My thanks to Bare Bones Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. Do you sling code or compose with words? Whether you’re an app developer, web developer, systems admin or just want a powerful writing tool that stays out of your way, BBEdit is worth checking out.
I’ve been using BBEdit since 1995, so I know first hand that it can handle any job I throw at it.
BBEdit is crafted in response to the needs of writers, web authors, and software developers, providing an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching, and the manipulation of text.
Dan Riccio, Apple’s vice president of hardware engineering:
Relative to the issue you referenced regarding the new iPad Pro, its unibody design meets or exceeds all of Apple’s high quality standards of design and precision manufacturing. We’ve carefully engineered it and every part of the manufacturing process is precisely measured and controlled.
This iPad Pro bend is a real head scratcher for me. Apple is so diligent and precise in every aspect of manufacturing that it seems impossible that this could happen, but yet it has. I haven’t seen this with my iPad Pro and we don’t know how prevalent it is beyond the few pictures we’ve seen online.
Apple is committed to your privacy and being transparent about government requests for customer data globally. This report provides information on government requests received.
For the last 8 years I’ve been shooting in the San Francisco area I have been absolutely obsessed with the fog. Night and day it’s what I live for and what defines my photographic style. I check the cams, satellites, and other forecasts to always be able to just get up and go. We even have a small group of about 20 of us known as, “Fogaholics” where we keep each other updated all the time as soon as we see it roll in.
These are beautiful, almost surreal images. The technique to create them is actually fairly simple. But the knowledge required to get images like these is not easy to teach or come by.
The army has been called in to help with the ongoing crisis at Gatwick airport, where drones flying near the runway have kept planes grounded for over 12 hours.
The airport has been closed since Wednesday night, when the devices were repeatedly flown over the airfield in what police and the airport described as a deliberate attempt to disrupt flights.
Tens of thousands of travellers have been affected, with 110,000 passengers on 760 flights due to fly on Thursday. Eurocontrol said Gatwick would not re-open before 8pm at the earliest.
This is an issue that is only going to get worse as more and more consumer drones are used and get in the hands of idiots who fly unsafely.
Multiple AirPods sharing audio on the same device, getting back at package thieves, and the bend of the new iPad Pro are among the topics Dave and I tackle on this week’s show.
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Apple has confirmed to The Verge that some of its 2018 iPad Pros are shipping with a very slight bend in the aluminum chassis. But according to the company, this is a side effect of the device’s manufacturing process and shouldn’t worsen over time or negatively affect the flagship iPad’s performance in any practical way. Apple does not consider it to be a defect.
The bend is the result of a cooling process involving the iPad Pro’s metal and plastic components during manufacturing, according to Apple.
And:
My 11-inch iPad Pro showed a bit of a curve after two weeks. Apple asked if I would send it their way so the engineering team could take a look. But the replacement 11-inch iPad Pro I received at Apple’s Downtown Brooklyn store exhibited a very slight bend in the aluminum as soon as I took off the wrapper.
And:
Those who are annoyed by the bend shouldn’t have any trouble exchanging or returning their iPad Pro at the Apple Store or other retailers within the 14-day return window. But it’s not clear if swaps will be permitted outside that policy.
Tricky. Is this really normal? Look at the image in the linked article. Certainly seems like a manufacturing defect to me.
Past as prologue, can’t help but imagine a lawsuit brewing somewhere.
Glenn Fleishman, writing for Smithsonian Magazine:
At midnight on New Year’s Eve, all works first published in the United States in 1923 will enter the public domain. It has been 21 years since the last mass expiration of copyright in the U.S.
And:
“The public domain has been frozen in time for 20 years, and we’re reaching the 20-year thaw,” says Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. The release is unprecedented, and its impact on culture and creativity could be huge. We have never seen such a mass entry into the public domain in the digital age. The last one—in 1998, when 1922 slipped its copyright bond—predated Google. “We have shortchanged a generation,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. “The 20th century is largely missing from the internet.”
And:
We can blame Mickey Mouse for the long wait. In 1998, Disney was one of the loudest in a choir of corporate voices advocating for longer copyright protections. At the time, all works published before January 1, 1978, were entitled to copyright protection for 75 years; all author’s works published on or after that date were under copyright for the lifetime of the creator, plus 50 years.
