Throughout the 1980s, Stewart traveled 60,000 miles a year as a full-time spectator, living out of his car, getting stoned, and using television’s obsession with athletics as a vessel for promoting his faith. In doing so, he made the Bible passage a fixture of professional sporting events.
It was a noble effort—but one Stewart would end up undermining with some increasingly eccentric behavior.
If you watched sports in 1980s, you saw this guy in the background of major sporting events. I found him incredibly annoying and, while I never wondered or cared about what happened to him, the path his life took is tragic.
The Powerball jackpot now stands more than $850 million CAD according to currency conversion calculators ($700 million USD). At this pace, the Powerball could soon break its own world-record and award a prize higher than the mammoth $2.1 billion CAD jackpot that stunned the world back in January 2016.
According to the official Powerball website, Canadians can “purchase a Powerball ticket…play the game and…collect prizes.” The website clearly states: “You do not have to be a [US] citizen or a resident to play the game.”
Canadians attracted by this amazing jackpot don’t have to cross the border if they want to play to win the exploding Powerball jackpot. They can play from the comfort of their homes.
Many of us Canadians are jealous about the size of the Powerball jackpot. This is an easy way for us (and others outside the US) to get in on the fun.
You’ve tried to silence unimportant push alerts but couldn’t figure out the complicated settings. Or worse, you thought you mastered the settings, but trivial messages still manage to sneak through like a mouse in an air vent.
Our attention has become such a precious commodity that apps, social networks and, yes, news outlets have deployed infuriating numbers of pop-ups to conquer it.
“Silence all the notifications!” is not the answer, however. Do I want Facebook to ding me to update my profile? Never. But I sure as heck want to be buzzed by the babysitter watching my newborn.
Notifications are a constant river of pain. But they do have value. The key is tuning them. The post does a nice job walking through some settings to give a sense of what lives where and what you can control.
But the article goes further, raising the point of the big UI divide between Apple’s (and Google’s) notification settings and those more fine tuned settings that live inside the biggest offenders, like Facebook.
The system-wide notification settings are found in the Settings app, listed under Facebook. These enable/disable notifications, and specify the various forms those notifications can take. But the detailed notification settings (notify me when someone likes my post, for example) are buried inside the Facebook app itself.
While this division is logical, Joanna makes this point:
The design of this system is confusing. Apple and Google should make it easier for us to get from system settings to individual app menus. It now takes about four taps to get from an app’s home screen to its notification controls.
And when you get there, you often see a long and messy list. The alternative is worse: a single on-off switch—or no notification control at all. Seriously, Lyft, I know when I need you, so alert me when my driver is arriving, not when there’s a sale on rides.
I think this is two separate issues. Nothing Apple can do about the granularity of an individual app’s notifications. That’s an app design issue.
But Apple could make it easier to get from an app’s notifications settings in the Settings app to the more detailed settings in the app itself. Perhaps via a link you tap in the Settings > Notifications > Facebook page that brings you to the sub-page in Facebook itself to tweak the more detail settings. To me, this consistency would be welcome.
Daisuke Wakabayashi, writing for the New York Times:
The company has put off any notion of an Apple-branded autonomous vehicle and is instead working on the underlying technology that allows a car to drive itself.
And:
A notable symbol of that retrenchment is a self-driving shuttle service that ferries employees from one Apple building to another. The shuttle, which has never been reported before, will likely be a commercial vehicle from an automaker and Apple will use it to test the autonomous driving technology that it develops.
And:
Five people familiar with Apple’s car project, code-named “Titan,” discussed with The New York Times the missteps that led the tech giant to move — at least for now — from creating a self-driving Apple car to creating technology for a car that someone else builds. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about Apple’s plans.
The project’s reduced scale aligns Apple more closely with other tech companies that are working on autonomous driving technology but are steering clear of building cars. Even Waymo, the Google self-driving spinoff that is probably furthest along among Silicon Valley companies, has said repeatedly that it does not plan to produce its own vehicles.
This is the way Apple works. In fact, this is the way any large-scale, R&D based business works. Experiment, build, test, learn, pivot. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes you end up going in a completely different direction.
