Uncategorized

I’m a casual fan and I enjoyed the stages in the latest Daytona 500 but I’m not such a diehard I really care one way or the other.

One of the great/awful things about living in a city is the cacophony of sights, sounds, and smells.

Those of who (attempt to) cook know the struggle of, “What can I make with what I have?” This clever web site can solve that problem for you. It’s also a good argument for having staples on hand. If your fridge only has beer, yogurt, and an apple in it, this site won’t be of much help.

Some of these shots are amazing if only for the timing of the shots. Settle in – there are 17 pages of images.

The video is straight up car porn. The funniest part is the small print at the bottom, telling you the “fuel economy” of the car.

That last line is the “rock and a hard place” of Apple’s position. They need cobalt. The majority of cobalt is in the Congo. The Congo uses child labor. That labor may be the only work the people of the region can get.

This is completely understandable and yet, still freaky.

This is really cool tech but a whole lot of creepy.

Cute ads.

Interesting discussion of different kinds of engines but the most important line is: “In the end, time is the enemy of the privileged few. Cost is the enemy of the masses.”

I remember when The Players’ Tribune was first published and the traditional sports media mocked it unmercifully. It has become a great place to read stories directly from the players.

I’m not a fan of these devices (mostly because I’m an incompetent boob when it comes to tools and installing stuff) but this is important because if you do this wrong or buy an inferior product, you could have serious issues. Wirecutter says there are only two models that meet their standards.

Like many people I’m using Apple’s Airport base stations (I’m running two of them) in my home to provide wireless coverage. Again, like many people covering all the areas that I need a signal has proven to be difficult, so I started looking for solutions—the one I’m considering strongly is Google Wifi. […]

This is an incredible data visualization. You can click on individual countries to see their incoming/outgoing traffic (Canada’s is unsurprisingly small) or zoom in to see individual details.

This is a great deal for those who qualify for it.

I got 25/25. “You must be an English scholar because only 4% of Americans can get a perfect score on this test.”

I love these weird investigative stories from Wired.

As a motorcyclist, that “17.5 million hours” number terrifies me. I understand this particular genie has been let out of the bottle but I’m constitutionally against anything that decreases the amount of time the driver spends focused on driving and looking at and through the “dumb glass” of his windshield and rearview mirrors.

I had no idea bluefin tuna used to be considered garbage fish. I do know we are overfishing at an unsustainable level.

Great tip (and links) from Rob Griffiths on replacing any fluorescent bulbs in your house or garage with new LED bulbs. Do it. You’ll have better light and they’ll last forever.

Spotify this afternoon announced that it has hit a new milestone, reaching a total of 50 million paying subscribers. That’s up from 40 million in September, suggesting Spotify is growing at a rapid pace despite the surging popularity of Apple Music.

I wonder where all of these people are coming from. Are the Tidal and Pandora users or are they new users that have never used streaming services before? Clearly, there’s still a lot of growth in the streaming business.

Spotify is preparing to launch a lossless audio version of its streaming service, according to multiple sources. The offering, which is currently called Spotify Hi-Fi, will offer lossless CD-quality audio to users — similar to what Tidal offers in its Hi-Fi service.

I’m interested to see what the response will be to this service. Lossless isn’t something Apple ever seemed to be keen to offer users, but they may be forced into it if Spotify’s becomes popular.

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team was debugging an issue causing the S3 billing system to progress more slowly than expected. At 9:37AM PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended. The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems.

It’s good that Amazon got to the bottom of this and let all of its customers know exactly what happened.

I’ve been a huge Hitchcock every since I found out one of my relatives worked with him in the 1950s. As the article points out, we think of him as a director of suspense films but his visual artistry and manipulation of your emotions through images was incredible.

Hockey isn’t the only thing we Canadians do on ice. We can bust a move, too.

If you are a camera manufacturer, these are absolutely brutal numbers. While the camera on your iPhone may not have killed the DSLR market (yet), it has certainly decimated the point and shoot and consumer DSLR segments. The industry had hoped mirrorless cameras would take off but the numbers show no evidence of that.

This additional interoperability can only be good for users and it’s great to see Microsoft opening up to other services like this. Gone are the days when all their customers used their products exclusively and helping users integrate “third party” services helps everyone.

I love that Apple is doing this and I hope they do much more to promote HomeKit. People have endless frustrations in trying to create this kind of automation in their home and HomeKit promises to make things much simpler — in theory.

Very interesting to see the list of companies who have signed this brief.

You probably know it as “wheelchair rugby” but that name doesn’t do it justice. It really can be awfully, wonderfully brutal.