Apple tweaked their App Store review guidelines from:
Apps should not directly or indirectly enable gifting of in-app purchase content, features, or consumable items to others.
To:
Apps may enable gifting of items that are eligible for in-app purchase to others. Such gifts may only be refunded to the original purchaser and may not be exchanged.
It’ll take time to see this, as apps need to implement the change, resubmit, then the updates need to propagate to the end users. But it’ll get there.
Seems a clear win for Apple. Gifting allows more money to flow through the ecosystem.
The inconvenient truth of future 5G networks is that their increased high-speed bandwidth, and the use of the millimeter wave spectrum (the radio spectrum above 30 gigahertz) to achieve it, comes at a price: Those radio signals barely propagate around the corners of buildings.
In other words, you need a lot more hardware to distribute that sweet, sweet high speed 5G around cities. But that extra hardware means lots of construction, clutter, traffic disruptions and ugly antennas hanging everywhere.
What to do? Someone came up with the idea of turning manhole covers into 5G antennas.
Put the title aside. Instead, think thoughtful insight, rather than snarky complaining. And if you are on the move, wheel over to your favorite podcast player and search for Vector. This is an excellent listen.
Interesting story on Reddit, both for the story itself and for the advice (read the comments that follow the story) on what to do when your phone is stolen.
If you play guitar or just love guitar-oriented music, this is for you. Terrific playlist for both Apple Music and Spotify, with a nice little writeup from Brian Sutich for each song.
Tuesday night in Los Angeles, Musk unveiled the very first tunnel in what he hopes will become a network of underground highways. The first tunnel runs between the headquarters of Musk’s SpaceX company and a parking lot behind a shuttered business a little over a mile away. It’s only for testing purposes and won’t be used by the public.
According to the best moving lead providers, Musk knew nothing about building tunnels when he started this venture. Just as he did with Tesla and SpaceX, he figures to build his expertise as he goes, then find ways to crush the costs down.
While modern subway tunnels in Los Angeles cost around $900 million per mile, he says he built his for about $10 million. One way he saved money: he literally made it dirt-cheap.
“When digging tunnels…it’s quite expensive to have all this dirt trucked off somewhere. And we’re like, well, why don’t we try to use that dirt for something useful? So we are creating bricks on-site…and you can pick ’em up for, they’re very cheap; 10 cents a brick,” he said.
There’s also great savings in owning the entire process, rather than bringing in layers of third party contractors and specialized labor, all of which significantly pumps up the price of any large project.
As to how the whole tunnel thing will work:
At first glance, the tunnel is a bit daunting. At only 12 feet in diameter, it’s much more claustrophobic than most transportation tunnels. According to Musk, cars will be able to travel up to 150 mph in the tunnel but must be on autopilot.
A bit of genius here. Only properly outfitted cars will be allowed in these tunnels. Someone who can build such cars efficiently can make a lot of money. To me, that’s incredible vision on Musk’s part.
Read the article, watch the video embedded below. Both are fascinating.
My thanks to Bare Bones Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. Do you sling code or compose with words? Whether you’re an app developer, web developer, systems admin or just want a powerful writing tool that stays out of your way, BBEdit is worth checking out.
I’ve been using BBEdit since 1995, so I know first hand that it can handle any job I throw at it.
BBEdit is crafted in response to the needs of writers, web authors, and software developers, providing an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching, and the manipulation of text.
Someone stole a package from me. Police wouldn’t do anything about it so I spent the last 6 months engineering up some vigilante justice. Revenge is a dish best served fabulously.
This is some fantastic engineering. Here’s hoping he open sources the design.
The results take seconds, work amazingly well, though I’ve found with more complex backgrounds, artifacts do creep in. Seems to work really well with head shots.
Whether you want to show off your beautiful wallpaper, or simply want your set up to look different from the millions of other iPhones out there, one of the best way to do that is to add blank icons to your Home screen.
These invisible icons will allow you to create empty spaces on your Home screen to either let the wallpaper shine, or to arrange your app icons in a very specific way.
This tutorial will show you how to create create blank iPhone icons, no jailbreak or hack required.
