BBEdit is one of my most used apps over the last 25 years of my career. It was installed first on any new computer I had over the years because it was so crucial to all the work I did.
Back in the 90s, we built our Web sites from scratch, so we used BBEdit to hand-code everything we needed to get the site up-and-running. We didn’t have a CMS at the time, so BBEdit became the default app for actually posting stories as well. It was an all-purpose tool that became indispensable for us.
We didn’t just use BBEdit for building and maintaining the Website, we also used it as our default word processing tool. Every word written for the stories we posted was done in BBEdit.
Now, as BBEdit celebrates its 25th anniversary, I can still say I am a proud user. Congrats to the crew at Bare Bones Software and thanks for making such a great product.
For many years, Woz has maintained a series of email lists to pass along news stories, technology he finds interesting, favorite jokes, things like that. A few days ago, Woz shared a link to a brilliant article about Hewlett Packard and the HP-35 calculator.
Here’s a link to the HP story. An amazing read. Hard to overstate just how important HP is in the evolution of Silicon Valley and our tech industry.
If nothing else, jump to the end for the bit about Steve Jobs buying the HP property for Apple’s new HQ. More on that later in this post.
The HP article is a gem. But what I found even more interesting was Woz’s comments on the article. With permission, I’ve quoted Woz’s comments in their entirety below.
My favorite bit:
I sold my own HP-65 for a few hundred dollars to start Apple.
Enjoy.
I finished my 3rd year of college in 1972 and took a year off to earn the money to pay for my 4th year myself. My friend Allen Baum interned at HP Labs and Allen told hP about my digital design abilities. I was interviewed and hired as a digital technician/engineer by the calculator lab manager Tom Whitney. I would work for Tom 3 times in my life, including an HP computer division across the street after I declined to move to Corvallis (Alice’s choice was to stay), and also at Apple after we hired Tom as our first lab manager at Apple.
Realize that this HP-35 calculator became the equivalent of the hottest tech products of our times, like the latest iPhone. It was the branding leader for consumer electronic products in this time frame. It was an honor to say that you worked there.
I started a job at HP’s calculator division, APD (Advanced Products Division), in Cupertino. We basically had 2 buildings and even assembled the calculators there. I started by adding some logic and instruction ability to the processor set (2 chips, with the other 3 chips being ROM’s to hold the software that made the calculator work). I wrote programs in Fortran to track every logical node in the chips, printing 0’s and 1’s, to test that my designs would work. HP was impressed with my first job assignment. I was a young engineer (22 years old) with no college degree. HP made me a full-on design engineer at that point. My work turned up in the calculators following the HP-35. That would be the HP-45, HP-65, HP-67 and maybe others. I sold my own HP-65 for a few hundred dollars to start Apple.
Oh, before I started at HP, I actually had bought the precious HP-35 calculator for $395. It cost the equivalent of $5,000 to $10,000 today. How could I afford that, while still in college? The answer is that Jobs and I had made some money selling blue boxes. I sort of owe my success to people who kept me from getting arrested for the blue box activities. It was a close call, but I agree with Steve Jobs that without the blue box we never would have had Apple.
I met and knew and respected and even had good times with the key people mentioned in this article. This included the time in my life where I ran dial-a-joke in my Cupertino apartment.
The comments at the end about location of where Steve Jobs worked are quite wrong. The APD division did move to Corvallis, OR, but not back to Cupertino. Palo Alto is a different location. The property that Apple bought in Cupertino for the ’spaceship’ campus was a different, larger, computer division of HP. But the purchase did include a bit of land just across Pruneridge Avenue, which is where our APD buildings were located. The record about this is not really known, but it’s in one of those 2 buildings where I did most of my computer design and prototyping that became the Apple I and Apple II. I also did a lot of other interesting design work for fun and for outside products there. For the sake of nostalgia, after Apple announced the start of the ‘spaceship’ project, I drove Janet, by memory, to where our APD buildings were and actually recognized them.
