Yearly Archives: 2015

VanCityBuzz:

This time every year, the Sapporo Snow Festival draws millions of people to Sapporo to see hundreds of intricately detailed snow sculptures and to participate in snow-themed cultural festivities.

The festival features an International Snow Sculpting Contest with teams from 12 countries around the world. 6,500 tons of snow is transported to the three festival sites throughout the month of January from locations in and around Sapporo.

The Star Wars sculpture is epic.

So cool.

New York Times:

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College released a study on Thursday that mapped DNA found in New York’s subway system — a crowded, largely subterranean behemoth that carries 5.5 million riders on an average weekday, and is filled with hundreds of species of bacteria (mostly harmless), the occasional spot of bubonic plague, and a universe of enigmas. Almost half of the DNA found on the system’s surfaces did not match any known organism and just 0.2 percent matched the human genome.

I’m never taking the New York City subway ever again.

According to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Apple has made a major push to recruit talent from the electric carmaker, offering massive bonuses and significant salary bumps for those willing to come to work in Cupertino.

Musk said Apple’s attempts have not been successful. I do have a lot of respect for Musk and the work he’s done.

LA Times:

Measles has been a scourge for centuries, afflicting millions of people. It has been blamed, in part, for decimating native populations of the Americas as Europeans explored the New World. In modern times, before a vaccine was developed, nearly every American contracted the virus, with its telltale skin blotches and fever. Measles was declared eradicated in the U.S. in 2000, but has staged a comeback as the inoculation rate has dropped. Here’s a history.

Many people think of measles as an innocuous childhood disease but it’s actually incredibly dangerous and sometimes deadly.

The device will communicate via a form of technology known as NFC and won’t have to be charged, Chief Executive Officer Nick Hayek said in an interview. The Swatch smartwatch will also let consumers make mobile payments and work with Windows and Android software, he said.

I really like the not having to be charged bit.

Hayek is ready to go head-to-head with Apple Inc., which has scheduled its smartwatch introduction for April.

Nobody is truly ready to take on Apple.

Vice:

Between 1974 and 1979, the Canadian government tested the idea of a basic income guarantee (BIG) across an entire town, giving people enough money to survive in a way that no other place in North America has before or since.

For those four years—until the project was cancelled and its findings packed away—the town’s poorest residents were given monthly checks that supplemented what modest earnings they had and rewarded them for working more. And for that time, it seemed that the effects of poverty began to melt away. Doctor and hospital visits declined, mental health appeared to improve, and more teenagers completed high school.

Damn Canadian socialists.

Macworld:

Providing many of the features found in its mobile sibling, the Yosemite-only Photos for OS X offers an interface less cluttered than iPhoto, improved navigation, simpler yet more powerful editing tools, the ability to sync all your images to iCloud (though it doesn’t require you to), and new options for creating books, cards, slideshows, calendars, and prints. I’ve had the opportunity to take an early look at Photos, and this is what I’ve found.

This is the developer preview but, in my experience, it’s pretty stable with few true glitches or bugs. Keep in mind, this is not (yet at least) a professional Aperture or Lightroom level app. But, that being said, it’s still pretty good.

FiftyThree:

Beginning today, the Draw, Sketch, Outline, Write, Color, and Mixer tools in Paper are available for free for everyone.

I can’t draw a straight line with a ruler but Paper is my favourite app for doodling and showing off the iPad’s drawing capabilities to others. Go grab these apps now.

With strong growth in the fourth quarter of 2014, Apple’s iOS has overtaken Android in the US, according to sales data from market research firm Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. […]

Set backstage at three iconic product launches and ending in 1998 with the unveiling of the iMac, “Steve Jobs” invites audiences behind the scenes of the digital revolution to witness an intimate portrait of the brilliant man at its epicenter.

Matt Gemmell:

There’s a lot of misunderstanding out there about mental health. Some people are up, some people are OK, and some people are down. Everyone gets down from time to time. Pull your socks up, and get on with it. Hold it together.

