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Obviously, no one should rely on step counters for accuracy but they can help regardless.

Mastodon is being touted as a “replacement” for disaffected Twitter users but there’s absolutely no chance of that happening if only because of the confusion surrounding how Mastodon works and is used.

I interviewed the FiftyThree principals back when Paper was announced. It’s a beautiful app and I hope it continues to have a place after this acquisition.

I’m a big fan of both of these apps (according to the Pocket email I get at the end of each year, I’ve been in the top 1% of their readers for the past 3 years!) and love squirrelling away articles for later reading.

This is obscene and I bet it triggers some sort of (completely ineffectual) Congressional investigation.

I was at that launch. The company I was working for at the time really wanted to have wifi-enabled laptops but the cost for cards and access points was prohibitively expensive – wifi wasn’t something for consumers at the time. I came back from Macworld Expo and told them they should invest in “this new Apple stuff. It’s going to blow up the world of laptops and internet access”. Of course, they ignored me.

How corporations deal with governments has always fascinated me, even more so when the corporation’s goals and values are significantly different than the country’s.

As an amateur cook, I’ve had chef friends say, “You must use real vanilla!” I had no idea it would make that much of a difference but it really does. That being said, the price of real vanilla has skyrocketed in the past few years.

I love these stories from the “Age of Discovery” when it seemed that scientists, amateur or otherwise, were discovering things we now take for granted almost every day.

A teenager hacked Apple, Twitter killed the APIs that developers use for their apps, Dave found a cool new feature on the Apple Watch, and—surprise— Google tracks you, even when you don’t want them to.

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Sometimes (yes – far too rarely), Twitter brings me a great deal of joy. This thread is an example of that.

This is definitely more interesting than useful. Just a historic artifact.

I still remember the first time I saw the iMac in real life at the 1998 Macworld Expo in New York City. I watched Apple techs set up several dozen of them in Apple’s booth at the Javits Center ahead of the Steve Jobs Keynote. I will always maintain that the iMac saved Apple. Without it, the company wouldn’t have survived long enough to accomplish all the amazing things it did in the ensuing years and we would all be the poorer for it.

These “changes” will also affect those of us who use Twitterrific as well as any other third-party Twitter client. Amazing to watch Twitter slit its own throat almost in real time.

I’ll be in Sienna next year but the timing is wrong and I’ll sadly miss this incredible spectacle.

I’ve been to Bozeman, Montana and, no offense to anyone who lives there, you’d have no reason to expect a museum with this level of AMAZING stuff in it. Turns out, it’s very real and absolutely incredible.

While I liked the 60’s Mustangs, I was never a huge fan of the car in general. That being said, my first car was the 1994 redesign and I loved that car.

Apple is caught between a rock and a hard place on this but it’s a situation of their own making.

Dave and I kicked off the show talking about a street musician playing Pink Floyd in Rome and then went right into Apple Music and the service’s new Friend’s Mix playlist, which is rolling out to customers.

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I don’t know if I’d call it an argument or hilarious but it is an at times testy exchange between the two and a little insight as to what all involved have to deal with in order to get us safely through the air.

I’m really hoping the weather holds for us this weekend because I want to teach my son how to capture “shooting stars”. If you have the gear, it’s fairly easy to set up. Then you need a bit of luck to get good shots.

I followed this story from a link in the Washington Post and it’s fascinating.

I’ve never bought a thing from Hammacher Schlemmer but I’ve always loved the weirdness of their catalogs.

This will be an understandably controversial move that won’t hurt Jones in the long run.

I love reading movie scripts and there are a bunch here, including for the “Steve Jobs” movie, you can download as PDFs.

Dave and I had a lot of fun today as we talked about his new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. We also took a look at Mac sales and iCloud storage limits.

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As a motorcyclist, this car and others that will come after it, terrify me. The “iPhone on wheels” is an awful and dangerous idea. Watch the video to get an idea of how obscenely huge and distracting that screen is.

Rachel Slade, Medium:

Improbably, AlterEgo, the soundless, voiceless, earbud-less device he’d been working on for the last two years had become adept enough at reading his thoughts that he could use it to order an Uber without saying a word.

And:

Kapur wants to perfect a device that allows users to communicate with A.I. as effortlessly as one’s left brain talks to one’s right brain, so that humans can integrate the power of the Internet into their thinking at every level.

And:

One night, Kapur and his brother were testing the device in their Cambridge apartment. Kapur was wearing the device and Shreyas was monitoring the computer screen. They’d rigged the device to track signals in real time so that Shreyas could note the exact moment it picked up something, if anything.

It was getting late. Kapur had been speaking silently into the device for a couple of hours — having programmed it to understand just two words: yes and no — without any meaningful results.

Then Shreyas thought he saw something. A blip on the screen.

To me, this is the sort of device that Big Tech ought to be building, something that allows you to interface with your personal AI and with the world it connects to, all without saying a word, by purposeful thinking.

There are dangers, of course, as those ad companies do their level best to connect directly with your brain. But still, I find this fascinating.

Barbara Davidson, NetCredit:

The United States is a comparatively young country, but one with a rich and diverse history. From the ancient villages of New Mexico’s Pueblo people and the early Spanish settlers in Florida, to the Russian traders of Alaska and 19th-century missionaries in Utah, each of the 50 states has its own story to tell.

Bucket list for me. I’d love to visit every one of these.

The world economy is increasingly dependent on these kinds of chokepoints. Heaven help us if/when they fail. It will make Y2K look like a walk in the park.