Research counts on missteps. It’s part of the process.
The tone of this article reads to me as: “Apple screws up royally, they just couldn’t build a car, have to settle for the scraps of building a shuttle for its employees.”
Another take could be, “Apple continues to learn about the auto space, takes another step forward by designing and building an actual, working autonomous vehicle which they will put into use moving employees around their campuses. Amazing that they came so far so quickly. Who knows where they’ll ultimately take this technology?”
Me? I think that second take is closer to reality.
Today we’re launching the first step of an exciting new phase at Medium.
We strongly believe that quality content needs to be paid for by consumers — not advertisers — so creators can do their best work, and to align the incentives of everyone involved. So, since March, we’ve been experimenting with our subscription paywall and putting more and more great stories behind it. But that’s only a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of fantastic stories published on Medium every day. And, though Medium is an open publishing platform, we haven’t enabled a way for most of our writers to participate in the economics.
Until now.
In a nutshell, Medium is updating their Partner Program to allow writers to be paid by engagement. And how is that engagement measured?
For the creators in the program, each month you will be paid based on the level of engagement your stories get from Medium members. Essentially, we look at the engagement of each individual member (claps being the primary signal) and allocate their monthly subscription fee based on that engagement. This is one of the reasons we love Claps — it helps us measure the depth of appreciation that a member has for each individual post. (For our members, we’re excited to give you more meaningful control over the stories you support. The more claps you give a locked post, the more share of your membership fee that author will get.)
To me, this move was inevitable. The question is, will this amount to more than pennies for all but the most widely read authors? Reminiscent of the music streaming model.
Popular weather app AccuWeather has been caught sending geolocation data to a third-party data monetization firm, even when the user has switched off location sharing.
And Jim’s followup:
How can you ever trust them again? You can’t.
Last night, AccuWeather released this statement:
Despite stories to the contrary from sources not connected to the actual information, if a user opts out of location tracking on AccuWeather, no GPS coordinates are collected or passed without further opt-in permission from the user.
Other data, such as Wi-Fi network information that is not user information, was for a short period available on the Reveal SDK, but was unused by AccuWeather. In fact, AccuWeather was unaware the data was available to it. Accordingly, at no point was the data used by AccuWeather for any purpose.
And
To avoid any further misinterpretation, while Reveal is updating its SDK, AccuWeather will be removing the Reveal SDK from its iOS app until it is fully compliant with appropriate requirements. Once reinstated, the end result should be that zero data is transmitted back to Reveal Mobile when someone opts out of location sharing. In the meanwhile, AccuWeather had already disabled the SDK, pending removal of the SDK and then later reinstatement.
My gut says AccuWeather was caught by surprise here, rather than caught with their hand in the cookie jar. The way I read this, this is an issue with the Reveal SDK, not an intentional act of deception on the part of the AccuWeather app. Disagree?
Popular weather app AccuWeather has been caught sending geolocation data to a third-party data monetization firm, even when the user has switched off location sharing.
It has been a few years since a decision by a major tech company last turned me into a green rage monster, but it just happened again. Code42 Software has announced that it’s discontinuing its consumer backup product, CrashPlan for Home.
Product Graveyard is a fun way to keep track of and commemorate our favorite products that are with us no more. I worked on this as a side project during my summer internship at Siftery. Hope you enjoy and please join in by contributing a funny story or eulogy for one of the featured products!
It’s a little depressing to see how many of these products I used over the years that are no more.
Congratulations to those of you who used proper solar eclipse glasses and witnessed the phenomenon without permanently damaging your vision. Good job! But now you’re probably wondering what to do with those flimsy pieces of cardboard and black polymer that were basically priceless just hours ago.
Fortunately, Astronomers Without Borders has offered to take them off your hands so that children will be able to use them in future eclipses. The organization says it will soon announce a program dedicated to redistributing glasses to schools in Asia and South America, where there will be solar eclipses in 2019.
What a great idea and wonderful service by Astronomers Without Borders.
