Wired:
Early tomorrow morning, the moon will pass behind the center of Earth’s shadow and turn a rusty red color. Most people probably won’t be able to see this total lunar eclipse, because it will occur mainly over the Pacific Ocean. But don’t worry. You can watch a live broadcast by the Slooh Community Observatory from multiple locations in Australia and North America or NASA’s broadcast of the event.
Always fun to watch these celestial events.
The Province:
Whitey was pictured in the photograph escaping the clutches of his mother Bernice and racing to his father Jack, a rifleman who was leaving for war with the B.C. Regiment (Duke of Connaughts Own Rifles).The image was captured by Province photographer Claude Dettloff, sent around the world and on Saturday, brought to life again.
A $2 Canadian coin has been minted, postage stamp produced and bronze statue unveiled at Hyack Square, near the original scene.
Not just an iconic Canadian picture but a world famous image made all the more sad when you hear the story of what happened afterwards. Make sure you have a tissue ready if you watch the video.
EVH is one of the all-time greats. It’s nice to just watching him having fun.
So, the next big thing to complain about is here: Hairgate. One of the community articles on 9to5Mac talks about people getting their hair caught in the iPhone 6—I don’t even know what to say about this shit. […]
Floodwatch:
Floodwatch is a Chrome extension that tracks the ads you see as you browse the internet. It offers tools to help you understand both the volume and the types of ads you’re being served during the course of normal browsing, with the goal of increasing awareness of how advertisers track your browsing behavior, build their version of your online identity, and target their ads to you as an individual.
I’m going to install and use this for a month. I bet the data it collects will appall me.
csstyle is a modern approach for crafting beautifully maintainable stylesheets. The csstyle method is implemented using a set of SASS mixins that make your CSS readable and semantic, generate your selectors for you, and automatically handle things like specificity and nesting. csstyle makes your project’s styling refreshingly consistent.
Geohopper Beacons unite Apple’s iBeacon technology and proximity-based notifications in a single easy-to-use bundle. Using Geohopper 2.0 for iOS, a single tap configures the beacon which then sends notifications to your selected contacts when you enter or exit the beacon location. No additional setup or maintenance is required.
Very cool.
Magic Script Creator lets you experiment with creating custom AppleScripts by just answering a few questions. No prior knowledge of AppleScript is needed in order to use this application. Included in Magic Script Creator are 24 different examples that you can configure hundreds of different ways. Most examples contain UNIX command line tools, combining their power with AppleScript’s strengths.
Version 4.0 contains two new major features. First, you can choose to compile your scripts with line by line remarks. This will help you understand what each line of code is executing. Second, for those examples containing UNIX command tools, you can export the MAN (or manual) page in an easy to read PDF. No more trying to read these manuals in a tiny terminal window! To learn more about Magic Script Creator, watch an instructional video, purchase the application, or try a demo version, please visit our homepage.
This is just completely freaky.
The Atlantic:
Turn on the Food Network any night of the week, and this is what you’ll probably see: “a larger-than-life host, a specifically defined challenge, bombastic music, a set time limit, a panel of judges, and a cast of contestants whose back-story and biographical detail serves to heighten the stakes and fan the [program’s] already heated dramatic flame.”That’s according to a 2013 study of Food Network’s evolution from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee associate professor Tasha Oren. The Food Network may have started as a channel focusing on the dishes themselves—think Emeril Lagasse and “Bam!” But in order to grow, the network has abandoned its food focus in favor of formulaic competition.
I don’t watch any of these shows but I see the commercials for them all the time. I don’t watch because I don’t get why cooking has to be a contest but the article might have a point. Maybe these shows are for those who don’t like sports but still like competition?
The Wirecutter:
After measuring the charging speed of 44 cables, then sending the top 11 to our electrical engineer for teardown analysis, the $14 Monoprice 3ft MFi Certified Lightning to USB Charge/Sync Cable is the one we’d buy. It may be a third-party cable, but the Monoprice stood out among competitors by being the only third-party cable that had as good, if not better, internal build-quality compared to Apple’s own cable. Plus, it’s cheaper than Apple’s by $5.
Always good to have an extra cable or two lying around and the price is right for this one.
Apple:
Over a million people from all over the world have shared their memories, thoughts, and feelings about Steve. One thing they all have in common — from personal friends to colleagues to owners of Apple products — is how they’ve been touched by his passion and creativity. You can view some of these messages below and share your own at [email protected].
Classy move, Apple.
Re/code:
Bose secured a league sponsorship deal that effectively allows it to elbow Beats — and any other rival headphone manufacturer — off the playing field.Under terms of its agreement with the league, the NFL confirmed, Bose received a broad set of rights that entitle it to prevent players (or coaches) from wearing any other manufacturer’s headphones during televised interviews.
This ban extends to TV interviews conducted during pre-season training camps or practice sessions and on game day — starting before the opening kickoff through the final whistle to post-game interviews conducted in the locker room or on the podium. The restriction remains in place until 90 minutes after the play has ended.
Does Bose really think this will make any difference in their sales or market share? Do they think that potential buyers, seeing the headsets on a bunch of “old guys” on the sidelines will make their target audience think, “Oh! I like that look! Gotta get me some of those!”?
This is unconscionable.
The GRAMMY Museum, based in Los Angeles, will be honoring Stevie Ray Vaughan’s birthday with FREE admission to its exhibits on October 3, 2014 from 11:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. PDT. In June, the museum unveiled Pride & Joy: The Texas Blues of Stevie Ray Vaughan, on display through July 2015. Jimmie Vaughan, Stevie’s brother, served as a guest curator.
