Uncategorized

Apple has very quickly sent out a press release refuting the rumor.

I get the convenience factor of this (having missed many deliveries due to not being at home) but I can see a lot of people reticent about allowing this kind of internet-connected (and, therefore, hackable) lock on their home. I would much rather a system where the delivery driver calls or texts that they are outside and then you would unlock the door.

Vox: When you watch a baseball game, you’re also listening for the hum of the crowd and the crack of a baseball bat. People like Andrew Stoakley make that happen. He mixes audio for teams like the Toronto Blue Jays, … Continued

Brooke Peterson went to visit her dad, who is apparently an Apple employee, on the company’s Cupertino campus. While there she took a video of her using his new iPhone X, with her father’s permission.

Well Brooke, I hope you enjoyed your trip to Apple because you probably cost your father his job by posting this video.

Om Malik:

I was in Tuscany, Italy recently and had a chance to put the new iPhone 8+ through the paces. While I made a lot of photos with my Leica SL, I wanted to take a moment and share some of the fantastic photos that came out of the iPhone.

Amazing.

Chuq does a good job of describing what happened and how it affects various constituencies of users. For the vast majority of people, little will change immediately. But, if you’re a professional Lightroom user, be prepared for a different future.

They look like they’re having a blast!

That is a remarkable achievement. I rarely use Apple Pay but I’m always impressed by how easy it is to use. I bet that lack of “friction” is a big part of why Apple Pay is so popular.

This is not an embarrassment to Microsoft – these kinds of flips happen often – but there can’t be many smiles on the faces of the Enterprise people in Redmond regardless.

So many questions. Why are they bothering to physically deliver the mail? Why are so many of the mailboxes fireproof?

SoundShare was already a great social music app, but it just got better with the release of 3.0 and new features like Party Mode.

Their NSFW name aside, this is a fascinating site with great, easy to understand descriptions of the phenomenon represented.

Apple is usually pretty good about not “encouraging” customers to buy more than they need.

I’d love to visit this store. Chicago is a great city and these photos really show off the new space.

Apple plays hardball but $20 says this gets settled out of court for “an undisclosed sum”.

This is a great list of apps – I use almost all of them on a regular basis.

This is great news and hopefully will ease some of the pain of the people in those affected areas.

Tim Cook:

“While it’s not time to share any details, we do plan for Mac mini to be an important part of our product line going forward.”

Well, good.

I’m sure we’ll have arguments about this list but I hope we can agree that if the fidget spinner is the “most ingenious gadgets of 2017”, we’re doomed.

I loved my Slinky as a kid but even given an unlimited amount of time, I could never pull off the stunts this guy does with his.

People often ask me why I love Eric’s guitar playing so much—this song sums it up. Clapton doesn’t need to play 100 notes a second to make you appreciate his playing. The opening riff is so heartfelt and meaningful, it makes you listen.

As usual for anything Adobe related, this will cause a lot of consternation among its users and customers. Personally, I will hold off “updating” for as long as possible.

This is such a cool, amazing discovery. We’ve always known everything was created from stars but the knowledge your gold jewelry was probably created in the aftermath of a kilonova is mindboggling.

From Apple’s Machine Learning Journal:

The “Hey Siri” feature allows users to invoke Siri hands-free. A very small speech recognizer runs all the time and listens for just those two words. When it detects “Hey Siri”, the rest of Siri parses the following speech as a command or query. The “Hey Siri” detector uses a Deep Neural Network (DNN) to convert the acoustic pattern of your voice at each instant into a probability distribution over speech sounds. It then uses a temporal integration process to compute a confidence score that the phrase you uttered was “Hey Siri”. If the score is high enough, Siri wakes up. This article takes a look at the underlying technology.

We take speech commands like “Hey Siri” for granted these days, but what goes on in the background is absolutely amazing.

The fascinating story of an incredibly dysfunctional family. I knew Adidas was a German company but I had no idea Puma grew out of this feud.

CBC: Gord Downie, the Tragically Hip frontman who united a diverse array of music lovers with his commanding stage presence and Canadiana-laced lyrics, has died. He was 53. Downie had an aggressive and incurable form of brain cancer called glioblastoma, … Continued

Dropbox Professional lets you store, share, and track progress on your work. Get powerful features like Smart Sync and Showcase as well as 1 TB (1,000 GB) of space.

The company unveiled the new plan earlier today.

Make no mistake – this is very bad. But it’s not as catastrophic as some make it out to be.

This is a fun, well-done video detailing all the changes in costumes over the years for a character most of us know very little about.

What an insane story. We’ve all heard about these “online mattress” companies – they advertise on many podcasts – but you probably haven’t given them much thought beyond that. But its as cutthroat an industry as any other.