Yearly Archives: 2015

Ars Technica:

At the Flash Memory Summit in California, Samsung has unveiled what appears to be the world’s largest hard drive—and somewhat surprisingly, it uses NAND flash chips rather than spinning platters. The rather boringly named PM1633a, which is being targeted at the enterprise market, manages to cram almost 16 terabytes into a 2.5-inch SSD package. By comparison, the largest conventional hard drives made by Seagate and Western Digital currently max out at 8 or 10TB.

That’s quite a lot of porn.

But I can’t quite put my finger on it.

…when iOS 9 beta detects a flight number, in this case Delta #2182, it transforms the text into an actionable link connected to data pulled from an offsite server. A long press on said link brings up options to preview flight information or copy text.

This is a great little added feature.

Catalog your repertoire. Prompt your lyrics live on stage. Keep everyone in sync. If you perform live on stage, alone or with a group, Setlists will make you a better professional. Forget carrying around heavy binders of paper and writing up tonight’s set on a napkin with a Sharpie.

Great looking app. I’ll be using this one.

Rene Ritchie takes an in-depth look at multitasking in iOS.

Twitter:

While Twitter is largely a public experience, Direct Messages let you have private conversations about the memes, news, movements, and events that unfold on Twitter. Each of the hundreds of millions of Tweets sent across Twitter every day is an opportunity for you to spark a conversation about what’s happening in your world. That’s why we’ve made a number of changes to Direct Messages over the last few months. Today’s change is another big step towards making the private side of Twitter even more powerful and fun.

I honestly don’t know if this is a good thing or not.

9to5Mac:

Apple has joined the official NFC Forum as a top-tier sponsor. Along with the sponsorship role, Apple has joined the forum’s Board of Directors, according to the forum’s official website.

With representation and sponsorship of the forum, Apple will be able to help advance the development of NFC chips across the industry and develop new NFC-based products at a quicker pace.

Apple has joined multiple industry forums for key components over the past several years, and the Cupertino-based company is a core member of both the USB and Bluetooth connectivity organizations.

This will undoubtedly help drive even more innovation in NFC. Apple waited to implement the protocol until they had the device to really take advantage of it. Now that they do, they are looking to use their directorship to drive further development in ways beneficial to the company.

iMore:

iOS 9 takes multitasking from the background and puts it right up front on the iPad.

Apple calls it Multitasking for iPad. The iPad, of course, has always multitasked at the system level, and over the years has gained background tasks and refresh and other forms of third-party multitasking as well. With iOS 9, however, the iPad is getting more than just the ability to do multiple things at once—it’s getting the ability to show multiple apps at once. It’s getting Slide Over and Split View.

Both Slide Over and Split View allow you to have two apps on-screen at the same time—a “primary” app and a “secondary” app. The primary app is the one you start with, full screen. The secondary app is the one you bring in that either overlays a part of the screen in Slide Over or takes over part of the screen in Split View.

This new functionality might actually get me using my iPad more. It’s been gathering dust since I got the iPhone 6 plus but Slide Over and Split View sound like the kinds of features I’m looking for to help the iPad get closer to a laptop in terms of useability.

Re/code:

CurrentC, the payments app being created by a consortium of big retailers known as MCX, may not launch widely this year as originally planned, MCX CEO Brian Mooney told Re/code in an interview on Tuesday. The company will begin a public pilot of its app in Columbus, Ohio in a few weeks and will not rush a wider rollout if the product is not ready, he said.

“This is a long game,” Mooney said. “Certainly going faster is always better — that’s not necessarily a debatable point. But we’re going to do it right.”

I don’t think there’s much doubt, after RiteAid and Best Buy and others have changed their plans, that CurrentC, at least in its present form, is DOA.

Vinyl Record Day:

Vinyl Record Day is dedicated to the preservation of the cultural influence, the recordings and the cover art of the vinyl record, celebrating our fondest music with friends and family.

