Yearly Archives: 2015

The emails and tweets about the weight loss I’ve experienced using HealthKit and Apple Watch have been heartwarming, to say the very least. It was probably the most difficult piece I’ve ever written, just because I was putting myself all out there for everyone to see. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I would even post it. Finally, I looked at the screen, hit publish, and walked away. […]

After winning the 2015 Helen Keller Achievement Award for VoiceOver, Apple has highlighted some of the popular apps using VoiceOver that are available on its App Store.

AFB is recognizing Apple for VoiceOver, a gesture-based screen reader that allows users to hear a description of everything happening on the display, and other features that make iPhone, iPad and other iOS devices accessible to people with vision loss. Apple received an AFB Access Award in 2009 for its trailblazing engineering of accessible products and continues its extraordinary efforts to make their products accessible for everyone.

Congrats to all at Apple for thinking of ever customer.

Petapixel:

If you come across any photograph published in the US before 1923, you’re free to use it for whatever purpose you’d like, with or without permission, and with or without attribution. Why? Because its copyright has expired and it’s public domain.

Strangely enough, sometimes free public domain photos get sold as stock photos, and those who don’t know any better may pay large sums to use something they could have used for free.

Don’t get conned by Corbis or anyone else trying to sell you imagery that is in the public domain.

Red Bull:

Leader Paul Bonhomme and Wingman Steve Jones have been flying together for 17 years, and needed every ounce of that experience to pull off this amazing feat of aviation.

The Red Bull Matadors pilots hurtled straight through a hangar at Llanbedr Airfield, north Wales, at a speed of 160 knots (185mph), just one metre off the ground.

Brings new meaning to the words, “sphincter tightening”. Amazing skill and courage of these two guys. “If we get it wrong, we hit a building”. Indeed.

Apple earns five stars in this year’s Who Has Your Back report. This is Apple’s fifth year in the report, and it has adopted every best practice we’ve identified as part of this report. We commend Apple for its strong stance regarding user rights, transparency, and privacy.

Congrats Apple.

EFF’s evaluation of Google (three stars):

Google should take a stronger position in providing notice to users about government data requests after an emergency has ended or a gag has been lifted. Furthermore, Google should provide transparency into its data retention policies.

Spencer Wynn

The Hello Project was born of a love of story telling and curiosity.

All too often people pass one another, head down and only interacting with their mobile devices. This is an attempt to use the power of social media to reconnect people in the oldest way possible …

by saying Hello.

This is sort of the Canadian version of the famous New York city project and it brings home a thought I’ve always had – most of us have stories to tell but no one to tell them to.

I love the idea of street photography but am often too reserved and shy (too Canadian) to approach people. I think this way of doing it will inspire me to try my own photographic experiment along these lines.

Check out the picture at the top of the post. Great!

Over 600 million Samsung mobile device users may be at risk due to a significant security threat, according to researchers at mobile security specialist NowSecure.

and

“Welton found he could hijack the process of updating one of the virtual keyboards Samsung installs on many Android smartphones. From there, he could eavesdrop on phone conversations, rummage through text messages and contacts, or turn on the microphone to capture audio,”…

Enjoy your phone Samsung people.

Jim and Merlin recap WWDC and talk rock.

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Brought to you by:

Casper — An obsessively engineered mattress at a shockingly fair price.

Warby Parker — Premium quality, affordable eyewear.

Priceonomics:

As helium supplies start to dwindle, the prices have already started to rise, and party balloons are taking a back-seat to the more serious applications. A hundred years down the line, a party balloon might be about as precious as a gold ring.

Despite the fact that science has known about the impending helium scarcity for decades, it’s only made the news in the past five years. Why that is has a lot to do with helium’s complicated political history in the United States.

What a fascinating story about an element most of us give no thought to unless we are sucking it in to make funny voices.

I have been reporting on Apple for more than 20 years now, and in all that time no product has had such an impact on my life as this little piece of hardware and software. I don’t say that for dramatic effect, it has had a profound effect on the way I live. As you will read later, this is the most personal review I have ever written. […]

LensProToGo:

As many of you may have heard, LensProToGo suffered a break-in at our Concord, MA location over the weekend of June 13-14 totaling just shy of $600,000 worth of gear stolen. We’ve taken a full inventory and this is the list of items that was taken. While this list is quite large, it does represent only a portion of our inventory, so we’re still able to handle customer orders with virtually no effect.

Please take a look at this list and be wary of any used camera items for sale in the coming months. Always ask to see serial numbers before purchasing.

The nice folks at LensProToGo (who I’ve rented from often) need your help. As with any purchase, always check the serial numbers and, if you are a photographer, be on the look out for “special deals” on eBay, Craigslist and other places on lenses. As you can see by the list, LensProToGo got ripped for a lot of lenses that will soon start showing up for sale.

CBC:

Cook had left his smartphone in a taxi and traced it electronically to an address on Highbury Avenue.

When he and a relative went to the address, he was confronted by three men in a car, London police Const. Ken Steeves told CBC News.

After a discussion about the phone, the men started to drive away and Cook dove onto the hood of the car. He was shot soon afterward.

We hear “heartwarming” stories of people tracking down their iPhones, confronting the bad guys, and getting them back all the time. Here’s the flip side. Please don’t do this. I promise your phone isn’t worth your life. Contact your local police if you’ve lost your phone and can track it to a specific location.

Great appreciation piece on Medium.