The spooky mystery of the Toynbee Tiles

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I just spent the last three days in New York. Walking in mid-town, I encountered something that was just plain eerie. I saw an actual, real-life Toynbee Tile.

From the Toynbee Tile Wikipedia page:

The Toynbee tiles (also called Toynbee plaques) are messages of unknown origin found embedded in asphalt of streets in about two dozen major cities in the United States and four South American capitals.[1][2] Since the 1980s, several hundred tiles have been discovered. They are generally about the size of an American license plate (roughly 30 cm by 15 cm), but sometimes considerably larger. They contain some variation on the following inscription:

Bold move to counter Yale’s blocking of a student course selection web site

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A few days ago, I posted about two students at Yale (Harry Yu and Peter Xu) who built a student course selection web site that was far superior to any of the official tools offered by Yale. Yale shut them down.

On Friday, Mary Miller, Dean of Yale College, posted an official response to the controversy. In addition, a Yale student offered up his own replacement solution that is sure to stoke the controversy.

The story of Wish You Were Here

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Back in September, 1975, Pink Floyd released the album Wish You Were Here. My brother and I have always loved that album and it often comes up in our musical conversations.

Yesterday, my brother sent me a photo of Syd Barrett, one of the founding members of the band who supposedly suffered from a crippling mental illness combined with drug addiction. After penning some of the bands earliest successes, Syd left the band in April 1968. He meant a tremendous amount to the band and they missed him. He was their primary voice and they had to reinvent themselves after he left.

Wish You Were Here was an emotional reaching out to Barrett. This video tells the story of the creation of the album. About 53 minutes in, you’ll hear the story of Barrett’s return. If you don’t have the bandwidth to watch the whole video, jump there and watch for about 5 minutes and you’ll see the picture that Stu sent me.

If you are a fan of Pink Floyd, I think you’ll really enjoy this.

Heroic bro saves skunk with cup stuck on its head

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I wish this video was better quality and I wish it was shot landscape instead of portrait. But soldier on, it’s a great little story. You’ll be rooting for both the bro and the skunk by the end.

Yale students made a better version of their course catalogue. Then Yale shut it down.

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A major challenge in registering for classes is working out schedule conflicts from overlapping classes, finding a solution that allows you to take the classes you need to take while sprinkling in courses you’d love to take or maximizing your sleep schedule. This is a complex problem with a lot of moving parts. Most universities offer, at best, some primitive calendaring solutions, even though the ability to optimize your schedule based on specified priorities is eminently solvable using software.

Two Yale students did their fellow students a huge solid by building a nice little system. It became quite popular. Then Yale shut them down.

Nintendo heads for third consecutive annual loss as Wii U flops

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To me, it all comes down to this:

Pressure will likely mount on the architect of the Wii success in 2006 to step aside or shift course to focus on making money from “Super Mario” and other software titles. Nintendo so far has refused to allow its games to be played on machines built by competitors or on tablets or other mobile devices that are used by gamers.

The pressure is building. Nintendo needs to either reinvent themselves entirely, shrink to focus on their handheld success, and/or start licensing franchise brands like Zelda and Mario to Microsoft or Sony.

Fantastic traction assist for buses and trucks

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I love good design. This video shows off a traction assist system that is mounted under buses and trucks. The system design and the video itself are both well done.

Los Angeles school district finalizes $115M for iPads

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Really happy this went through. The proposal for rolling out 67,500 new iPads to Los Angeles schools was laid out in July, 2013. After 6 months of in-fighting, the proposal was adopted, with a compromise on the number of iPads.

In voting for the $115 million proposal, the board sided with schools Superintendent John Deasy, who has championed the iPad effort since its inception in July 2013. An oversight panel advised against the large tablet buy, recommending 38,500 units would be more than enough for the district’s purposes. School staff requested 67,500 iPads, but the final number will be somewhere in between, the board said.

Starbucks caught storing mobile passwords in the clear

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Are you kidding me, Starbucks?

The Starbucks mobile app, the most used mobile-payment app in the U.S., has been storing usernames, email addresses and passwords in clear text, Starbucks executives confirmed late on Tuesday (Jan. 14). The credentials were stored in such a way that anyone with access to the phone can see the passwords and usernames by connecting the phone to a PC. No jailbreaking of the phone is necessary. And that clear text also displays an extensive list of geolocation tracking points (latitude, longitude), a treasure trove of security and privacy gems for anyone who steals the phone.

Google, Nest, and the value of your home’s energy profile

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Buried in this article on the Nest acquisition is this little gem:

Researchers in 2011 were even able to use a similar approach to determine what movie was being watched on a television set by making energy profiles of each film. This was achieved by observing that a television’s electricity load will vary over time depending on whether dark or light scenes are being displayed to the viewer.

Although the researchers in question relied on very granular data from the television set, Danezis worries that such techniques could one day offer smart-home companies an X-ray view of your home.

Tony Fadell’s blog post on Google acquisition of Nest

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Tony Fadell:

This decision wasn’t made on a whim – Google has been in the mix in some way or another for about three years of our almost four-year history. In fact, my first meeting with Google as a Nester was before we’d launched. At the 2011 TED Conference, Erik Charlton and I huddled in a corner with Sergey Brin to show him a video and an early model of the Nest Learning Thermostat – he instantly got what we were doing and so did the rest of the Google team when we showed them. In May 2011, Google Ventures led our Series B round of financing, and in 2012, Series C. Time and time again, Googlers have shown themselves to be incredibly like-minded, supportive and as big of dreamers as we are. I know that joining Google will be an easy transition because we’re partnering with a company that gets what we do and who we are at Nest –and wants us to stay that way.

Best of luck. Continue making great products, you’ll be successful.

iPhone power button tips

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Great tip. I knew that tapping the power button on an incoming call silenced the ringer. I did NOT know that a double-tap sent the call directly to voicemail. And one more: tap the power button to lock the screen. Nice.

Court rules Yelp must ID negative reviewers, no constitutional protection

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This is a big deal.

In a decision that could reshape the rules for online consumer reviews, a Virginia court has ruled that the popular website Yelp must turn over the names of seven reviewers who anonymously criticized a prominent local carpet cleaning business.

The case revolves around negative feedback against Virginia-based Hadeed Carpet Cleaning. The owner, Joe Hadeed, said the users leaving bad reviews were not real customers of the cleaning service — something that would violate Yelp’s terms of service. His attorneys issued a subpoena demanding the names of seven anonymous reviewers, and a judge in Alexandria ruled that Yelp had to comply.

Origins of the dial tone

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The dial tone is another example of something that will disappear with the next generation. I found this interesting, though.

Computer driven custom cookie machine

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I find this astonishing. This guy built a Rube Goldberg contraption that dispenses carefully measured ingredients for a customized, single cookie. Crazy.

iRing gesture controller for iOS

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Multitouch gestures are an important part of iOS. The iRing expands gesture detection beyond the screen. As the software that brings gesture detection to life gets better, I expect we’ll see more of these hardware assistive devices.