Vice:

There is nothing like the Purina Pro Plan Incredible Dog Challenge. Nowhere else in the nation are the six most popular canine contests—the Agility, the Diving Dog, the 30 Weave Up & Back, the Fetch It!, the Freestyle Flying Disc, and the Jack Russell Hurdle Race—crammed into one Olympic-style event.

The animals are referred to as “athletes” without even a hint of irony, and, for their part, they earn this honor. The agility course requires speed, endurance, execution, and, most important, an almost unfathomable level of obedience.

This is rarely on TV but, when it is, I love watching it. It may be “goofy” but the training and commitment of both the dogs and their handlers is fantastic. I’ll admit to loving the Jack Russell Terriers crash into barriers a little too much and I’ve always wished I had a dog I could play Frisbee with.

Steve Cheney:

One of Steve Jobs’ biggest legacies was his decision to stop relying on 3rd party semiconductor companies and create an internal silicon design team.3 I would go so far as to argue it’s one of the three most important strategic decisions he ever made.

If you study unit economics of semiconductors, it doesn’t really make sense to design chips and compete with companies like Intel unless you can make it up in volume. Consider the audacity back in 2007 for Apple to believe it could pull this off. How would they ever make back the R&D to build out a team and pay for expensive silicon designs over the long run, never mind design comparative performing chips? Well today we know. Apple makes nearly 100% of the profit in the entire smartphone space.

It is – in fact – these chip making capabilities, which Jobs brought in-house shortly after the launch of the original iPhone, that have helped Apple create a massive moat between itself and an entire industry.

I don’t think Apple’s advantage is as insurmountable as Cheney states but it is remarkable Apple is in this position. It’s a sense of mission and dedication and truly amazing foresight from the company that, for those of us long time Apple watchers, we could never have predicted 10 years ago.

BBC:

When was the last time you were well and truly lost? Chances are it’s been a while.

Extraordinary gadgets like smartphones and satnavs let us pinpoint our location unerringly. Like the people in Downton Abbey, we all know our place. However, the technology which delivers the world into the palms of our hands may be ushering in a kind of social immobility undreamt of even by Julian Fellowes’s hidebound little Englanders.

Discovery used to mean going out and coming across stuff – now it seems to mean turning inwards and gazing at screens. We’ve become reliant on machines to help us get around, so much so that it’s changing the way we behave, particularly among younger people who have no experience of a time before GPS.

I’m famous for having absolutely zero sense of direction. Even with GPS, I get lost all the time. But I’m OK with that. As a matter of fact, I use my GPS to get lost. I’ll set it for home and then go out riding my motorcycle. Whenever the GPS tells me to go in a certain direction to go back home, I go in the other direction. I’ve explored thousands of miles in the US and Canada like this and have found some wonderful places that I otherwise would have never come across.

Griot:

Sometimes photographs deceive. Take this one, for example. It represents John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s rebellious gesture the day they won medals for the 200 meters at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, and it certainly deceived me for a long time.

I always saw the photo as a powerful image of two barefoot black men, with their heads bowed, their black-gloved fists in the air while the US National Anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” played. It was a strong symbolic gesture – taking a stand for African American civil rights in a year of tragedies that included the death of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.

It’s a historic photo of two men of color. For this reason I never really paid attention to the other man, white, like me, motionless on the second step of the medal podium. I considered him a random presence, an extra in Carlos and Smith’s moment, or a kind of intruder. Actually, I even thought that that guy – who seemed to be just a simpering Englishman – represented, in his icy immobility, the will to resist the change that Smith and Carlos were invoking in their silent protest. But I was wrong.

It’s a powerful photograph and I, like so many others, made assumptions about the third participant. The back story is fascinating but the tale of what happened to him afterward is heartbreaking.

Boston Globe:

The Obama administration has backed down in its bitter dispute with Silicon Valley over the encryption of data on iPhones and other digital devices, concluding that it is not possible to give US law enforcement and intelligence agencies access to that information without creating an opening that China, Russia, cybercriminals, and terrorists could also exploit.

With its decision, which angered the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, the administration essentially agreed with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and a group of the nation’s top cryptographers and computer scientists.

The administration also agreed with common sense. But make no mistake, this decision came about because of pushback lead by Apple, among others, and more importantly, the administration listening to and trusting the tech companies when they were told this couldn’t be done the way the government wanted it done.