Today is the day Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. Do you remember the first (or last) vinyl record you bought? For me, it was Rush’s “Bastille Day”.

Flyovers are very cool.

Mental Floss:

The British Library is the largest library collection in the world, with more than 170 million items in its catalogue.

The collections are generated by the so-called “Mechanical Curator”, which randomly chooses images from public domain books from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Better yet, every image links back to a PDF of the source book so you can determine the full context. The sheer volume of images means it’s impossible for the institution to organise them alone, and so part of the project is a request that users help identify and tag the content. Essentially, you get to contribute to the British Library’s curation.

Do not go to The British Library’s Flickr page unless you have a lot of free time. It’s an absolute time suck.

Macworld:

Photos for OS X is designed to appeal to a broad audience, with simple editing tools that let anyone improve their photographs. But is that it? Even though it’s a 1.0 product (replacing iPhoto and Aperture), a lot of editing power is actually hidden beneath that user-friendly surface.

I’m a happy Lightroom user and won’t touch Photos for OS X with a ten foot pole but this article does a good job of explaining what kind of editing you can expect to find in the app.

Rite Aid announced today that all of the Company’s nearly 4,600 stores nationwide will begin accepting mobile payments, including Apple Pay and Google Wallet, starting Saturday, August 15.

The significance here is that Rite Aid was a supporter of CurrentC. Clearly that didn’t work out so well for them.

BMW on Tuesday said it was looking into whether Google infringed any trademark rights after the Silicon Valley-based group set up a new company called Alphabet, which is also the name of a BMW subsidiary.

“We are examining whether there are any implications over trademarks,” a BMW spokeswoman said on Tuesday. The spokeswoman said there were currently no plans to take legal steps against Google.

This is a very important topic for many people, especially when considering what technologies to implement on the Internet.

Business Insider:

We’ve rounded up some of the best libraries around the world that offer not only an impressive collection of reading material, but also boast unique architecture.

From an 8th-century monastery in Switzerland to a library with hanging bookshelves in Mexico City, here are the libraries that every book worm should visit.

I still remember going to the Halifax Library as a kid and marvelling at all the books. To this day, I love these kinds of expansive, beautiful libraries. I was surprised to see Vancouver’s Public Library on this list. While its outside is interesting, it’s interior is fairly pedestrian and not nearly as spectacular as many of the libraries pictured.

Fortune:

Ad-blocking software is estimated to cost websites nearly $22 billion in ad revenue this year.

Software that blocks digital ads will cost online publishers nearly $22 billion in advertising revenue this year, according to a new study.

That figure comes by way of a new study from Adobe Systems Page Fair, an Irish startup that caters to websites and advertisers looking to avoid those so-called “ad-blocking” practices.

As a content creator, this is a disturbing statistic (and one I take with a truckload of salt because of the inherent bias in the study’s creator) but it’s a problem brought on by the industry itself. If ads hadn’t gotten so intrusive and obnoxious, perhaps their intended recipients wouldn’t be working so hard to avoid them. And it’s only going to get worse for both sides.

Venturebeat:

The startup, backed by a rare lineup — Tim Cook, Schmidt’s Family Foundation, Y Combinator — launched preorders for its first product, a shower-head, on Kickstarter last night. The size of Nebia’s seed round was not shared, but Y Combinator is known to invest at least $120,000 by default. Nebia aims to raise at least $100,000 more on Kickstarter.

But Nebia isn’t just out to create some pricy shower system. CEO Philip Winter claims the device uses 70 percent less water than a traditional shower, and he hopes to scale the product to a point where it’s cheap enough to bring to developing markets.

I’ve been very vocal about my dislike of Kickstarter projects in general but I love showers even more than I hate Kickstarter. This idea is very clever, looks great and, as someone who is always looking for a better shower experience (and to use less water), it’s something I am very interested in. I’ve backed this project.

NASA:

As the third brightest object in the sky the space station is easy to see if you know when to look up.