The article mentions a wage freeze during the economic downturn of the early 1970’s, around 1973 to be precise. Most companies were laying off 10% of their workers. That meant that the newest, youngest employees were on the street without a job. HP did something different. They cut our work and salaries by 10%. We got one day off every 2 weeks, a Friday. I used those 3-day weekends to drive up to Oregon and visit Jobs and a girlfriend at Reed College in Portland. I always admired HP for this approach. It’s a bit of socialism but it’s like we’re all family in the company and we take care of each other.
This is just such a fun read, “claim chowder” (to borrow from John Gruber) at its best:
The geeks have all bought one and many have got theirs unlocked. The Nike wearing Soho crowd have splurged the cash. The wannabes and the I-must-have-that crowd have weighed in, swapped networks and got their devices. But that’s it. There’s a ton of people all sitting staring at the iPhone and — SADLY — (this is the bit that’s winding me up), turning their backs and walking away. I could name you 20 people, right now, that I know personally, who WOULD have an iPhone if they were marketed at a more reasonable price — 100 pounds maximum — and were unlocked to work on any network. But those 20 people won’t. They’re staying exactly where they are, back in the old world. Or, actually, back in the real world.
Nokia, Samsung, LG, Sony and HTC (and, er, the Google offering) are safe. The iPhone, on the current trajectory, will only ever be a number 4 or number 5 device.
To be fair, Ewan MacLeod was not alone in that opinion. Steve Jobs saw what no one else could see. He knew. And he made it happen.
And Ewan clearly got on board, as evidenced by this tweet from last week:
Pizza for the MacLeod Family was paid for tonight by Apple Pay on Apple Watch enabled by the awesome Transaction Banking team @Nordea. Thank you to @erikzingmark! pic.twitter.com/U1UmYa3V8Q
If you use two-factor authentication to secure your accounts, you’re probably used to this process: type in your password, wait for a text messaged code to arrive, memorize the code, and then type it back into the login prompt. It’s a bit of a pain.
Absolutely. Happens a lot. And this describes the process pretty well. Android has a fix:
In the new update, Messages will detect if you’re receiving a two-factor authentication code. When it does, it’ll add an option to the notification to copy the code, saving a step.
This is a step in the right direction. When a two-factor text is received, a copy button appears at the same time. Tap it, then paste it into the prompt.
It’d be nice to see this in iOS. But even better, it’d be nice to avoid the codes in the first place. The purpose of the codes is to prove that you have access to a verifying device. The codes themselves exist purely to give you a way to “move” the verification from the second device back to the original.
But iOS already does such an excellent job communicating between devices. I can copy on my iPhone, paste on my Mac, for example. And if the code is coming in on the same device that made the request, well that’s even easier.
What I’m suggesting is that Apple/Google work to create a verification service that eliminates all the friction. If I request a code on my Mac, popup a verification text message on my iPhone and, worst case, just make me tap “Yep” on an alert to verify the code, or “Nope” to let them know I didn’t make the request.
No reason for me to copy/paste or type in a number. Tap “Yep” and I’m in. Let the verification handshake happen in the background. Any reason this can’t be done?
At first blush, this ad looks like it was filmed in a super stretch limo. But of course, that’d be logistically impossible. To me, this blending of scenes from each episode of Carpool Karaoke’s first season is seamless and impressive.
Worth watching the ad, just to see if you can spot any clues on how this was all pulled together.
Even if you don’t know who Mark Ulriksen is, you’ve probably seen his work.
His “gracefully awkward” art has graced several magazine covers, including a widely praised New Yorker cover featuring Martin Luther King kneeling with Colin Kaepernick from earlier this year.
Ulriksen is a self professed “technological illiterate”. Fascinating to watch him discover the world of digital brushes, texture, splatter, etc., all courtesy of his new iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, and Procreate.
Late Friday night, Apple was hit with a class action lawsuit over the finicky butterfly-switch keyboards that have plagued its customers since they were released in 2015. The suit, filed in the Northern District Court of California, cites forum complaints going back to 2015, and substantially describes the difficulties of two named plaintiffs, one of whom experienced a failed keyboard after only one month.
