Assaulted for wearing Google Glass, but not for privacy reasons

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Kyle Russell writes for Business Insider. He was wrapping up an assignment, covering a protest of a Google lawyer turned part-time landlord, when someone ran up to him and grabbed his Google Glass from his face.

The story is less about this assault and more about the impact well heeled startups are having on the local communities. As the money floods in, housing prices rise, taxes increase, and local residents are prices out of their homes. Anger and resentment brews. Can this be fixed? A thoughtful read.

Cry Baby: The Pedal That Rocks The World

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[VIDEO] The wah-wah guitar pedal emerged in the 60s as a huge influence in the guitar universe. I still have mine. A fantastic invention.

Cry Baby: The Pedal That Rocks The World tells the story of the wah wah effect pedal, from its invention in 1966 to the present day. Musicians, engineers, and historians discuss the impact of the pedal on popular music and demonstrate the various ways it has been used, as well as how its evolution has improved the ability of artists to express themselves musically. The film features interviews with Brad Plunkett, the inventor of the pedal, plus many other musical luminaries such as Ben Fong-Torres, Eddie Van Halen, Slash, Buddy Guy, Art Thompson, Eddie Kramer, Kirk Hammett, Dweezil Zappa, and Jim Dunlop. These professionals explain how a musical novelty transcended convention and has become timelessly woven into the fabric of modern pop-culture.

Video embedded in the original post.

Alpine to sell stand-alone CarPlay consoles

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Nikkei.com:

While a slew of carmakers will soon start offering vehicles that come standard with a CarPlay interface built in, the Japanese company’s device is to be the first aftermarket product compatible with the system. It will first be available in the U.S. and Europe and likely cost around $500 to $700.

The device will connect to an iPhone 5 or later by wire. Drivers will be able to view maps on its screen, likely 7 inches, and use voice commands to access messages, make calls and play music. The system will be able to read messages and directions aloud.

This looks pretty cool. A real boost for CarPlay.

The classic Kombi Volkswagen van is retired, makes final wish

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[VIDEO] The Kombi van was created in the 1940s and is an icon of the automotive industry. Called the “hippie van”, or the VW bus, the Kombi van has had a long colorful life. The last one rolled off the assembly line in Brasil at the end of last year.

The video embedded in the post is a love letter from Kombi to the world. Fantastic.

Google pilot program tracks online clicks all the way to brick and mortar purchases

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Wall Street Journal:

The company’s new pilot program involves AdWords, its biggest advertising program, in which advertisers place links next to Internet-search results. Google gets paid when users click on an ad and visit the advertiser’s website.

But while tracking clicks is an effective way to measure a Web ad’s impact on online sales, the system breaks down when shoppers enter a physical store, where their behavior is harder to monitor.

“Clicks are just the beginning, and everyone knows that there’s more value to tying ads to purchases,” said Benny Arbel, chief executive of myThings, an advertising-technology company that works with Google but isn’t involved in the pilot program. “If Google can demonstrate that people did not just click on an ad but that they actually bought something, that is the Holy Grail.”

This will mean a big new source of revenue for Google and a wealth of new data they will be able to collect about their users’ habits.

XKCD’s take on Heartbleed

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Read the linked comic, then take a read of the How it works post from a few days ago. The XKCD comic is basically showing a series of GET requests and what happens when the requested data size doesn’t match the actual data size.

Thoughts on asking users for iOS permissions

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Asking a user for permission to send them push notifications or to access their private data can be a little bit of a minefield.

For many apps, not getting access to a phone’s sensors or data can change the entire user experience. For example, if an app depends on where the user is standing, declining access to location could render the app useless. More subtly, if push notifications play a critical role in getting your user to form a habit of using your app, declined access could lead to you losing them forever.

Making it all worse is that when a user taps “Don’t Allow”, there is no easy way for them to reverse that decision.

If you are interested in user interface/experience, this is some good food for thought.

Banning “feigned surprise”

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I just loved this essay about banning “feigned surprise”, a pretty common response in the programming universe.

“Feigned surprise” (when someone gasps and says something like: “you don’t even know about monads?”) is a method of belittling someone and lording your superiority over them.

Updated aerial pictures of Apple’s new spaceship campus

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It’s definitely getting there.

As you can see from the pictures below, the demolition part of the work seems to be complete. There are no buildings left standing. There is a lot of work being done by heavy construction machines throughout the field.

Great pictures.

How Uber plans to challenge Amazon on same day delivery

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I would not have made the connection from Uber to same day package delivery, but once you see the logic, hard to punch a hole in it. They are leveraging their existing GPS tracking infrastructure.

How the Heartbleed vulnerability works

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I’ve been reading about the Heartbleed bug, trying to understand how it does what it does, how a hacker could use the vulnerability to gain access to your data.

If you have not heard of Heartbleed, read this, which was posted last night.

Read the main post for my ham-handed attempt at explaining how this vulnerability works.

