Yearly Archives: 2015

Apple just updated the entire iMac line, bringing the option for a Retina display to the 21.5-inch iMac, and a 5K display to every 27-inch model. I had a chance to see the displays last week, and I can say they are spectacular.

What’s your plan when your Mac’s hard drive dies? Plan ahead and get back to work in minutes with a Carbon Copy Cloner bootable backup. CCC—the app that saves your bacon.

Jim’s Note: I’ve used this app for many years. I trust and love it.

Vice:

There is nothing like the Purina Pro Plan Incredible Dog Challenge. Nowhere else in the nation are the six most popular canine contests—the Agility, the Diving Dog, the 30 Weave Up & Back, the Fetch It!, the Freestyle Flying Disc, and the Jack Russell Hurdle Race—crammed into one Olympic-style event.

The animals are referred to as “athletes” without even a hint of irony, and, for their part, they earn this honor. The agility course requires speed, endurance, execution, and, most important, an almost unfathomable level of obedience.

This is rarely on TV but, when it is, I love watching it. It may be “goofy” but the training and commitment of both the dogs and their handlers is fantastic. I’ll admit to loving the Jack Russell Terriers crash into barriers a little too much and I’ve always wished I had a dog I could play Frisbee with.

Steve Cheney:

One of Steve Jobs’ biggest legacies was his decision to stop relying on 3rd party semiconductor companies and create an internal silicon design team.3 I would go so far as to argue it’s one of the three most important strategic decisions he ever made.

If you study unit economics of semiconductors, it doesn’t really make sense to design chips and compete with companies like Intel unless you can make it up in volume. Consider the audacity back in 2007 for Apple to believe it could pull this off. How would they ever make back the R&D to build out a team and pay for expensive silicon designs over the long run, never mind design comparative performing chips? Well today we know. Apple makes nearly 100% of the profit in the entire smartphone space.

It is – in fact – these chip making capabilities, which Jobs brought in-house shortly after the launch of the original iPhone, that have helped Apple create a massive moat between itself and an entire industry.

I don’t think Apple’s advantage is as insurmountable as Cheney states but it is remarkable Apple is in this position. It’s a sense of mission and dedication and truly amazing foresight from the company that, for those of us long time Apple watchers, we could never have predicted 10 years ago.

BBC:

When was the last time you were well and truly lost? Chances are it’s been a while.

Extraordinary gadgets like smartphones and satnavs let us pinpoint our location unerringly. Like the people in Downton Abbey, we all know our place. However, the technology which delivers the world into the palms of our hands may be ushering in a kind of social immobility undreamt of even by Julian Fellowes’s hidebound little Englanders.

Discovery used to mean going out and coming across stuff – now it seems to mean turning inwards and gazing at screens. We’ve become reliant on machines to help us get around, so much so that it’s changing the way we behave, particularly among younger people who have no experience of a time before GPS.

I’m famous for having absolutely zero sense of direction. Even with GPS, I get lost all the time. But I’m OK with that. As a matter of fact, I use my GPS to get lost. I’ll set it for home and then go out riding my motorcycle. Whenever the GPS tells me to go in a certain direction to go back home, I go in the other direction. I’ve explored thousands of miles in the US and Canada like this and have found some wonderful places that I otherwise would have never come across.

Griot:

Sometimes photographs deceive. Take this one, for example. It represents John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s rebellious gesture the day they won medals for the 200 meters at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, and it certainly deceived me for a long time.

I always saw the photo as a powerful image of two barefoot black men, with their heads bowed, their black-gloved fists in the air while the US National Anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” played. It was a strong symbolic gesture – taking a stand for African American civil rights in a year of tragedies that included the death of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.

It’s a historic photo of two men of color. For this reason I never really paid attention to the other man, white, like me, motionless on the second step of the medal podium. I considered him a random presence, an extra in Carlos and Smith’s moment, or a kind of intruder. Actually, I even thought that that guy – who seemed to be just a simpering Englishman – represented, in his icy immobility, the will to resist the change that Smith and Carlos were invoking in their silent protest. But I was wrong.

It’s a powerful photograph and I, like so many others, made assumptions about the third participant. The back story is fascinating but the tale of what happened to him afterward is heartbreaking.

Boston Globe:

The Obama administration has backed down in its bitter dispute with Silicon Valley over the encryption of data on iPhones and other digital devices, concluding that it is not possible to give US law enforcement and intelligence agencies access to that information without creating an opening that China, Russia, cybercriminals, and terrorists could also exploit.

With its decision, which angered the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, the administration essentially agreed with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and a group of the nation’s top cryptographers and computer scientists.

The administration also agreed with common sense. But make no mistake, this decision came about because of pushback lead by Apple, among others, and more importantly, the administration listening to and trusting the tech companies when they were told this couldn’t be done the way the government wanted it done.

Haunting and just a bit hopeful.

Thanks to SVALT for sponsoring The Loop this week. Use code “LOOP” for a $15 discount on the ultimate high-performance Apple laptop dock, the SVALT D Performance Cooling Dock, that increases CPU Turbo Boost speeds by 106% and speeds up … Continued

Lifehacker:

Over just a few years, the batteries in our smartphones have changed a lot. That means those old tips to stretch out your battery life just aren’t as true as they once were, yet we still share them like they’re gospel. Before telling someone to disable Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, let’s shed some light on those old myths.

Pass this along to the people in your life who still believe you can overcharge the batteries on laptops or iPhones.

Atlas Obscura:

The Merritt Parkway is a four-lane highway, with a large and wooded median in between. The lanes are narrow, there are no streetlights, and it’s completely surrounded by forest. The on-ramps are almost nonexistent, meaning that getting onto the road can be a bit like the initial descent of a roller coaster. The best part, however, is that no trucks are allowed–it’s a zippy car haven. And the cars do go fast.

I used to live in Westport and Danbury CT and, even though it added quite a bit of time to the trip, I always tried to take the Merrit Parkway. When the traffic was light, it was a high speed run into New York City. In the fall, it was one of the prettiest roads I have even been on. If you’re ever in the New York city area and have a car and a few hours to kill, drive the Merrit.

SlashFilm:

The environments in The Good Dinosaur are breathtaking. There are moments in the 30 minutes of the movie I previewed that look no different from live-action footage. And if it looks real, that might be because they used real data to create the locations in the film.

Some shots in the movie look out more than 50 miles in the distance. To accomplish this near-impossible task, the set team used actual USGS data of the northwest United States to create the sets in the film.

The amount of work that goes into any animated film today is mind-boggling but Pixar go so far beyond what anyone else does for the look of their films. As the story says, they wanted the environment to be another character in the story.