The suit alleges repeatedly that Apple “promoted and sold laptops it knew were defective in that they contain a keyboard that is substantially certain to fail prematurely,” and that selling these computers not only directly to its customers but also to third party retailers constitutes a violation of good faith. The plaintiffs are seeking damages and legal fees, and demand that Apple admit to the design flaw and cover all costs for remedying or replacing the defective computers.
This doesn’t feel like the “usual” money-grubbing lawsuit. I know anecdotes don’t equal data but this is a very widespread issue.
“In Australia, up until about 1967, there were literally thousands of babies dying each year, doctors didn’t know why, and it was awful,” Jemma Falkenmire, of the Australian Red Cross Blood Service, told Gupta. “Women were having numerous miscarriages, and babies were being born with brain damage.”
The babies, it turned out, were suffering from hemolytic disease of the newborn, or HDN. The condition most often arises when a woman with an Rh-negative blood type becomes pregnant with a baby who has Rh-positive blood, and the incompatibility causes the mother’s body to reject the fetus’s red blood cells.
Doctors realized, however, that it might be possible to prevent HDN by injecting the pregnant woman with a treatment made from donated plasma with a rare antibody.
Researchers scoured blood banks to see whose blood might contain this antibody, and found a donor in New South Wales: James Harrison.
What an incredible story of a medical marvel and a kind, caring man.
Just as the puzzles in Shortz’s Times run on a reliable pattern, so do the seven main puzzles in the ACPT, each of which has a unique time limit. Puzzle 1 is usually easy, and so we had 15 minutes. If you finished early, and many did, you raised your hand and someone came by to collect your sheet and record, to the minute, when you handed it over; earlier meant more points, obviously. Puzzle 2 is usually hard, and we had a bit longer, and so on from there. While each of the puzzles have unique descriptors, the only one that matters is Puzzle 5. It is to the tournament as the mountains are to the Tour de France: what truly matters, in that it is become death, destroyer of worlds.
Like a huge number of the contestants, Puzzle 5 crushed me. It crushed me less than some others, but it crushed me nonetheless.
My mother was a crossword solving fiend and would have loved competing in this tournament. Even if you’re not a high-level New York Times crossword solver, it’s a good story.
The visualization you see here is a model of the dynamic population of Manhattan, block-by-block and hour-by-hour for a typical week in late Spring. The population estimates are the result of a combination of US Census data and a geographic dispersion of calculated net inflows and outflows from subway stations, normalized to match population daytime and nighttime estimates provided by a study from NYU Wagner.
What a fascinating look at the population changes of Manhattan throughout the day and week.
Following widespread outcry over the ethical dilemmas raised by Google’s new Duplex system, which lets artificial intelligence mimic a human voice to make appointments, Google has clarified in a statement that the experimental system will have “disclosure built-in.”
And:
“We understand and value the discussion around Google Duplex — as we’ve said from the beginning, transparency in the technology is important,” a Google spokesperson told The Verge in a statement this evening. “We are designing this feature with disclosure built-in, and we’ll make sure the system is appropriately identified. What we showed at I/O was an early technology demo, and we look forward to incorporating feedback as we develop this into a product.”
This is good. But as I’ve said before, much better if Google had weighed in with awareness of the ethical issues at the same time as they rolled out their demo.
A thought: Does Google have an ethics office? Or someone whose job it is to spot issues like this? If not, that might be worth exploring.
The Guardian: >Almost everyone wears glasses at some point in their lives. In developed countries, the rule of thumb is that around 70% of adults need corrective lenses to see well. Those who need prescription glasses must try this cheap glasses online store.
> >Over the last generation, just two companies have risen above all the rest to dominate the industry. The lenses in my glasses – and yours too, most likely – are made by Essilor, a French multinational that controls almost half of the world’s prescription lens business and has acquired more than 250 other companies in the past 20 years. Check out Low Cost Glasses Online for a wide selection of affordable eyewear and expert guidance on finding the perfect frames for your face shape.