Lifehacker:

Over just a few years, the batteries in our smartphones have changed a lot. That means those old tips to stretch out your battery life just aren’t as true as they once were, yet we still share them like they’re gospel. Before telling someone to disable Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, let’s shed some light on those old myths.

Pass this along to the people in your life who still believe you can overcharge the batteries on laptops or iPhones.

Atlas Obscura:

The Merritt Parkway is a four-lane highway, with a large and wooded median in between. The lanes are narrow, there are no streetlights, and it’s completely surrounded by forest. The on-ramps are almost nonexistent, meaning that getting onto the road can be a bit like the initial descent of a roller coaster. The best part, however, is that no trucks are allowed–it’s a zippy car haven. And the cars do go fast.

I used to live in Westport and Danbury CT and, even though it added quite a bit of time to the trip, I always tried to take the Merrit Parkway. When the traffic was light, it was a high speed run into New York City. In the fall, it was one of the prettiest roads I have even been on. If you’re ever in the New York city area and have a car and a few hours to kill, drive the Merrit.

SlashFilm:

The environments in The Good Dinosaur are breathtaking. There are moments in the 30 minutes of the movie I previewed that look no different from live-action footage. And if it looks real, that might be because they used real data to create the locations in the film.

Some shots in the movie look out more than 50 miles in the distance. To accomplish this near-impossible task, the set team used actual USGS data of the northwest United States to create the sets in the film.

The amount of work that goes into any animated film today is mind-boggling but Pixar go so far beyond what anyone else does for the look of their films. As the story says, they wanted the environment to be another character in the story.

Handelsblatt:

Handelsblatt: Apple just hired some of Tesla’s most important engineers. Do you have to worry about a new competitor?

Musk: Important engineers? They have hired people we’ve fired. We always jokingly call Apple the “Tesla Graveyard.” If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I’m not kidding.

Handelsblatt: Do you take Apple’s ambitions seriously?

Musk: Did you ever take a look at the Apple Watch? (laughs) No, seriously: It’s good that Apple is moving and investing in this direction. But cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches. You can’t just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: Build me a car. But for Apple, the car is the next logical thing to finally offer a significant innovation. A new pencil or a bigger iPad alone were not relevant enough.

Yet another person who should know better being dismissive of Apple. Remember when cell phone manufacturers said it’s not easy to make a phone and that Apple couldn’t just walk in and take over? How’d that work out for them?

Re/code:

Academy Award-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin uses actual events to take the audience on an imagined — as in, fictional — series of fast-paced exchanges in the minutes before the curtain would rise on the introduction of each product.

But the writer and director weren’t looking to create a biopic that rigidly adhered to the details of Jobs’s life — rather, they wanted to create an “impressionistic portrait” that drew from real-life events.

The story is populated by events that never happened — such as a dramatic reimagining of preparations for the Mac’s demo in which it blows up in rehearsal, instead of declaring, “Hello, I am Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag” — and long, stinging exchanges that aren’t drawn from any of the six biographies written about Jobs.

I’ll still see the movie but will be disappointed if only because I would have preferred more “reality”. Steve Jobs was such a fascinating person that his life story, in my opinion, doesn’t need the kinds of embellishments described in this review.

The Next Web:

Lightroom for mobile on iOS can now be used locally on your phone or tablet without the desktop Lightroom app, without a Creative Cloud Photography Plan subscription and even without an Adobe ID. The same feature is coming soon to Android.

This move is part of an overall desire to broaden the audience. By letting people use Lightroom for mobile without Creative Cloud, Adobe is making the app competitive with other popular standalone photo editing apps like Snapseed or Pixelmator’s mobile version.

I use and love the desktop version of Lightroom and this will be another tool I can use when I’m out and about using my iPad.

Wired:

The first Pill has sold more than a million units since its debut in 2012. Though it’s a hit, it’s gotten long in the tooth and the audio quality is really poor. That makes the Pill the perfect thing to tear down and rebuild. (Also, Bluetooth speakers are way easier than headphones.)

The result, the Beats Pill+, sounds much better, looks much better, and is a far more enticing product than its predecessor. It’s more than just a new piece of mobile candy. It’s an opportunity for Apple to show the extent to which it can shape the design of hardware coming out of its subsidiary.

