I was reminded by a tweet or two from Henri Helvetica from a couple of years ago where he mentioning that he likes to listen to web pages sometimes and I wondered if I could make that work today. I remember trying this out on desktop Safari in the past and I think it was maybe an accessibility feature that let you select text and read it back to you. I remember liking the idea at first, but not liking that when you tried to do something else on your Mac you'd lost focus on what was being read and would have to set it back up again to continue. That feature just didn't really click for me after a few attempts at it.

I don't know when this was added to iOS, but today on mobile Safari I noticed that in the same menu that you use to trigger Reader Mode there's a button, labeled “Listen to Page”. This feature is pretty simple in that once you hit that button Siri just starts to read the article from top to bottom. I headed out for my dog walk with the blog post playing in my headphones and I noticed a few things:

• You can leave Safari while the audio continues to play. Just like listening to a podcast, you can jump to another app, put your phone to sleep, and control the audio using the system controls (including pause and play via AirPods).
• Siri sounds much more natural than before! Inflection and handling of punctuation sound great. The only time where I felt it didn’t sound right was when I was testing it on another blog post and I noticed it had an issue with some product names (which is not unexpected).
• Basically I think whatever text makes it into Reader Mode is what you are hearing when you use this feature. I think Reader Mode is pretty good at filtering out unnecessary page content, but I haven’t used it often enough to know if you'd be missing anything with this setup.

I think the ability to open up a blog post and have it play just like a podcast will allow me to squeeze in more learning in places where I wouldn’t have done so before. I like the idea of being able to have a page on MDN read to me while I’m cleaning snow off of my driveway or when mowing the lawn.

In the past I would normally wait until lunch or nighttime to catch up on RSS, but ever since I've started using Tapestry for RSS I find myself reading articles throughout the day or adding them to Safari to queue them up for later downtime. After this experience today I think my habits are going to change in a big way.

Epilogue

This whole thing has me thinking about a few more things:

• Having AI tools in iOS for proofreading is fine, but having my own blog post read back to me might be a really good way to catch errors or weird grammar problems.
• This reminds me of the Bespoken product that John Morton had created a Craft CMS plugin around. The idea is that you send your article text to Bespoken’s AI platform and it would provide you with an audio file you can embed onto your website. While you might say that with this Safari feature you might not need something like Bespoken, but 1. not everyone uses Safari, and 2. a thing I liked that John had presented was the ability to train the AI to correctly pronounce words and proper nouns or the ability to describe elements that wouldn’t make it into Reader Mode.
• Speaking of AI, this also might sound similar to Google’s NotebookLM product. I’ve listened to a few samples from NotebookLM and while I can see this being useful for aggregating lots of text, I would rather hear the original text as written in a blog post. If for nothing else, I feel like Siri is more genuine than the NotebookLM characters.

We talked about my experience as a web developer and then it turned into an impromptu review of the 2024 Dot One event in Toronto.

Dumb teenager me doing dumb things, I often kept a few pairs of earplugs in my stick bag but almost never put them on when I was playing. On top of that, the problem with being a band full of poor teenagers is that things like extra speakers and in-ear monitors weren't something we'd invest our part-time paychecks on. So if you’re the drummer and you want to hear the vocals and whatever the guitar is playing you’d put the main speaker and amps behind the kit and listen to them from there. You're also sitting at one of the loudest instruments in the band that has a huge dynamic range between the bass and all the cymbals.

Anyway, somewhere in my 20s I started noticing that I had a hard time hearing in my right ear. I went to the doctor and got my ears cleaned and checked out. While I was having a few issues with hearing a few different sounds it wasn’t bad enough to diagnose me as hard-of-hearing or anywhere worse than that. But I knew that something was off.

Now that I'm 40 I know for sure that my early drumming days did some serious damage. I often find myself having a hard time hearing people in crowded areas where a lot of talking is going on and I find myself asking people to repeat what they said from time to time.

It’s all my fault and while the ship has sailed I have found that being a remote employee has really helped me deal with it at work (because every conversation can be turned up with a volume knob). Elsewhere I find myself using headphones a lot to consume media and for basic hearing protection. I keep a pair of over-the-ear monitors at my drum kit for when I play at home, I have a pair of noise cancelling, over-the-ear headphones for when I mow the lawn or do anything in the wood shop, a pair of headphones for solo watching TV (which is also about not disturbing everyone in the house), and as of the last couple months I've started doing the thing I learned on ATP where you can wear AirPods Pros at concerts to kill off sounds above a certain decibel range.

AirPods Pros as Hearing Aids

At its 2024 iPhone event, Apple announced a software update coming to all AirPods Pros (2nd generation) that turn them into clinical-grade hearing aids. I can’t wait for this to roll out officially because A. I already have a pair of AirPods Pro that will work with this feature so it's just a software upgrade for me, and B. at this point I always have my AirPods Pros on me anyway.

My understanding of the feature is that you use an iPhone on iOS 18 to do a hearing test, then it helps you create a profile that syncs to all of your Apple devices. This means my iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV would all use this hearing profile to make audio sound better for me. Then as part of the AirPods themselves I can essentially put them in a hearing aid mode where it not only pumps noise from around me into the earbuds but it'll use that profile to help enhance the right sounds that work better for my ears.

While I don’t love being in this situation to begin with, at least I hope this new AirPods feature will help me out a little bit.

I wasn’t the only person shooting photos at Frostapalooza and a week later I'm starting to see tons of great photos and videos from the show pop up! The best place to get an idea what it felt like to be at this show can be found in the Frostapalooza! Google Photos album.

I also noticed Brian Kordell was shooting a lot of video from the crowd and has posted a bunch of shorts and videos on his YouTube channel, (including this clip of one of my favorite tunes of the night, Sledgehammer).

Over the past few days I’ve seen a few blog posts popping up that share some really nice insight on what it was like to participate in the show:

• Adactio: Journal—Frostapalooza by Jeremy Keith
• Frostapalooza in photos and videos by Brad Frost
• Frostapalooza by Chris Coyier (about 40% of the way down the page is a video of a very sweet jam between Chris and Jeremy from the pre-show get together)
• Vibe Check №34 - Dave Rupert

Finally, while I believe it’s currently in editing, there is a multi-camera video that is definitely worth looking forward to. I got to see a behind-the-scenes look at the process to capturing all of the clips from all of the cameras placed around the venue and it’s an amazing, yet complicated setup that got all the best angles of the night.