The smartphone platform wars are pretty much over, and Apple and Google won. But it’s interesting, in passing, to note the final score, and think about what it means.

Some good work from Benedict Evans.

The world’s biggest online retailer, which has laid out plans to start using drones for deliveries by 2017, said a cross-government team supported by the UK Civil Aviation Authority had provided it with the permissions necessary to explore the process.

I just don’t know about this whole thing.

Recently, there has been a virtual tsunami of articles about the so-called hidden dangers of using the Pokémon GO app. The vast majority of them concern potential violations of the privacy rights of both consumers and landmark-owners. The media’s Chicken Little-like take on this is that augmented reality apps are opening the door to a dystopian future.

However, what has not been widely discussed is the impact of all this on the developers of augmented reality apps.

There are so many things to consider, it’s almost mind boggling.

Dan Frakes:

I’ve long recommended creating a bootable installer drive—on an external hard drive, thumb drive, or USB stick—for the version of OS X you’re running on your Mac. It’s great for installing the OS on multiple Macs, because you don’t have to download the ~5GB installer onto each computer, and it serves as a handy emergency disk if your Mac is experiencing problems.

Dan takes you through all the steps using Terminal.

Many people suffer from depression—some people are in so deep, they don’t even know it. Sometimes it takes strong people like Robert Macmillan telling their story to make you realize that you’re not alone. If you know someone suffering from depression, help them.

There are many of us—errr, people—who build stuff with Legos at all ages. Having grown up with loads of hand-me-down Legos (and having a Lego Wall-E sitting on my desk right now), I started to wonder how Legos evolved from the sets I remember from my childhood to what they are today.

Everyone loves Lego.

[Via Coudal]

Bob Mansfield had stepped back from a day-to-day role at the company a few years ago, after leading the hardware engineering development of products including the MacBook Air laptop computer, the iMac desktop computer, and the iPad tablet. Apple now has Mr. Mansfield running the company’s secret autonomous, electric-vehicle initiative, code-named Project Titan, the people said.

Mansfield is a very smart guy and is well respected inside and outside of Apple.

Chuck La Tournous:

I’ll begin this story the same way I began the phone call to my wife: “I’m OK, but…”

I’ve known Chuck for a long and he’s a friend. I’m glad you’re okay!

Law enforcement agents had seen a YouTube demonstration of a technique developed by Jain’s lab which could transform fingerprint scans into fake fingertips that could fool the sensors on smartphones.

You certainly can’t blame law enforcement for using every trick they can.

There is no doubt that Musk is a very smart man. He went way out on a limb building the things he has over the last decade and he’s succeeded.

Two youths unaware of their surroundings when they were playing Pokemon GO on their cell phones made an illegal border crossing this week from Canada into the United States in a remote part of Montana, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol said.

The weirdness goes on.

Om Malik:

As an avid reader, I am often amazed how much of our written materials are about the past (or the near past) and the future (and the near future) but never about the present. Is present too boring? Or is too real? Or is it too incomplete to merit a careful and long deliberation.

That’s an interesting point. I hadn’t really considered that before.

It’s really interesting that they retain knowledge of the people in these experiments, and reacted to other crows and predators, but not pigeons.

Inside the Wilson tennis ball factory. I also find these things fascinating.

With all of the press it’s received in the past couple of weeks, it will come as no surprise that Pokemon Go has been a huge success. In fact, Apple told me today that the game has set a new App Store record with more downloads in its first week than any other app in history. That is impressive. […]

These are cool, I’d love to have some of these.

“Because our network is a shared resource and we need to ensure all customers have a great mobile experience with Verizon, we are notifying a very small group of customers on unlimited plans who use an extraordinary amount of data that they must move to one of the new Verizon Plans by August 31, 2016,” a Verizon spokesperson told Ars. “These users are using data amounts well in excess of our largest plan size (100GB). While the Verizon Plan at 100GB is designed to be shared across multiple users, each line receiving notification to move to the new Verizon Plan is using well in excess of that on a single device.”

I have no idea how someone could use 100GB of data a month.

With the wireless industry maturing, Verizon has been buying up internet and advertising technology companies, including AOL, and presenting itself as the best bet to take on Google and Facebook Inc. in mobile advertising. Yahoo has millions of users, a collection of websites including Flickr, Tumblr and Yahoo Finance and Sports and some useful digital-ad tech like Flurry and BrightRoll. Together with AOL, the new Yahoo under Verizon may have a better chance of competing in a digital ad market dominated by two big players.

It’s interesting to me that all of the companies Yahoo bought basically disappeared from consumer consciousness after the purchase. I’m not sure if Verizon can raise the profile of those companies or not, but it will be interesting to watch this play out.

Thank you Igloo for sponsoring The Loop this week. Igloo is an intranet you’ll actually like. It’s 100% cloud-based, so you’ll always have the latest version and it can be accessed from any device, anywhere. It’s time to simplify work and keep people more connected than ever before.

The country’s National Center for Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity (NISC) issued nine instructions to users of the mobile game, ranging from advising them not to use their real names to warning gamers over fake apps.

Be safe people.

A good article from Jason Snell, showing you where and how to see what’s associated with your Apple ID.

Each day, we make million of updates to Google Maps throughout the world. But it’s still not enough to ensure that every single restaurant, shop or landmark worldwide has the most accurate information possible. That’s why we’ve been rolling out new, easy ways for you to help keep the neighborhoods and places where you hang out up-to-date.

Making it easier for users to update places in their neighborhood is obviously a smart idea.

Via MacStories]

I also found my frame rates to be significantly higher than before the patch as well. For example, in certain areas I would average around 30 – 50 frames per second before the switch to Metal. After the switch I found myself getting around 70 – 90 frames per second in the same places.

You can also read the follow-up post.

I’ve looked at telephoto lens in the past, and this is a good roundup of what’s available. Ultimately, I went for the DxO One.

There has been some speculation today that Apple purchased cloud-based music provider, Omnifone. According to my sources, that’s not the case. […]

With Plex for Sonos you can now browse and play your entire Plex music collection on any Sonos device, right from the Sonos app.

Great news.

ChefSteps recently introduced Joule, a small and easy-to-use sous vide tool, the first of many of the products planned by Young and his team of over 50 chefs, scientists, photographers, writers and engineers.

It’s not often you hear of a person with this combination of attributes. Interesting interview.

One of the two oldest methods of applying color to web pages, named colors remain very useful in web design and development today. Consisting of 149 distinct keywords (shown above, with their hexadecimal equivalents) CSS named colors have a few special features

The decision to drop a paywall can provide insight into how a news organization’s “values intersect with its commodification strategy, its technology design, and its brand identity” as outlets of all stripes are still deciding how much their reporting should cost.

This discussion has been going on for two decades.

Modi’s cabinet on Wednesday is likely to approve a three-year exemption on local-sourcing requirements for foreign single-brand retail companies with “cutting-edge technology,” according to the people, who asked not to be identified due to rules for speaking with the media.

This is great news, although I’m not sure what happens after the three-year exemption.