Happy Birthday SRV. You were always one of my favorites.
I think Schmidt underestimates the intelligence of the general public. If you don’t buy a product, you are the product being sold.
The Guardian:
The Greater Tokyo Metropolitan Area, composed of four prefectures, became the world’s pre-eminent megalopolis – some 35 million people by 2010, or 27% of Japan’s total population. It isn’t unusual for commuters to spend two hours getting to work every day on trains that exceed 150% of capacity.
When I was in Tokyo, one of the things I wanted to see and take pictures of was the Shinkansen bullet train. It’s a shame we don’t have the population densities to make these trains possible here in North America.
Washington Post:
When eight cans of nitrate film arrived at the Library of Congress in August, a staffer began a routine inspection to see what sort of physical condition the film was in. Without even watching the footage, she quickly noticed a headline screaming out from one of the newsreels: “SENATORS WIN WORLD SERIES,” it said. “40,000 frantic fans see American Leaguers take 12-inning deciding game, 4 to 3.”And when archivists from the Library’s Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation watched the reel, they found nearly four minutes of footage from that 1924 World Series, footage that somehow had remained in nearly perfect condition for 90 years. Bucky Harris hitting a home run, Walter Johnson pitching four innings of scoreless relief, Muddy Ruel scoring the winning run, fans storming Griffith Stadium’s field: It was all there, and it was all glorious.
Fascinating to see how much, and how little, the game has changed since this was shot.
Macstories:
From a visual perspective, Tweetbot 3.5 looks and works the same, keeping the foundation that Tapbots introduced with Tweetbot 3 last year. The app hasn’t changed considerably – it has evolved in expected ways and within the limitations imposed by Twitter’s API for third-party apps.
Glad to see this update to my favourite iPhone Twitter client. Can’t wait for the updated iPad version, too.
The publication claims former PayPal president David Marcus was against the Samsung partnership as it would hinder future operations with Apple, but eBay CEO John Donahoe forced PayPal to accept. The dynamic just got more interesting with news today that PayPal will be spun off from eBay in 2015, possibly opening the door to policy changes and realigned alliances.
M O R O N S
Tom’s version doesn’t do much to change my mind.
In his first interview since joining Apple, industrial designer Marc Newson discusses his latest product – a domestic draft beer machine he says is the equivalent to a Nespresso coffee maker for beer lovers.
Sweet mother of God, I must have this!
After nearly six months of searching and deliberation, Apple appears to have settled on a successor to Katie Cotton, its former VP of worldwide corporate communications — and it’s not former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. It’s Apple comms veteran Steve Dowling. Sources close to Apple tell Code/red that Dowling was tapped as interim head of public relations last week by CEO Tim Cook, who has been looking to put a friendlier, more approachable face on Apple’s public relations efforts.
Personally, I think this is the first step to Dowling getting the position full time.
TidBITS:
One of the most intriguing features of iOS 8 is how Apple opened it up to third-party keyboards. Google’s Android mobile operating system has allowed developers to create custom system keyboards for years, which has led to interesting experiments, like Swype, which lets you draw on the keyboard to spell out words.Now, keyboards like Swype are available for iOS 8, but how you enable and use them isn’t always obvious. Also of concern is how these third-party keyboards, some of which connect to the Internet, impact your privacy.
I have little to no interest in third party keyboards but I know a lot of you do. TidBITS does their usual good job of how to set up and use them and what to watch out for.
My name is Rick Smolan and I’m a former Time, Life, and National Geographic photojournalist. When I was twenty-eight, National Geographic Magazine sent me on the assignment of a lifetime: to document the 1,700 mile journey of a mysterious twenty-seven-year-old woman named Robyn Davidson, who was trekking across the Australian outback alone with four camels and her dog, Diggity. During Robyn’s nine-month journey I tracked her down five times, spending about three months traveling with her and shooting tens of thousands of photographs.
What an amazing book this will be.
Yosemite is a conference for Apple developers, designers, and enthusiasts. It will be held next Spring, in the heart of Yosemite National Park.
Dave Klein and the folks at CocoaConf are putting on a great conference in 2015 in Yosemite. I will be speaking at the conference, along with many very talented people in the Mac and iOS communities.
The Atlantic:
Free samples help consumers learn more about products, and they make retail environments more appealing. But samples are operating on a more subconscious level as well.“Reciprocity is a very, very strong instinct,” says Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University. “If somebody does something for you”—such as giving you a quarter of a ravioli on a piece of wax paper—“you really feel a rather surprisingly strong obligation to do something back for them.”
Am I weird because I’ve never taken a free food sample in a grocery store? I just find the whole idea strange. For those of you outside the USA or Canada, is this “free samples in grocery stores” a thing in other countries, too?
Vogue: The secret weapon of the most sought-after personal-electronics company in the world is a very nice guy from Northeast London who has a soft spot for woodworking and the sense that designers ought to keep their design talents backstage … Continued
The Guardian: The US government and police officials are in the midst of a misleading PR offensive to try to scare Americans into believing encrypted cellphones are somehow a bad thing, rather than a huge victory for everyone’s privacy and … Continued
Big thanks to long time Loop reader Patrick Crowley for pulling together this fantastic collection of images from yesterday’s Apple Watch event at the Colette boutique on Rue Saint Honoré as part of Fashion Week.
The images were all taken with Patrick’s brand new iPhone 6. Thanks, Patrick. Great job.