This week TechCrunch’s Editor-In-Chief, Matthew Panzarino, joins me to talk about his many sneakers and the incredible aftermarket for them. We also delve into what it’s like writing, planning articles, and covering Apple in today’s world.
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!
I was just out for a drive and this song came on Pandora. I absolutely love this song, but I also remembered one of the funniest movies ever made—Cheech and Chong “Up in Smoke”. This is the opening scene of the movie.
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.
Two articles kind of collided for me.
From the Dow Jones Newswires:
In a permit issued April 14 by the state of California, obtained Friday through a public-records request, Apple identifies six employees, including roboticists who worked at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, who will be in the front seat of three Lexus sport-utility vehicles outfitted with technology to make them autonomous.
More specifically:
The permit also names three engineers who worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Paul Hebert, who has designed a robot that could unlock a door; Jeremy Ma, who focused on algorithms for detecting three-dimensional objects; and Victor Hwang, who has worked on motion-planning algorithms for robots, according to their LinkedIn pages, which list them as working at Apple.
Then comes this Bloomberg article:
Apple Inc. has gone to space to find additional talent for its augmented reality efforts. The iPhone maker has hired Jeff Norris, a specialist in the new technology from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, to help build future products, according to people familiar with the matter.
And, more specifically:
Norris founded the Mission Operations Innovation Office of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, where he led efforts to create new ways to control spacecraft and robots in space with virtual and augmented reality, according to his website.
One article focused on autonomous vehicles, the other on augmented reality. Is this simply a coincidence of mining a rich vein for employees, or are the two efforts more deeply connected? Opinions welcome.
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.
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!
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 amazing to watch. My imagination, or do they keep calling him “Mr. Job”? Remember, this was before the iPhone. Steve was there telling the Cupertino City Council about Apple’s purchase of a huge parcel from HP due to their explosive growth. Again, before the iPhone.
Five years later, Steve went back to the council to talk about the idea of the Spaceship campus. They got his name right this time.
Can’t help but note the difference in Jobs, both in physical appearance and in his voice, from that first video (below) and his Spaceship campus pitch.
This is fascinating, mesmerizing. [H/T Robert Walter]
Last week, we linked to a post from Daniel Pasco on updating a 2009 Mac Pro:
I turned a 2009 Mac Pro I picked up off of Ebay for $1300 into a superb professional workstation, gaming, and VR platform, simply by adding an SSD drive and a new video card.
Here’s a follow-on post with all the detail on the build, really well written with lots of pictures. Thanks for this Dan, a real service to the community.
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.
From the New York Times profile of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, about Kalanick being summoned to a meeting with Tim Cook in early 2015:
For months, Mr. Kalanick had pulled a fast one on Apple by directing his employees to help camouflage the ride-hailing app from Apple’s engineers. The reason? So Apple would not find out that Uber had been secretly identifying and tagging iPhones even after its app had been deleted and the devices erased — a fraud detection maneuver that violated Apple’s privacy guidelines.
But Apple was onto the deception, and when Mr. Kalanick arrived at the midafternoon meeting sporting his favorite pair of bright red sneakers and hot-pink socks, Mr. Cook was prepared. “So, I’ve heard you’ve been breaking some of our rules,” Mr. Cook said in his calm, Southern tone. Stop the trickery, Mr. Cook then demanded, or Uber’s app would be kicked out of Apple’s App Store.
For Mr. Kalanick, the moment was fraught with tension. If Uber’s app was yanked from the App Store, it would lose access to millions of iPhone customers — essentially destroying the ride-hailing company’s business. So Mr. Kalanick acceded.
More on fingerprinting:
The idea of fooling Apple, the main distributor of Uber’s app, began in 2014.
At the time, Uber was dealing with widespread account fraud in places like China, where tricksters bought stolen iPhones that were erased and resold.
And:
To halt the activity, Uber engineers assigned a persistent identity to iPhones with a small piece of code, a practice called “fingerprinting.” Uber could then identify an iPhone and prevent itself from being fooled even after the device was erased of its contents.
There was one problem: Fingerprinting iPhones broke Apple’s rules. Mr. Cook believed that wiping an iPhone should ensure that no trace of the owner’s identity remained on the device.
And:
So Mr. Kalanick told his engineers to “geofence” Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., a way to digitally identify people reviewing Uber’s software in a specific location. Uber would then obfuscate its code for people within that geofenced area, essentially drawing a digital lasso around those it wanted to keep in the dark. Apple employees at its headquarters were unable to see Uber’s fingerprinting.
The audacity! But Apple caught on, thus the meeting with Cook.
Clues to this fingerprinting emerged late last year. From TechCrunch:
Uber responded today to reports that its app continues to check users’ locations even when they hadn’t used the ride-hailing service for days or weeks. The company explained that the issue is being caused by the iOS operating system itself, not direct tracking by its app.
