revenue," reports TechCrunch. "This also caters to how many developers have already been marketing their annual subscriptions in their apps." From the report: Often, app developers will display the lower monthly price to highlight the discount the customer would receive if they purchase the annual subscription instead of the monthly option. If the user is on the fence about a longer-term commitment, the notion that they're getting a better deal can help to push them toward the annual option.

Now, Apple is essentially formalizing what these developers were already doing, which allows it to also craft a set of policies around how these subscription offers are to be displayed so as not to mislead customers about the true cost of the deals.

However, the option will not be available to developers in the United States or Singapore at launch. While Apple didn't offer an explanation for this, it's still in App Store litigation in the U.S. around the specifics of the court's ruling in its case with Epic Games around how Apple can charge for subscriptions. Apple likely doesn't want to complicate the matter further until that matter is finalized. Singapore, meanwhile, also has a sophisticated payments market with strong consumer rules, which is why it may have been left out of the initial release.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This story by Kevin Guilfoile about his aging father (who worked for the Pirates and the Baseball Hall of Fame) and the mystery of what happened to the bat that Roberto Clemente got his 3,000th hit with is one of my favorite things that I’ve read over the past few months.

[My father’s] personality is present, if his memories are a jumble. He is still funny, and surprisingly quick with one-liners to crack up the staff at the facility where he lives. He is exceedingly polite, same as he ever was. He is good at faking a casual conversation, especially on the phone. But if you sit and talk with him for a long time, he gets very anxious. He starts tapping his forehead with his fingers. “Shouldn’t we be going?” he’ll say. You tell him there’s no place we need to be, but 30 seconds later he’ll ask again, “Shouldn’t we be going?”

What happens to memories when they’re collapsed inside time like this? They don’t exactly disappear, they just become impossible to unpack. And so my father, who loved stories so much — who loved to tell them, who loved to hear them — can no longer comprehend them. The structure of any story, after all, is that this happened and then that happened, and he can’t make sense of any sequence.

That is the real hell of this disease. His own identity has become a puzzle he can’t solve.

Objects have stories, too. Puzzles that need to be solved. Like a pair of baseball bats, for instance, that each passed through Roberto Clemente’s hands before they passed through my father’s. One hung on my bedroom wall throughout my childhood. The other is in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

These objects never forget, but they never tell their stories, either.

Without a little bit of luck, we’d never hear them.

Or more than a little luck:

My father has lots of old baseball bats given to him by players he worked with over the years. He has Mickey Mantle bats from his years with the Yankees, and Willie Stargell and Dave Parker bats from his days with the Pirates. The one I always loved best was an Adirondack model with R CLEMENTE embossed in modest block letters, instead of the usual signature burned into the barrel. On the bottom of the knob, Roberto had written a tiny “37” in ballpoint pen, presumably to indicate its weight: 37 ounces. It also had a series of scrapes around the middle where someone had scratched off the trademark stripe that encircled all Adirondack bats. Former Pirates GM Joe Brown gave my dad this bat several years after Roberto died. For much of my childhood it hung on the wall of my bedroom, on a long rack with about a dozen other game-used bats.

My dad had been working at the Hall of Fame for more than a decade when, in 1993, his old friend Tony Bartirome, a one-time Pirates infielder who had become their longtime trainer, came to Cooperstown for a visit. Tony and his wife went to dinner with my folks and then came back to our house to chat. The only way to go to the first-floor washroom in that house was through my old bedroom, and on a trip there, Tony noticed that Adirondack of Clemente’s hanging on the wall.

Tony carried it into the living room. He said to Dad, “Where did you get this bat?” My dad told him that Joe Brown had given him the bat as a gift, sometime in the late ’70s. “Bill,” Tony said. “This is the bat Roberto used to get his 3,000th hit.”

My father was confused by this. “That’s impossible,” he told Tony. “The day he hit 3,000 I went down to the clubhouse, and Roberto himself handed me the bat he used. I sent it to the Hall of Fame. I walk by it every day.”

“Well,” Tony said. “I have a story to tell you.”

It’s a wonderful story, read the whole thing. Or get the book: the story is excerpted from Guilfoile’s A Drive into the Gap, available here or for the Kindle.

[This is a vintage post originally from Mar 2013.]

Tags: A Drive into the Gap · baseball · books · Kevin Guilfoile · Roberto Clemente · sports · timeless posts

John from Brisbane has added a photo to the pool:

After what felt like a never ending summer with little rain towards the end, all of a sudden, the autumn was upon us. But it just wasn't a sudden drop from unseasonably high temps, we also finally got a bit of wet weather. Not over done, but showers drifting through in what seemed a bit more like Melbourne weather, blue skies one minute then clouds and brief rain, the next.

You can see some of the effect here looking north from Scarborough to the Glasshouse Mountains north of Brisbane. The larger of the two mountains is Mt. Beerburrum, I think!

If you know two things about the Dungeon Crawler Carl book series, one is that it has impressive audiobook adaptations. Listeners are frequently surprised to learn that one man, Jeff Hays, is responsible for all the voices (aside from a couple guest spots.) The eighth book in the series, A Parade of Horribles, is due in a couple weeks, but you can get a peek behind the curtain and watch Hays record the first few chapters of the audiobook (spoilers, obv.)

• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6
• Part 7
• Part 8

While the audiobooks proper are under a ten year exclusive contract with Audible, Hays' production company, Soundbooth Theater, has been recording an audio drama version—dubbed an "Audio Immersion Tunnel"—that they distribute themselves. These are slightly re-worked versions with author Matt Dinniman's input and/or approval, added sound effects, music, and an expanded cast (Hays still voices the main characters.) You can watch him recording Season One, Episode One (Part 2, Part 3.) The finished episode is free on Soundbooth's app.

Indigenous solar projects to tackle diesel shortage concerns and halve power bills. Two remote Indigenous communities have attracted a combined $11 million [US $7.9 million] in funding for solutions to tackle their fuel security and cost-of-living crises.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

At AI Dev 26 x SF, code slingers confront their relationship with AI

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