We won’t know for sure until reviewers get units in hand for testing but the early comments from the Beats demo sound promising. I don’t read anything that makes me want to give up my Libratone Zipp speaker though.

ideaMachine Studio:

We stumbled upon the Steve Jobs “Think Different” marketing campaign speech in light of the new movie release this weekend. As animators, we were really struck when he paused for a good while before he said “… marketing… is about values.” We could see in his body that this thought weighed on him. And, in fact, that thought would determine the direction of Apple for the next two decades.

For Jobs, Apple was not about “making boxes for people to get their jobs done.” He and his executive team needed to be about something more. They needed to think beyond the equipment… beyond the dollars, toward something more. They needed to live in service to a higher calling. It’s hard to hear this speech without being moved. Not just because we are hearing a speech from a dead man, but because we know what Steve Jobs is saying is true. Our studio was challenged by this very real moment. Were we just clocking in and clocking out? Were we living from dollar to dollar? Or, were we working for something more?

I’ve seen this video before but the folks at ideaMachine Studio did some great work in cleaning it up. I may be a bit too cynical and jaded to attribute as much to the speech as they do but I certainly believe the sentiment is in Apple’s DNA. They don’t just want to make money. They really do want to change the world.

Quartz:

Twitter’s strength has always been hosting conversations around live events, but it’s not always easy to find them. Doing so often requires some savvy, juggling multiple tabs within Twitter’s app—not to mention knowing the right hashtags and accounts to follow.

Moments is designed to untangle some of these complexities by relying on curation to surface such conversations. Both Twitter’s staff and its partners—including NASA, Major League Baseball, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and BuzzFeed—will package tweets into collections, which will show up under a new tab called Moments.

I don’t know if I’d describe “Twitter’s strength” in that way but anything Twitter can do to make the service “less confusing” to new users is good for the company and will help keep the investor wolves from their door. Personally, I don’t find Twitter all that confusing but then again, I’ve been using it from the beginning. Am I wrong? Is Twitter confusing for new users?

The Wall Street Journal:

Four years after Steve Jobs’s death, a new movie is reopening a debate over the Apple Inc. co-founder’s legacy.

Mr. Jobs’s allies, led by his widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, say the film “Steve Jobs,” and other recent depictions, play down his accomplishments and paint Mr. Jobs as cruel and inhumane. Ms. Jobs repeatedly tried to kill the film, according to people familiar with the conversations. She lobbied, among others, Sony Pictures Entertainment, which developed the script but passed on the movie for financial reasons, and Comcast Corp.’s Universal Pictures, which is releasing the $33.5 million production on Friday.

“A whole generation is going to think of him in a different way if they see a movie that depicts him in a negative way,” said Bill Campbell, a longtime Apple board member and friend of Mr. Jobs. Mr. Campbell hasn’t seen the film.

I don’t know that I agree with Campbell on his assessment of Jobs’ legacy and whether or not this movie will taint it. I doubt it. The debate will continue for generations with each making their own evaluations.

The most interesting tidbit in this story, and a piece of information that hadn’t been disclosed up until now, is the fact that Wozniak was paid $200,000 to consult on the film.

Petapixel:

Personal videos have long been an integral part of our lives, allowing us to share and cherish memories with our friends and family. Apple’s recent release of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s+ have introduced ultra high-definition 4K video recording to a massive new audience. With such a powerful device, you may want to tweak your footage before you share it. Today, we are taking a quick look at five different editing solutions for your iOS device.

As a photographer, I don’t mess around with video on my iPhone very much but when I do, I use a couple of these free apps to quickly bang out something I can post online.

Mother Jones:

Every photo ever taken by Apollo astronauts on moon missions is now available online, on the Project Apollo Archive’s Flickr account. That’s about 8,400 images, grouped by the roll of film they were shot on. You can finally see all the blurry images, mistakes, and unrecognized gems for yourself. The unprocessed Hasseblad photos (basically raw scans of the negatives) uploaded by the Project Apollo Archive offer a fascinating behind-the-scenes peek at the various moon missions as well as lots and lots (and lots) of photos detailing the surface of the moon.

This is one of those Flickr pages you don’t want to go to unless you have a lot of free time this afternoon.

NPR:

Apple has long touted the power and design of its devices, but recently the world’s most valuable company has been emphasizing another feature: privacy. That’s no small matter when many users store important private data on those devices: account numbers, personal messages, photos.