But, as John Gruber writes:
After writing about how you can verify that Uber is not tracking your location other than within five minutes of ending a ride, Daring Fireball readers on Twitter started sending me screenshots of their Location Services settings, showing that the Uber app is still checking for their location days or even weeks after they last used the app.
A few more reads:
This TechCrunch article digs into a more detail on the fingerprinting process, and includes a response from Uber on the Times’ piece.
John Gruber digs into the Times article in detail, and raises some unanswered questions of his own.
One last thought: Uber has a 3rd party API, detailed here. If someone deletes the Uber app from their phone, what’s to prevent one of the other Uber API-using apps from reporting data back to Uber, even unknowingly? Could this explain why users report being tracked even after deleting the app?
TechCrunch:
Apple is finally adding transit options to its Maps app for the city of Paris. Starting today, you can use Apple Maps to calculate itineraries using public transportation.
You’ll find subway, RER and bus lines, and even Transilien lines. Just like in Google Maps, you can look around the map with a new subway layer or you can calculate an itinerary from A to B. If you tap on a station, you can see all the lines leaving this station as well as real time information about the next departures.
Finally, you’ll also find Autolib car sharing stations as well as Vélib bike sharing stations. Unfortunately, it doesn’t say if there are bikes or spaces available.
Surprised that this took so long, but glad the data is finally available.
Syracuse Post-Standard:
How fast can a bowler roll 12 consecutive strikes and achieve a perfect game?
For Ben Ketola, the answer is 86.9 seconds.
I love bowling but wouldn’t this level of skill take a lot of fun out of the game?
It’s just as bad as you would imagine it to be.
CNET:
The March for Science drew tens of thousands of scientists and science supporters to US and international cities on Saturday. In San Jose, California, the heart of Silicon Valley, the march began near City Hall.
The best part of this photo series is CNET explains some of the wonderfully nerdy science signs. My favorite is number 40.
FCP.pro:
3D and VR plugin developer Tim Dashwood has joined Apple. Not only is that good news for FCPX users, he has also made his existing plugin products free.
We would imagine FxFactory’s servers have been red hot since the news crept out that long-time plugin developer Tim Dashwood has joined Apple. Tim developed 3D and 360 VR plugins for editors using Quartz Composer. Now that Tim works at Apple, could we see VR editing functionality included with FCPX? Or could VR capability be included inside the OS?
All exciting stuff and very good news for anybody who uses the Pro Apps. His employment has meant that he has made his commercial plugin products free to download.
Good news in general for pros and specifically for users who want his commercial plugin products.
Mic:
For those that are beginning to worry that the television season is winding down, leaving us with a dwindling list of compelling dramas, think again. Now streaming on Amazon Prime is the third season of Bosch, the critically lauded crime series based on the series of books by Michael Connelly.
The series, which stars Titus Welliver as Harry Bosch, is coming off a near-universally acclaimed second season that saw the titular detective finally solve his most intimate case: The murder of his mother. Bosch’s stellar second season certainly has fans of the series ready for more, and those that have not yet watched may want to consider jumping on board.
James Wolcott of Vanity Fair described Bosch’s second season as “a marvel of long-form plotting and execution, [it] is the only show I’ve watched this young year that delivers the sustained suspense, discovery, and enjoyment of the returning Better Call Saul and The Americans.”
I’m not usually one for recommending TV shows here but this one is so good, I feel compelled to. The lead, Titus Welliver, brings an intensity to what might otherwise be the cliched “tough cop, heart of gold, troubled personal life, lives by his own code, blah, blah, blah”. The two included trailers, one a recap to get you up to speed and the other a season three preview, really don’t do the show justice. If you are an Amazon Prime member, start binge-watching now.
In honor of yesterday’s Earth Day, watch this.
The Atlantic:
Will you pay more for those shoes before 7 p.m.? Would the price tag be different if you lived in the suburbs? Standard prices and simple discounts are giving way to far more exotic strategies, designed to extract every last dollar from the consumer.
This is the part of online shopping that pisses me off the most – the blatant price gouging and fluctuations based on factors not found in brick and mortar stores.
Adweek:
It’s a conversation that happens across the country—how many times a day? A hundred? A thousand? Warily eyeing middle age bearing down on him, a fella goes out and buys a motorcycle on a whim. He’s plunked down his 10 grand, and he’s had a swell time getting bugs in his teeth out on the open road.
Now there’s just one problem: He hasn’t told his significant other about it.
This squirmy conversation is the topic of the latest advertising spot debuting today from Zero Motorcycles.
It’s a weird ad but funny because I’ve heard these arguments and more made by dozens of potential motorcycle owners trying to convince themselves or their significant other to “let” them have a bike. And if you want some personal views on the Zero electric bike, check out my post on a test ride here.