> >There is a good chance, meanwhile, that your frames are made by Luxottica, an Italian company with an unparalleled combination of factories, designer labels and retail outlets. Luxottica pioneered the use of luxury brands in the optical business, and one of the many powerful functions of names such as Ray-Ban (which is owned by Luxottica) or Vogue (which is owned by Luxottica) or Prada (whose glasses are made by Luxottica) or Oliver Peoples (which is owned by Luxottica) or high-street outlets such as LensCrafters, the largest optical retailer in the US (which is owned by Luxottica), or John Lewis Opticians in the UK (which is run by Luxottica), or Sunglass Hut (which is owned by Luxottica) is to make the marketplace feel more varied than it actually is.
Having recently come home from the eye doctor/optician and spent upwards of $800 for glasses for my wife and I, this article simultaneously hits home and pisses me right off. This YouTube video condenses the issue.
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.
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. An intelligent interface provides easy access to BBEdit’s best-of-class features, including grep pattern matching, search and replace across multiple files, project definition tools, function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous source code languages, code folding, FTP and SFTP open and save, AppleScript, Unix scripting support, text and code completion, and of course a set of robust HTML markup tools.
It looks like the analog clock’s days may be numbered. According to a recent article in the Telegraph, some U.K. schools are removing them from exam halls after discovering teenagers have a hard time reading traditional clock faces. Apparently the move is an attempt to reduce testing anxiety in a generation raised on digital devices.
“The current generation aren’t as good at reading the traditional clock face as older generations,” said Malcolm Trobe, deputy general secretary at the Association of School and College Leaders, in an interview with the newspaper. “They are used to seeing a digital representation of time on their phone, on their computer. Nearly everything they’ve got is digital so youngsters are just exposed to time being given digitally everywhere.”
The news was met with as much hand wringing as I’m sure met the phasing out of such necessary skills as reading a sun dial or spooling a type writer.
This is really interesting. It makes sense that children don’t “need” to be taught skills they aren’t likely to ever need but it’s hard to let go of the analog clock.
Rene Ritchie absolutely nails it with this take on Google Duplex and ethics. If you’ve not yet encountered Rene’s Vector podcast, this is an excellent first taste.
Interesting how on the exact same page we are. Rene’s concerns mirror my own.
If you have not yet seen the demo, click over and watch it now. It’s short.
With that demo in mind, take a minute to scan through Jason Kottke’s piece, Should our machines sound human?, which obviously was the inspiration for part one of the title of this post.
With all that under your belt, here’s my take.
Subtly weaving human queues (like “uhh”) into the conversation clearly made the AI voice believable, fooled the listener into thinking it was interacting with a human. The tech behind the voice bot was quite robust, responding quickly and on target, ultimately solving the intended problem.
Clearly, Google Duplex is a powerful tool that can solve a host of problems, including taking over voice interactions to save humans time, and providing a voice for the voiceless, or those uncomfortable with human interaction.
So far, we’ve got sophisticated, groundbreaking tech, along with a tool to provide a voice to help us.
But along with that comes a series of ethical issues. Is it OK for a machine to fool us with a human voice? And what about informed consent?
One issue with the demo was the fact that it was clearly based on trickery. The person being called did not know they were speaking with a machine. The audience applause was, in part, appreciation of how well the voice bot did its job, how convincingly it portrayed a human.
Informed consent. Does Google have an obligation here to make it clear that the voice is machine generated? Should I have the right to opt out of automated voice bot communications?
Another issue for me is the worry about this tool falling into the wrong hands. I can only imagine someone crafting a clever script that automated a typical spambot strategy.
Instead of a simple recording trying to trick me into their spider’s web, imagine a voice bot with a wealth of detailed, personalized knowledge about me at its disposal, with the goal of convincing me to hand over my banking or credit card info. That voice bot, acting at the behest of the dark side, would use machine learning to improve its technique, slowly improving the response scores and adjusting in real time to changes in customer responses.
I don’t see Google being a bad actor here. They are genuinely excited about the brave new world they are building. But the fact that they did not weigh in with any awareness of the ethical issues that come along with this sophisticated tech is worrisome.