Of the estimated 2.4m apps available on the App Store, we believe less than 1% leverage ML today – but not for long. We believe Core ML will be a driving force in bringing machine learning to the masses in the form of more useful and insightful apps that run faster and respect user privacy.
It’s going to be interesting to see what we will be able to do with our devices in the next three years as machine learning and artificial intelligence make their way into our lives in a bigger way.
After touring with his prototype models throughout 2016 and 2017, Slash is proud to announce the release of these limited edition Gibson Custom Slash Anaconda Burst Les Pauls.
It’s very nice, but I’m more of an Appetite for Destruction Les Paul guy.
This is a major drop in shipping time, from 6 weeks (down to 4 weeks recently) down to 2-3 weeks. This is on the US Apple Store. Not sure about other countries.
Your Mac contains a lot of personal information, and is connected to a number of Apple accounts. When you plan to dispose of your Mac — whether you sell it, give it away, or send it for recycling — there are a number of things you should do to make sure your data and your accounts remain secure. There are also a few steps you need to take to remove that Mac from Apple’s accounts.
In this article, I go over the 8 steps you should take before getting rid of a Mac.
Some basic, common sense advice here. Bookmark, pass along, especially to folks you know who are relatively new to the Mac.
Forget fiddling with passwords or even fingerprints; forget multiple layers of sign-in; forget credit cards and, eventually, even physical keys to our homes and cars. A handful of laptops and mobile devices can now read facial features, and the technique is about to get a boost from specialized hardware small enough to fit into our phones.
Using our faces to unlock things could soon become routine, rather than the purview of spies and superheroes.
And:
Depth-sensing technology, generally called “structured light,” sprays thousands of tiny infrared dots across a person’s face or any other target.
By reading distortions in this field of dots, the camera gathers superaccurate depth information. Since the phone’s camera can see infrared but humans can’t, such a system could allow the phone to unlock in complete darkness.
And:
Teaching our phones what our faces look like will be just like teaching them our fingerprints, says Sy Choudhury, a senior director at Qualcomm responsible for security and machine-intelligence products. An image of your face is captured, relevant features are extracted and the phone stores them for comparison with your face when you unlock the phone.
As with fingerprint recognition, the facial images are securely stored only on the device itself, not in the cloud. History — from Apple’s battles with domestic law enforcement over unlocking iPhones to Amazon’s insistence that the Alexa doesn’t upload anything until it hears its wake word — suggests companies will use this privacy as a selling point.
My fingerprints don’t change, but moisture, sweat, and dirt can make my fingerprints unreadable to Touch ID. I wonder if a haircut, beard trim, shift in makeup patterns will have a similar impact on facial recognition.
“Breakout” was created by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak with help from fellow co-founder Steve Jobs as a successor to “Pong,” and requires a player to knock down rows of colored bricks with a paddle.
Nestle simply replaced the bricks with brown Kit Kat bars, used in a Kit Kate Bites commercial titled “Kit Kat: Breakout,” showing adults and children using paddles to knock the bars down, according to Atari.
How does Nestle possibly defend themselves against this lawsuit? They seem guilty as hell.
Lots to love about this fantastic video. There’s the solar eclipse itself, of course, , but there’s also a chance to see the great Walter Cronkite at work. I love the reference to 2017 as the next total eclipse. Seems impossibly far off.
MPs are expected to gather outside parliament to witness Big Ben’s final bongs at midday on Monday before the chimes are silenced to allow repair work to begin, amid a political furore about the four-year renovation project.
Big Ben is the nickname for the Great Bell of the clock at the north end of the Palace of Westminster in London and is usually extended to refer to both the clock and the clock tower as well. The tower is officially known as Elizabeth Tower, renamed to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II in 2012; previously, it was known simply as the Clock Tower.
When completed in 1859, it was, says clockmaker Ian Westworth, “the prince of timekeepers: the biggest, most accurate four-faced striking and chiming clock in the world.” The tower had its 150th anniversary on 31 May 2009, during which celebratory events took place.
A British cultural icon, the tower is one of the most prominent symbols of the United Kingdom and is often in the establishing shot of films set in London.