This is my new favorite way to add blank icons to customize your home screen. Note that you have to re-jump through the hoops if you want to change the blank icons.
In a nutshell, you use iPhone Safari to browse to iempty.tooliphone.net. That site lets you customize your page, as you like.
Daisy chaining: I can connect two Bose headphones to one device. I’d love to do this with AirPods, so my SO and I can watch the same movie on an iPad, or listen to the same podcast on a walk. (This is called “Music Share” in the Bose Connect app, but works with any audio coming from the device.)
Multiple Active Devices: My Bose headphones can connect to two devices at once. I’d love to be able to have an active connection to 2-3 devices on my AirPods, so I can use my phone / tv / laptop all at once.
A connection management tool. I thought I’d hate this. But I love it. I can easily select from a list of past devices which ones I’d like my headphones to be connected to, and it does it nearly instantly.
That first one is my favorite. I would love to be able to share audio with someone when playing it out loud is not practical, or allowed. For example, watching a movie together on a long plane or train ride. Or watching TV, late at night when the baby is asleep.
Used to be, you’d plug in a splitter and then plug in your wired headphones. Two headphones Bluetooth’ed into your iOS device or Mac would be a terrific idea.
This a Bluetooth 5 thing? I believe the W1 chip in the AirPods is based on Bluetooth 4.2. The W3 chip in the Apple Watch Series 4 supports Bluetooth 5. So might this feature be possible in the next generation of AirPods?
A lawsuit blaming Apple for a child’s death in a car crash, has been dismissed by a US appeals court in California.
Garrett Wilhelm told police he was using FaceTime on the iPhone 6 when he crashed into the back of a family car.
Five-year-old Moriah Modisette died from the injuries she sustained in the 2014 Christmas Eve accident in Texas. Her family held Apple responsible for not enabling “lockout” technology on the phone.
This is an awful, horrible tragedy and our hearts go out to the little girl’s family but it’s not the responsibility of Apple.
Apple Books has published six exclusive audiobooks this week, showcasing six great first listen titles read by celebrity narrators. The books themselves are all public domain works from Pride and Prejudice to Winnie the Pooh, recorded by Apple and released in the Book Store for free.
Only available on Apple Books, Apple has partnered with celebrities including actresses Kate Beckinsale and Karen Gillan, and comedian Tituss Burgess. The titles range from four to twelve hours in length, and there’s even a retelling of Winnie the Pooh recorded by Disney.
I’m not a huge fan of audiobooks in general but I’d listen to Kate Beckinsale read the phonebook.
In a viral Twitter thread Wednesday, Maya Hughes, a 20-year-old college student in California, revealed a wild story: In a desperate ordeal when she was 5 years old, a kind stranger helped her fly back the U.S. from Sierra Leone.
Through an unexpected chain of events 15 years later, she and her mom finally found out who the man was: Tom Perriello, who went on to become a Virginia congressman and Democratic gubernatorial candidate.
I don’t post “happy news” stories simply for the sake of it but this one was so wonderful, I had to share it.
A recent issue of the American Heart Journal illustrates the power of Apple’s brand and the simplicity of its approach. Based on the Journal’s reporting, the Apple Heart Study enrolled a massive 419,093 participants, making it the largest investigation of its kind ever fielded. To put this into perspective, a large-scale Swedish study also investigating arrhythmia screening fielded just 25,000 participants.
The sheer mass of the study was important to researchers, as bigger is generally better when it comes to investigations of this type — the larger the sample size, the narrower the margin of error for the study. Stanford Medicine researchers say that the study is in the final stages of data collection. Results should be available early next year.
And this is just the beginning for Apple in the field of health apps, activity, and management.
Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he’s got an answer: “536.” Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, “It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,” says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.
Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit.
What an incredible story. Fascinating to think how this affected not only that year but all the way through history.
It’s December, which means Best of 2018 lists are here. With so many lists out there, who has time to read all of them?
Turns out: We do. But because you probably don’t, we rounded up all the Top 10 lists we could find, smashed ’em together in a big spreadsheet, and spit out overall Top 10 lists for the year’s best albums, songs, books and movies. You’re welcome.
I suppose it had to happen eventually but I’m officially old. Not only have I not heard any of these songs, but I’ve never even heard of six of the artists on the list.