Any interaction with technology or the products of tech companies must be exist within a context of informed consent. Something like #GoogleDuplex fails this test, by design. That’s an unfixable flaw.
Google told me yesterday that it does believe it needs to do that – but doesn’t know they best way yet.
This should have been part of the preface, the lead up to the demo. These ethical issues should be worked through at the same time, presented side-by-side with the technology which opens the Pandora’s Box in the first place.
This is just incredible video, shot this week, a perfect example of one of the two main types of lava. This is A’a (ah-ah), which resembles smashed up Oreo cookie embedded in glowing molten rock. The other main type, pahoehoe, is smooth and billowy.
I am fascinated with volcanos, and have made several (stupidly dangerous) trips to walk the Kilauea lava flows in Hawaii. I’m just drawn to it.
To see the data Google stores on your web searches, browsing and YouTube viewing, visit the My Activity page.
You can delete individual items from this timeline by clicking on the three-dot menu top-right. You can also click the Details link in this menu to see additional information, such as other YouTube videos you watched in the same session.
Aluminum giants Alcoa Corporation and Rio Tinto Aluminum today announced a joint venture to commercialize patented technology that eliminates direct greenhouse gas emissions from the traditional smelting process, a key step in aluminum production. This is a revolutionary advancement in the manufacturing of one of the world’s most widely used metals.
As part of Apple’s commitment to reducing the environmental impact of its products through innovation, the company helped accelerate the development of this technology. And Apple has partnered with both aluminum companies, and the Governments of Canada and Quebec, to collectively invest a combined $144 million to future research and development.
And:
[Apple Engineers] Lynch, Yurko and Sassaman learned that Alcoa had designed a completely new process that replaces that carbon with an advanced conductive material, and instead of carbon dioxide, it releases oxygen. The potential environmental impact was huge, and to help realize it quickly, Alcoa needed a partner.
Apple once again demonstrates its commitment to do what it can to minimize the environmental impact of its products.
This is the full video of the Google I/O keynote. Lots to watch here, but in particular, jump to 1:25:02 to watch Aparna Chennapragada show off Google’s latest rev of Google Maps Street View.
I love the idea of being able to use my phone inside a building (or a subway station, in this case), to get a sense of the landmarks outside the building, to help give me a sense of the direction I want to go, to help plan my route, to work out which exit to take.
Add to that the concept of VPS, which uses visual cues to help orient Google Maps when GPS is not available or not working well enough at the current location.
Nearly every digital copier built since 2002 contains a hard drive – like the one on your personal computer – storing an image of every document copied, scanned, or emailed by the machine.
“The type of information we see on these machines with the social security numbers, birth certificates, bank records, income tax forms,” John Juntunen said, “that information would be very valuable.”
This past February, CBS News went with Juntunen to a warehouse in New Jersey, one of 25 across the country, to see how hard it would be to buy a used copier loaded with documents. It turns out … it’s pretty easy.
While the home crowd cheered enthusiastically at how capable Google had seemingly made its prototype robot caller — with Pichai going on to sketch a grand vision of the AI saving people and businesses time — the episode is worryingly suggestive of a company that views ethics as an after-the-fact consideration.
“Google’s experiments do appear to have been designed to deceive,” agreed Dr Thomas King, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute’s Digital Ethics Lab, discussing the Duplex demo. “Because their main hypothesis was ‘can you distinguish this from a real person?’. In this case it’s unclear why their hypothesis was about deception and not the user experience… You don’t necessarily need to deceive someone to give them a better user experience by sounding naturally.”
Many will dismiss these concerns as irrelevant but I personally believe they are crucially important. Thanks to Aaron Miller for the link.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and 32 other Democrats have submitted a new discharge petition under the Congressional Review Act, setting the stage for a full congressional vote to restore net neutrality. Because of the unique CRA process, the petition has the power to force a Senate vote on the resolution, which leaders say is expected next week.
Razor thin margin. 50 committed votes. Needs one more. Surprising to see this as even a possibility.