Apple CEO Tim Cook talks to NPR’s Robert Siegel about how the company protects its customers’ data, and how it uses — or doesn’t use — that information.

Yet another fascinating interview with Cook. He is really hammering home the security and privacy angle of Apple’s corporate position.

Bloomberg:

Amazon.com Inc. will stop selling media-streaming devices from Google Inc. and Apple Inc. that aren’t easily compatible with its video service, the latest example of the company using its clout to promote products that fit with its own retailing strategy.

The Seattle-based Web retailer sent an e-mail to its marketplace sellers that it will stop selling the Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast since those devices don’t “interact well” with Prime Video. No new listings for the products will be allowed and posting of existing inventory will be removed Oct. 29, Amazon said.

Interesting, if foolhardy, move by Amazon. They want to push sales of their own product so much, they are willing to give up the revenue generated by the more popular competitors products. I bet this means we won’t be seeing Amazon’s Prime Video on the Apple TV anytime soon.

Medium:

Ms. Fiorina’s trainwreck stint at HP has been well documented. But I want to address one tiny but telling aspect of her misbegotten reign: an episode that involved her good friend Steve Jobs. It is the story of the HP iPod.

The iPod, of course, was Apple’s creation, a groundbreaking digital music player that let you have “a music library in your pocket.” Introduced in 2001, it gained steam over the next few years and by the end of 2003, the device was a genuine phenomenon. So it was news that in January 2004, Steve Jobs and Carly Fiorina made a deal where HP could slap its name on Apple’s wildly successful product. Nonetheless, HP still managed to botch things. It could not have been otherwise, really, because Steve Jobs totally outsmarted the woman who now claims she can run the United States of America.

I can talk about this with some authority. Not only have I written a book about the iPod, but I interviewed Fiorina face to face when she introduced the HP iPod at the 2004 Consumer Electronics Show, and then got Steve Jobs’s side of the story.

Hindsight is 20/20 but many of us saw this deal as a “Huh? WHY!?” kind of move by HP. Many more of us predicted it would be a disaster, but not for Apple.

iFixIt:

Over the weekend some brave Apple fans introduced their new iPhones to a life aquatic. The phones didn’t always emerge unscathed, but the overall trend is clear: the 6s and 6s Plus are dramatically less prone to liquid damage than their predecessors.

So, what changed? After disassembling a couple of new iPhones in the name of science, here’s what we found.

Remember, “dramatically less prone to liquid damage” does not mean “waterproof”. You still need to be very careful about getting your expensive electronics wet but it’s good to see Apple is taking baby steps towards helping the clumsy among us not damage our phones.

Techcrunch:

Privacy is something everyone should care about. But studies continue to indicate that people either aren’t aware of what they’re giving up, or they don’t understand the implications.

Apple is blowing that up a bit today by expanding on its privacy page and presenting its policies in clear language, with extensive supporting data. Whether it’s government information requests (94% of that is trying to find stolen iPhones, and only 6% is law enforcement seeking personal information) or how consumer-facing features like iMessage, Apple Pay, Health and HomeKit are set up to protect user information; the sense is one of confidence in its stance.

This has been a long time coming and no surprise that it’s coming from Apple. I expect Samsung (and other companies) to copy this new stance shortly.

LA Times:

The Los Angeles Unified School District has reached a tentative $6.4-million settlement over curriculum from education software giant Pearson that the school system said its teachers barely used.

The pact is the latest fallout from an aborted $1.3-billion plan to provide an iPad to every student, teacher and campus administrator in the nation’s second-largest school district.

The Board of Education is expected to vote on the settlement in October. The bidding process that led to the original contract is the subject of an FBI investigation.

This has been a long, drawn out embarrassment for Apple, a company that prides itself on its work with schools. While the case isn’t entirely over, this settlement at least paves the way for all parties to move on.

Ars Technica:

The only thing that most people will need to know about Apple’s A9 is that it’s a whole lot faster than last year’s A8. But for those of you who are more interested in chip design, Chipworks has unearthed an interesting tidbit: there are two different versions of the A9 chip, one manufactured by Samsung and another by Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC). Most interestingly, Samsung’s version (the APL0898) has a slightly smaller footprint than the TSMC version (APL1022).