It’s reasonable advice – as long as you’re just feeling down.

For some people, though, down doesn’t cover it. They can’t just get on, because their feet can’t find the bottom.

There’s a predator down there. That’s the truth. Black as pitch, and silent in motion. It can see perfectly even where no light penetrates – in fact, especially there. It’s surprisingly warm to the touch, but it can drain all the heat out of a room in moments.

As one who suffers from depression, Matt’s piece really hit home for me.

It is a pretty damning indictment that Microsoft had to spend hundreds of millions on front end apps for its own platform –Microsoft Exchange — and it should send alarm bells ringing.

Microsoft has a long history of not getting product trends. They didn’t get the iPod, tablets, iPhone and a host of other products that it could have made a lot of money on. Microsoft is profit-focused, which means it makes shitty products. Apple is product-focused, which means people buy the quality and Apple makes a lot of money. Reading this, Microsoft will have no idea what the difference is.

Vice:

On his way to games, while his teammates on the bus would be mentally preparing to take the ice, James had to prepare for something else: the hatred that would inevitably be thrown at him due solely to the color of his skin.

I love hockey but it has a very recent and very ugly history of racism.

Jim and Shawn talk about Super Bowl ads, TUAW, music creation and good bourbon!

Sponsored by lynda.com (Start learning something new in 2015 by visiting the link to get a 10-day free trial and access their 2400+ courses) and Squarespace (use code GUITARS for a free trial and 10% off).

The Verge:

Apple appears to be testing a pool of cars near San Francisco that are equipped with powerful camera rigs. A Claycord blog has published photos of a car that CBS affiliate KPIX 5 has confirmed is leased to Apple. The mysterious cars have been spotted a number of times over the past several months in and around San Francisco. A video, published on YouTube in September, also shows a complex camera rig mounted on the roof of a similar Dodge minivan in New York. Both of the cars near San Francisco and New York appear to be equipped with the same LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) camera system.

This is interesting but not hugely surprising. Apple is continuing to make its Map.app and technology behind it better all the time.

Re/code:

Researcher IDC said Amazon showed the steepest annual decline among the five major tablet makers, with worldwide shipments of its Kindle Fire devices falling by as much as 70 percent compared with the holiday 2013 period.

A spokesperson for the retailer criticized IDC’s methodology, saying “our most affordable tablet ever, the Fire HD 6 at $99, which is one of our high volume products, wasn’t included in the report.” She declined to discuss sales.

Well Amazon, you know how to solve the problem. Simply report sales figures.

Mashable:

Phone Expander is designed to make it easy for a user to easily save space on their iOS device by deleting cache files inside apps, easily remove large apps installed on the device, remove pictures or videos (backing them up to the desktop first) and soon, manage music on their devices.

I ran the app on my (backed up) iPhone and it allowed me to recover a little over 2.5 GB. Not a lot but every little bit counts.

Matt Richman:

With Apple Pay, Apple leveraged its business model, cultural influence, and customer base to enter arguably the most heavily-regulated international system on Earth in a way that everyone already in the system had a reason to like. This is an incredible accomplishment, and no other company could have done it.

Matt makes a great point, one often made by many others, that Apple will and can succeed because of its tight control and integration of both hardware and software.

Medium:

Giraffedata—a 51-year-old software engineer named Bryan Henderson—is among the most prolific contributors, ranking in the top 1,000 most active editors. While some Wikipedia editors focus on adding content or vetting its accuracy, and others work to streamline the site’s grammar and style, generally few, if any, adopt Giraffedata’s approach to editing: an unrelenting, multi-year project to fix exactly one grammatical error.

Henderson has now made over 47,000 edits to the site since 2007, virtually all of them addressing this one linguistic pet peeve. Article by article, week by week, Henderson redacts imperfect sentences, tightening them almost imperceptibly. “I’m proud of it,” says Henderson of the project. “It’s just fun for me. I’m not doing it to have any impact on the world.”

You’ve got to admire the dedication if nothing else.