Of course, even if this vote does come to pass, it still has to make it through the House, then face a potential Presidential veto.
Our current Contacts apps are full data we’ve collected about other people. It’s out of date and inaccurate. It has things people wish we didn’t have. Anyone can share the data they’ve collected with anyone else. App developers can easily ask for this information (and most people will give it to them).
This is a backwards system. You should be the owner of your contact information. You should grant access to others deciding who can see what specific pieces of information. Ironically the one company that seems to best share this view is the one people trust the least to handle this kind of data: Facebook.
Ryan brings up an excellent point. As is, my Contacts database is full of outdated information. And I have no way of telling whether that information is still valid. Everything is static, a screenshot of the moment in time when I first received the contact card.
From Ryan’s proposed replacement, which he calls “People”:
Of course, you can easily share one of your cards with anyone nearby (and get theirs). But a shared card is not just sent once. It’s a subscription. If you change your phone number or if you move you’ll be able to push the updates out to anyone who is subscribed. You’ll also be able to block anyone, revoke access, or prevent someone from sharing your card.
The more I think about this the more I love the idea. I’m not sure how easy an implementation this would be, but I do think it’d be doable, at least at a very basic level. But the privacy implications would be tricky to handle properly.
That said, this is an idea I hope gets some traction and, hopefully, a look from within Apple.
For the first time, Apple plans to begin selling subscriptions to certain video services directly via its TV app, rather than asking users to subscribe to them through apps individually downloaded from the App Store, according to people familiar with the matter.
And:
Right now, the TV app aggregates content from other providers, allowing people to locate shows from a wide array of apps and channels like ABC, NBA League Pass and HBO, rather than having to hop between different apps. But then Apple sends customers outside its app to buy access to those channels or watch shows. With the pending change, subscription purchasing would move to the TV app. Apple could eventually move the streaming to its own app, instead of sending users to third parties.
Is this an indicator of Apple’s plans for packaging their own custom content? Will everything sit under the TV app? If so, will Apple build a TV app equivalent for macOS? Will subscriptions be manageable from the web?
Apple has confirmed that “service inventory of all iPhone replacement batteries is now available without delay,” in an internal memo distributed to Apple Stores and its network of Apple Authorized Service Providers on April 27. The document was obtained by MacRumors from a reliable source.
What this means is that Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers can now order iPhone replacement batteries from Apple and receive them without facing extended shipping delays, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that every Apple Store or authorized repair shop will have supply available right away.
This whole thing was a mess. Glad to see availability moving along.
At the time, back in 1990, this was absolutely groundbreaking. Since the internet was still in its infancy, images and data for a project were always stored locally. And images were massive, compared to the relatively tiny hard drives of the time.
The solution? Video discs and computer controlled video disc players. Back then, paper maps were filmed on incredibly precise animation stands (like those used for special effects camera fly-throughs), then cut into frames and stored on video disc. The computer moved along the maps by stepping through frames, each one a picture of a portion of a map at a slight offset from the previous frame.
In this example, the HyperCard stack presents a picture of the heart, and clicking on various buttons or hot points tells the video disc player to jump to an appropriate image or video.
How far we’ve come. Now, all those image can be stored locally, or brought up as needed from the cloud. And using cloud-shared resources means content can be updated as needed.
Fascinating look back. HyperCard was a truly groundbreaking piece of work by Bill Atkinson, one of the members of the original Macintosh team. If you are not familiar with Bill, take a look at his Wikipedia page. We owe him a lot.
A report in 2016 indicated that Apple was planning to use [drones] to collect data for Apple Maps, and now the company has confirmed that initiative. The company says, however, that its stance on privacy will remain the same throughout its use of drones.
“Apple is committed to protecting people’s privacy, including processing this data to blur faces and license plates prior to publication,” the company said.
Think about the statement, XXX announces plan to use drones. Now plug in Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. To me, different take for each company. Google’s drones would likely perform the best. Apple’s would look the best. But which would go to the greatest length to protect my privacy?