There have long been rumors that Apple was dual-sourcing the A8 from Samsung and TSMC, but this is the first visual proof that we’ve seen of the practice. iPhone and iPad processors up to and including the A7 were all made by Samsung.

This is really “inside baseball” for a lot of folks but it does beg the question of why is Apple doing this? To keep Samsung “honest”? Or are they prepping TSMC to take over chip design?

Nature Geoscience:

Determining whether liquid water exists on the Martian surface is central to understanding the hydrologic cycle and potential for extant life on Mars. Recurring slope lineae, narrow streaks of low reflectance compared to the surrounding terrain, appear and grow incrementally in the downslope direction during warm seasons.

Our findings strongly support the hypothesis that recurring slope lineae form as a result of contemporary water activity on Mars.

I link directly to the research study because I love the language they use. Bottom line? There is not only water on Mars (we knew that already. It’s in the form of ice) but that it actually flows – “liquid water” – in Mars’ summer months.

M.G. Siegler:

Anyone who thinks Apple’s new ‘Live Photos’ element of the iPhone 6s (and 6s Plus) is a gimmick is a fool that doesn’t understand Apple — and may not understand human nature and emotions. I actually think this is one of the more brilliant features Apple has released in a while.

It’s no accident that people with children immediately realize the value in this feature.

I haven’t seen Live Photos in action but it’s been interesting talking to people who have. No one has dismissed it as “just a gimmick” and those with young children echo Siegler – they think it is a brilliant idea.

Petapixel:

GoPro just further expanded its action camera lineup after announcing the HERO+ LCD back in June. The new HERO+ is an even more affordable camera that drops the LCD screen while retaining 1080p60 recording and Wi-Fi connectivity.

The HERO+ can also capture 720p60 video, 8-megapixel photos, time-lapses, and burst mode photos. Other features and specs of the camera include an durable (integrated) housing that’s waterproof down to 131 feet (40m), Bluetooth connectivity, GoPro’s new built-in trimming and sharing, QuikCapture (powering up and starting video recording with one button), and HiLight Tag for selecting key moments while filming.

If you’re looking for a very good and very inexpensive action camera, GoPro is your best bet. This would be a great Christmas gift for a kid who was into BMX or other high motion activities. I’ve been thinking of getting one for my motorcycle until I realized, the video wouldn’t really be all that exciting.

Lisa Bettany:

In the past eight years, each new advancement in iPhone camera technology has made dramatic improvements to image quality. The new 12-megapixel iPhone 6s iSight camera is no exception. With 50% more megapixels than the last four iPhone 8-megapixel models, the iPhone 6s boasts a number of key improvements including: improved auto-focus, local tone-mapping, noise reduction, and colour separation, with that fancy “deep trench isolation” technology Apple is raving about.

In this follow-up post to my previous iPhone comparisons, I present a 9 iPhone comparison from all iPhone versions taken with Camera+ including: the original iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4, iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, and the new iPhone 6s, in a variety of real-life situations to test each iPhone camera’s capabilities.

The results are predictable (after all, it’s expected the camera would get better with each generation) but seeing them on the page is very interesting especially considering how “great” many of us thought the original iPhone was at taking pictures.

TechInsider:

Tonight — Sunday, Sept. 27 — you can see the first “supermoon” total lunar eclipse in 30 years. The moon will turn red, which is normal for a lunar eclipse, but this rare event will be bigger and brighter than those of the past few decades. That’s because the eclipse will coincide with a supermoon — a “very rare” alignment that won’t happen again until 2033.

Check this map to see if you live where the eclipse will be visible. If you don’t live in a visible region, or a big city with too many tall obstructions or a lot of light pollution, bookmark this page.

We won’t see the full effect here on the West Coast but if you’re lucky enough to be able to get outside and see it clearly, don’t miss it. Otherwise, like so many other things nowadays, you can watch online.

Moon Connection:

Now you can have accurate, attractive Moon and Sun details at your fingertips. View a beautiful real-time image of the current Moon phase, complete with technical data. Quickly see if the Moon is above the horizon on the Lunar Position screen, along with Moon rise and set times and precise Moon position in the sky. If you also want to know Sun rise and set times, look at the Solar Position screen.

Tonight’s total eclipse of the Super Harvest Moon could be spectacular, depending on the weather in your area. Use this free app to figure its position in your night sky.