Hope we hear that famous bong again as soon as possible.
UPDATE: Feedback on the original article ranged from calling it silly (the clock is undergoing maintenance, pure clickbait) all the way to anger (this story is nothing, Brexit is where the focus should be). If you’re interested, here’s a Twitter moments’ peek at the crowds gathering to watch the bell fall silent:
When you restart your iPhone, you are forced to reenter your passcode to unlock your phone. If your phone is off, this prevents anyone with access to your phone from breaking in.
But with the latest beta (iOS 11 beta 6), Apple added this shortcut:
iOS 11 is a game-changer for Touch ID. Press power button rapidly 5 times and it opens the 2nd screen, but it also forces passphrase entry! pic.twitter.com/uvWbM04lyk
In a nutshell, if you press the power button 5 times quickly, you are sent to the emergency call screen (as you were in previous incarnations). But in the latest beta, Touch ID will no longer unlock your phone, forcing you to reenter the passcode to regain access.
This is a smart add. You can make this move silently, even with the phone in your pocket.
Movie studios are considering whether to ignore the objections of cinema chains and forge ahead with a plan to offer digital rentals of films mere weeks after they appear in theaters, according to people familiar with the matter.
Some of the biggest proponents, including Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures, are pressing on in talks with Apple Inc. and Comcast Corp. on ways to push ahead with the project even without theater chains, the people said.
And:
Deals with potential distributors such as Apple and Comcast could be reached as soon as early next year to sell digital downloads of major films as soon as two weeks after they debut in theaters, the people said.
This seems inevitable, part of the evolution of the content consumption model. Apple is easing into this business on several sides, tweaking their iTunes movie and TV streaming business, as they also build their own content creation business.
I see Apple as the irresistible force here, fueled by the deepest pockets in the biz.
Deloitte today announced that Chipotle Mexican Grill has selected Deloitte Digital to help transform its mobile customer experience. Deloitte Digital, the creative digital consultancy within Deloitte Consulting LLP, will redesign Chipotle’s iOS and Android ordering apps as part of Chipotle’s focus on digital ordering and enhancing the customer experience. Chipotle plans to launch the new apps in the fall of 2017, with additional channels by the end of the year.
And:
The redesigned mobile experience will also include enhanced payment options including Apple and Android pay.
Whether or not you are a fan of Chipotle, this is a sign of the continued expansion of Apple Pay. Slow and steady.
The Voyagers’ scientific mission will end when their plutonium-238 thermoelectric power generators fail, around the year 2030. After that, the two craft will drift endlessly among the stars of our galaxy—unless someone or something encounters them someday. With this prospect in mind, each was fitted with a copy of what has come to be called the Golden Record. Etched in copper, plated with gold, and sealed in aluminum cases, the records are expected to remain intelligible for more than a billion years, making them the longest-lasting objects ever crafted by human hands. We don’t know enough about extraterrestrial life, if it even exists, to state with any confidence whether the records will ever be found. They were a gift, proffered without hope of return.
Apple aired the finale of its first original series this week. If you missed it, don’t stress.
It’s just a pretty undramatic, very-edited reality show about dozens of entrepreneurs, people who were trying to make careers off a business based around an app.
Not unlike Shark Tank, viewers learn a little about what it takes to build an app-based company and raise venture capital. But unlike Shark Tank, it’s really not that thrilling.
That’s OK, though. For Apple, the whole ordeal can be seen as a success.
I couldn’t/didn’t watch all ten episodes. If you did, what did you think? Would you watch another full season of the show?
Prepare for some seriously epic Sunday brunches, because the PancakeBot makes it possible to essentially 3D print your own pancake designs at the touch of a button. The proprietary batter dispensing system will draw your customized pancake perfectly every time.
This is utterly insane and stupid and I want one so bad.
Last week, I met Louis and we walked down a memory lane, talking about our publishing lives, disappointments and emotional challenges of breaking up with something you create. We pondered about the state of the media, the emergence of President Trump and why we need to be optimistic about the future.
Such a great interview. It’s like we’re listening in on two friends sitting down for a chat.