Microsoft to compete with Amazon and Netflix with their own original programming

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Bloomberg:

Microsoft Corp. is going Hollywood with a cast including comedians Sarah Silverman and Seth Green, aspiring World Cup players and eerily human robots.

All are involved in shows that Microsoft’s new Xbox television studio plans to roll out globally starting in June. Helmed by former CBS Corp. honcho Nancy Tellem, who Microsoft hired 19 months ago to build a TV powerhouse from the ground up, the studio now has six series lined up — including a science-fiction thriller called “Humans” about humanoid robot workers — and more than a dozen projects in development.

This is Microsoft’s not-so-Trojan horse into the living room, building dependence on the Xbox One for accessing web-based programming on your TV, competing with Apple TV, Fire TV, and Google’s evolving TV solution.

WWDC lottery results are out – here’s mine

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Am I in? Am I in?

Dear Developer,

Thank you for registering for the random selection process to attend WWDC 2014.

Unfortunately, you were not selected to purchase a ticket. However, you can still take advantage of great WWDC content. We’ll be posting session videos, slides, and sample code throughout the week for all Registered Apple Developers.

We appreciate your support.

Best regards, Apple Developer Program Support

Pheh. If you put yourself in for the lottery, hopefully your luck was better than mine. The good news is, Apple has been great about putting everything on line quickly.

Curated JavaScript resources

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This is an actively curated collection, with articles for beginners and those with experience. Terrific resource.

Israeli firm shows off nanotech that can charge a phone in 30 seconds

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[VIDEO] Wall Street Journal:

StoreDot Ltd., a Tel-Aviv based start-up, says it hopes to at least make the charging process faster–unveiling Monday a prototype charger that promises to take you battery from a tiny sliver of red to 100%, all in about 30 seconds.

My natural reaction is a healthy skepticism. That said, here’s an article from last October on StoreDot’s work with bio-organic LED displays, and another from November on biological semiconductors. There’s certainly some science behind the show. Video embedded in the post.

Gmail has a mute button

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I did not know this. Gmail makes it easy to drop out of a reply all email thread. Great idea.

Statistical analysis of the Apple App Store

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If you in any way make your living, or hope to make your living, via the App Store, I think you’ll find this fascinating. For example:

I ran a simple query on my data to determine the distribtion of user ratings. I found that 60% of apps do not have any user ratings

I’m surprised by this. Zero ratings. Not one person took the time to rate 60% of the apps. To me, that means 60% of the apps never get found, never find an audience.

The guilt of the video-game millionaires

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From the New Yorker:

One night in March, 2013, Rami Ismail and his business partner Jan Willem released a game for mobile phones called Ridiculous Fishing. Ismail, who was twenty-four at the time and who lives in the Netherlands, woke the following morning to find that the game had made him tens of thousands of dollars overnight. His first reaction was not elation but guilt. His mother, who has a job in local government, had already left for work. “Ever since I was a kid I’ve watched my mom wake up at six in the morning, work all day, come home, make my brother and me dinner—maybe shout at me for too much ‘computering,’ ” he said. “My first thought that day was that while I was asleep I’d made more money than she had all year. And I’d done it with a mobile-phone game about shooting fish with a machine gun.”

Great read.

Not so great review of Amazon Fire TV

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I didn’t ask for games. I didn’t ask for photos. I asked for a streaming media solution that could do things right: Something easy to pick up, simple to use, and something that actually made the experience of playing and navigating through multimedia, dare I say it, fun.

Amazon promised all of the above with Fire TV, which the company unveiled Wednesday at an event in New York City. Unfortunately, the device doesn’t live up to its own hype. Perhaps Amazon’s homegrown solution was a bit premature and its ambitions too lofty, because while Fire TV can do almost everything, little of it is done right.

Ouch.

Last year, 71 million people watched other people play video games

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I remember the first time I saw the X Games on TV. Snowboarding? On TV? It just seemed odd. But now snowboarding has also become mainstream, a big draw in the Winter Olympics.

Turns out, this same thing is happening with video games. Though I shudder to think that video games will ever make its way into the Olympics, there is no doubt that watching other people play video games has gone mainstream.

Exploring and erasing your Google search history

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Molly Wood, of the New York Times, talking about your search history:

YOUR search history contains some of the most personal information you will ever reveal online: your health, mental state, interests, travel locations, fears and shopping habits.

And that is information most people would want to keep private. Unfortunately, your web searches are carefully tracked and saved in databases, where the information can be used for almost anything, including highly targeted advertising and price discrimination based on your data profile.

She suggests that you visit this page to visit your history and, if you choose, erase it.

Treasure trove of data on app and book sales from Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft

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Follow the headline link for a wealth of data on app sales from the iOS and Mac App Stores, Google Play, Amazon, Windows Phone and PC. For eBooks, there are numbers for Apple iBooks and Kindle. This data has been available for years and is well known in the developer community, but not so well known in the general tech community.