NASA’s Spot The Station service gives you a list of upcoming sighting opportunities for thousands of locations worldwide, and will let you sign up to receive notices of opportunities in your email inbox or cell phone. The space station looks like a fast-moving plane in the sky, but it is dozens of times higher than any airplane and traveling thousands of miles an hour faster. It is bright enough that it can even be seen from the middle of a city!

Obviously, the times of overflight vary and you likely won’t see every sighting but it is still kind of cool to get an email or SMS, go outside, look up and see the bright ISS transiting your night sky.

The Verge:

There was a time in the not-too-distant past where you couldn’t just open Spotify, your favorite torrent client, or iTunes and get hold of a song you wanted to hear. No, you had to obtain actual physical goods that they sold in things called stores. That is, of course, unless you were a member of the Columbia House music club.

Mail-order convenience was big back then, and the idea of a subscription music service that came to your door was pretty appealing. But times change and mediums mutate, and now The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Columbia House has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It was an ugly ending. Revenues for Columbia House peaked in 1996 at $1.4 billion, but last year the company declared net revenue of just $17 million.

Living in the backwoods of Nova Scotia as a kid without much money and no access to a record store, Columbia House was the only way many of us could get the latest CDs and cassette tapes. And, getting 12 albums for a penny also may have been my first lesson in “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”.

Nothing like hearing the vision directly from the top man at Google.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president of Chrome and App, said the company developed Brillo, a stripped down version of Android that will run on battery-powered connected devices and Weave, a communications standard that will let developers build programs that allow these connected devices to communication.

Does this mean malware can now infest your home?

Business Insider:

Google just announced a brand new operating structure.

It is now a subsidiary of a company called Alphabet, which has Larry Page as CEO. The CEO of Google is Sundar Pichai.

“Alphabet Inc. will replace Google Inc. as the publicly-traded entity and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares of Alphabet, with all of the same rights. Google will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet.”

This is blockbuster news breaking as we speak.

From Kari (Mrs PQ):

Pad & Quill is passionate about designing and crafting unique leather bags, accessories and cases for Apple products. We employ the best leathers, canvas and various materials to make products that are beautiful, functional, durable and ageless. Our craftsmen exemplify the heart and soul of our company and we celebrate their skill by inviting each artisan to sign each Leather Bag or Apple Watch Bands as it is completed for you, our customer.

Now Nokia boss Rajeev Suri is planning a comeback. He must wait until late 2016 before he can consider re-entering the handset business – after a non-compete deal with Microsoft expires – but preparations are underway.

The company has already dipped its toe into the consumer market; it has launched an Android tablet, the N1, which went on sale in January in China and days ago unveiled a “virtual-reality camera” – heralding it as the “rebirth of Nokia”.

Like many of us, I was a longtime Nokia user, before the company dropped the ball and then kicked it away. I fear for their new business if the plan is to enter an already crowded market with another Android device.

Horace Dediu:

It’s much more likely that Apple converts existing smartphone users while Android converts first-time users.

Brilliant.

Ben Bajarin tackles upgrades, Android switchers, and China in addressing Wall St. concerns over how much growth is left for iPhone.

The Silicon Valley automaker is losing more than $4,000 on every Model S electric sedan it sells, using its reckoning of operating losses, and it burned $359 million in cash last quarter in a bull market for luxury vehicles. The company on Wednesday cut its production targets for this year and next. Chief Executive Elon Musk said he’s considering options to raise more capital, and didn’t rule out selling more stock.

Elon is an interesting guy. He set some aggressive goals for the company that Wall Street isn’t convinced he can meet.

Samsung closed the gap with Apple when it launched a touch-based fingerprint sensor in the Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy S6 edge, but a recent report claims that fingerprint sensors that are used in Android smartphones are not as secure as TouchID fingerprint sensor used in the recent iPhones.

Samsung’s implementation isn’t as good as Apple’s? Shocking.