The Onion is just brilliant sometimes.

Ars Technica:

It was a simpler time, back in early 2015, when Amazon’s Echo first came out as a speaker with a voice assistant inside. Now, the evolution of the Echo family and Alexa have brings us a device designed specifically to make you look good. The new $199 Echo Look is the first iteration of Echo that has a camera, and the device uses it to evaluate your outfits, take outfit-of-the-day photos for you to share, and suggest which styles look best on you.

There has never been a product less suited to me. That being said, I think Amazon will sell a lot of these to budding and wannabe fashionistas.

Among the various sports, baseball players aren’t particularly noteworthy for their athleticism, but what Toronto’s Chris Coghlan did Tuesday night was certainly noteworthy.

Wow.

Lots and lots of great links to explore.

BuzzFeed:

A Connecticut man was charged with murdering his wife after police analyzed the woman’s Fitbit and found the device recorded her movements after the time the man told investigators she was fatally shot by a home intruder.

Imagine the shock on this guy’s face when they laid this out for him. Like an episode of Elementary.

The details and live examples are here. To bring the sample pictures to life, hover over the “Live” box in the upper-right corner.

The key is a chunk of JavaScript wrapped up in a library called LivePhotosKit. Read more about LivePhotosKit here.

CNBC:

According to a new survey, individuals who did not already own Apple’s smartwatch were unenthusiastic about buying one anytime soon, while just 8 percent of those surveyed said they planned to make the purchase.

A total of 1,339 consumers were polled by consumer marketing firm Fluent for the survey.

“Customer excitement for the Apple Watch has plateaued since hitting the market in 2015. Only current owners think it’s a great product, but nearly half of them don’t plan on upgrading,” a Fluent spokeswoman said in an email.

I think it’s hard to draw these sorts of conclusions about a market that is so young and still growing, still finding its way. Add to that that the Apple Watch is a secondary device, designed to augment the iPhone, at least for most people. Apple Watch sales are gravy for Apple, enhancing iPhone sales numbers, helping add value to the ecosystem.

As to upgrading, I’d say give that time, time for the Apple Watch and watchOS to evolve, to give people a reason to upgrade to the latest and greatest. Currently, a faster processor doesn’t mean much for most Apple Watch users. But over time, as watchOS gains capabilities, that need will change.

The Fluent survey may be factually correct, but I don’t agree with the tone of the analysis. Personally, I see a lot of headroom for Apple Watch growth and I do plan on upgrading in the next cycle.

Check out the images in the press release. I love the animated GIF toward the bottom of the release that shows the “solar wings” opening and closing. Apple Stores sometimes seem, to me, like sculptures.

Popular Mechanics:

The last thing a fighter pilot wants to do is eject, and it’s not just because they’re abandoning the ship to a fiery demise. The turbulent process of ejecting puts pilots at serious risk of injury. Once those rockets fire under the seat, they blow a person up and out of the cockpit with enough force to seriously bruise both shoulders on the harness straps and possibly break collarbones. And you better tuck in your knees and elbows, because if anything hits the side of the cockpit on the way out, it’s coming off.

Not that any of us would ever be in this situation but it’s still fascinating. The post includes some incredible video of pilots ejecting, including one from a plane already on the ground.

Mashable:

It’s like a real life Where’s Waldo or I Spy, except this one can kill you.

While most people walking through the woods are on the lookout for wildlife, this photo from a snake expert proves that you should be super cautious if you’re walking in an area with venomous snakes.

Somewhere, lurking in this photo, is a snake ready to strike.

I can’t see it and this perfectly encapsulates why I don’t go into the woods.

The company expects to deploy its flying taxis in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, and Dubai by 2020, Chief Product Officer Jeff Holden said at the Uber Elevate Summit in Dallas on Tuesday.

Fuck no!

Priceonomics:

Traffic engineers believe that the 85th percentile speed is the ideal speed limit because it leads to the least variability between driving speeds and therefore safer roads. When the speed limit is correctly set at the 85th percentile speed, the minority of drivers that do conscientiously follow speed limits are no longer driving much slower than the speed of traffic. The choice of the 85th percentile speed is a data-driven conclusion — as noted Lt. Megge and speed limit resources like the Michigan State Police’s guide — that has been established by the consistent findings of years of traffic studies.

Yet most speed limits are set below the 85th percentile speed.

Last Sunday, I decided to see what kind of gas mileage I could get on my motorcycle. I drove 90 minutes into downtown Vancouver, keeping to the speed limit the entire time (except for the 30 seconds I didn’t and this happened). I got passed by everybody. Semis, minvans, old men in Buicks. Even thought the speed limit was 100kph (about 60mph), literally no one was doing the speed limit.

CBS News:

“So we call the software of the store that we are launching the end of May – we call that Today at Apple.”

That “software” will roll out across Apple’s nearly 500 stores, many of which will be changed literally overnight. Ahrendts calls it all an effort to create “town squares” where customers engage with their devices and their communities.

“A lot of the big online guys have said they’re opening stores. Amazon’s investing in stores. Google’s investing in stores. … Starbucks figured it out, you know? Being a gathering place for – right? ‘Meet me at Starbucks,”’ Ahrendts said. “And you know, I’ve told the teams, ‘I’ll know we’ve done a really, really great job if the next generation, if Gen Z says, “Meet me at Apple. Did you see what’s going on at Apple today?”’”

It’s interesting that Apple is going back to what they used to focus on – in-store demonstrations and training.

Apple today announced plans to launch dozens of new educational sessions next month in all 495 Apple stores ranging in topics from photo and video to music, coding, art and design and more. The hands-on sessions, collectively called “Today at Apple,” will be led by highly-trained team members, and in select cities world-class artists, photographers and musicians, teaching sessions from basics and how-to lessons to professional-level programs.

Sounds like an expanded version of what they used to do at the stores. I like it.

Into the craft that is songwriting? Check out Song Exploder, a podcast that invites artists to explain their process.

My 2 cents, the best place to start is with the latest episode, where Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo talks through his approach to writing the song Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori.

The whole thing was fascinating, from the backstory of the song’s inspiration, to the mechanics Rivers uses to bring together chord structures. Lots to learn here.

Wannabe songwriter? Give it a listen.

Laura Hazard Owen, Neiman Lab:

Good things can happen when a crowd goes to work on trying to figure out a problem in journalism. At the same time, completely crowdsourced news investigations can go bad without oversight — as when, for example, a group of Redditors falsely accused someone of being the Boston Marathon bomber. An entirely crowdsourced investigation with nobody to oversee it or pay for it will probably go nowhere. At the same time, trust in the media is at low and fact checking efforts have become entwined with partisan politics.

So what would happen if you combined professional journalism with fact checking by the people? On Monday evening, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales launched Wikitribune, an independent site (not affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation) “that brings journalists and a community 
of volunteers together” in a combination that Wales hopes will combat fake news online — initially in English, then in other languages.

Here’s a link to Wikitribune. The site has been deluged with traffic, so don’t be surprised if you have trouble getting in. Early reviews have been nitpicky, focusing on typos and broken links. Me, I say give it time to find its feet. I love Wikipedia and have high hopes that Jimmy Wales can make this work.

From the Wikitribune front page:

Facts can be presented with bias, taken out of context and most recently a lot of facts are just plain…made-up. Supporting Wikitribune means ensuring that that journalists only write articles based on facts that they can verify. Oh, and that you can see their sources. That way you can make up your own mind.

Amen.

Reuters:

A premiere party for “Carpool Karaoke” scheduled for March in Los Angeles was postponed without explanation days before it was to take place. This week, the company again postponed its launch party, which had been rescheduled for Monday.

To me, this is not original content that will make or break Apple’s approach to a cable cutting alternative. Perhaps they are pushing this back to somehow intersect with WWDC.

Macstories:

Today, Apple announced that it is reducing the commissions it pays on apps and In-App Purchases from 7% to 2.5% effective May 1st. The iTunes Affiliate Program pays a commission from Apple’s portion of the sale of apps and other media when a purchase is made with a link that contains the affiliate credentials of a member of the program. Anyone can join, but the Affiliate Program is used heavily by websites that cover media sold by Apple and app developers.

While the percentage remains at 7% for movies, music, and books, this does nothing but hurt small publishers, some of who rely on these revenues from Apple’s affiliate program. It means some sites may not be able to continue or will be forced to increase the number of affiliate links to make up the difference. Apple still takes their 30% from developers (affiliate revenues came out of Apple’s share), so this means Apple makes more money and users of affiliate links make significantly less.

My thanks to Letter Opener for sponsoring The Loop this week.

Letter Opener for macOS

Working together with Windows users shouldn’t be problematic at all. Still, some email messages can not be natively read by the Mac and are packed into Winmail.dat or MSG files that have to be extracted and displayed somehow. Letter Opener for macOS does that with a simple double-click!

Letter Opener for macOS Mail

The plugin to stop the Winmail.dat file flood for good.

If Winmail.dat files are a reoccurring problem, Letter Opener for macOS Mail is the solution. Installed into Mail it opens and displays the files directly inside Apples Mail application, so the user can forget about Winmail.dat files entirely.

BoingBoing:

If you live near a lake in the US, you’ll soon be able to zip across it in this Kitty Hawk Flyer. According to their site, the “ultralight aircraft,” which is financially backed by Google co-founder Larry Page, will be available by the end of 2017. You won’t need a registration or pilot’s license to fly it, and the Flyer only takes minutes to learn how to operate it.

I’d fly this.

National Geographic:

When you weigh 200 tons, even the smallest body movements require a lot of energy. That’s why blue whales, Earth’s largest animal, are picky eaters.

Stunning new drone footage shows exactly how these massive mammals maneuver to feed on only the most nutritious patches of krill—providing insight on how they make these choices.

Fascinating that the blue whale is, possibly by necessity, picky about the size of krill patch it eats.

This is fascinating, mesmerizing. [H/T Robert Walter]

Lyrebird:

Lyrebird will offer an API to copy the voice of anyone. It will need as little as one minute of audio recording of a speaker to compute a unique key defining her/his voice. This key will then allow to generate anything from its corresponding voice. The API will be robust enough to learn from noisy recordings.

This is fascinating and scary. The technology is far from perfect, but I can definitely see them getting to “close enough to fool you” pretty quickly.