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I dug into Christoph Kabisch’s new iBook with zero expectations. A look back at the original iPhone? How good could this be?

As it turns out, the book was a fascinating read with lots of detail, both in word and images. I owned the original iPhone, was there when it was announced and rolled out. I thought I remembered the details, but this book made it clear how much slipped out of my memory.

When you read it, be sure to tap on each image. Some move to a larger frame, others are 3D models that rotate.

The book is only 99 cents. Here’s a link. Worth it for the pictures alone. A terrific journey back in time.

UPDATE: Don’t miss the iPhone OS simulator on page 40. Incredible.

Patently Apple:

In the future, if Siri doesn’t recognize the voice of the owner of the device, accessing Siri or the computer associated with it will be impossible.

And:

Today a user will say “hey Siri” and Siri will respond. In the future, the command to call up Siri may be customized to your voice. For instance, a user sets up Siri to recognize the phrase “Hey there, Boss.” The customized phrase and the voice must match what’s in Siri’s database before the digital assistant will respond. The customized phrase is technically referred to in Apple’s patent filings as a “Lexical Trigger.”

And:

In the future, in order to access Siri, a person will have to know a passcode, use a fingerprint or be recognized by the system via face recognition. Unless your iDevice recognizes you on multiple security levels, Siri will remain unresponsive to commands or requests.

As long as I can turn this off via a setting, this seems like a natural evolution.

MIT News:

MIT Professor Tim Berners-Lee, the researcher who invented the World Wide Web and is one of the world’s most influential voices for online privacy and government transparency, has won the most prestigious honor in computer science, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) A.M. Turing Award. Often referred to as “the Nobel Prize of computing,” the award comes with a $1 million prize provided by Google.

Tim Berners-Lee changed the world as much as anyone else in the computing or business world. Folks like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk etc. all changed the world, no doubt. But all of them became incredibly wealthy in the process. Nice to see this announcement.

On a related note, here’s an interview with Tim where he discusses the Turing Award and what’s become of his beloved brainchild, the web.

Wall Street Journal:

The National Football League has reached a deal to stream 10 Thursday night games with Amazon.com Inc., the online retailer that is aggressively trying to position itself as a premier source of entertainment content.

The one-year agreement is valued at around $50 million, according to people familiar with the matter. That price tag represents a fivefold increase over the NFL’s agreement with Twitter Inc. for the same number of games last season.

To me, this deal makes much more sense than last year’s Twitter deal. The Twitter deal seemed like dipping a toe in the waters, an experiment with no real end goal. With Amazon, the deal seems more practical, a move to drive traffic, to increase Amazon Prime signups. Note that the games will still be available on TV via CBS and NBC.

Not sure this kind of move would ever make sense for Apple, unless buying an Apple TV was the only way you could watch Thursday Night Football.

Like the iOS version, Apple Music for Android features a bolder, cleaner look with reorganized sections: “Library,” “For You,” “Browse,” and “Radio.” Also included are iOS 10 features like song lyrics and a revamped For You recommendation section, plus with the redesign, there’s more of a focus on album art.

I could say something sarcastic like “I wonder if Android gets the iTunes Match feature that doesn’t work, or is that an iOS-only feature.”

But I won’t.

Music streaming service Spotify said on Tuesday it had signed a deal with Universal Music Group that lets artists release new albums exclusively on its paying premium service for two weeks.

And

The multi-year license agreement with Universal Music could make Spotify more attractive to Universal Music’s artists, who include Taylor Swift, Adele, Lady Gaga, Coldplay and Kanye West.

A couple of notable Apple favorites in there.

Krebs on Security:

Once you understand how easy and common it is for thieves to attach “skimming” devices to ATMs and other machines that accept debit and credit cards, it’s difficult not to closely inspect and even tug on the machines before using them. Several readers who are in the habit of doing just that recently shared images of skimmers they discovered after gently pulling on various parts of a cash machine they were about to use.

I’ve gotten into the habit of doing this at ATMs I go to. Luckily, I haven’t found any skimmers but better to be safe than sorry. I also rarely have any money so skimmers won’t get much out of me regardless.

Apple today began sending out emails to customers who purchased popular automation app Workflow in the last few weeks, letting them know that they’ll be receiving a refund for the purchase price of the app.

Apple is handing out refunds because following its recent acquisition of the Workflow app and team, it made the Workflow app free to download and removed some key functionality.

Respect, Apple.

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LifeHacker:

Apple added a few new things in the iOS 10.3 update, and one of those is a tool to identify 32-bit apps that may be rendered obsolete in the next version of iOS.

SensorTower compiled a list of the nearly 200,000 incompatible apps in the App Store and the bulk seem to be games or education apps.

Go to the linked web site to see how to check for iOS 11 incompatible apps. I’ve got several dozen apps that will break and some are ones I still use regularly.

Twisted Sifter:

Vantablack® is a super-black coating that holds the world record as the darkest man-made substance. It is the darkest material ever measured by the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, reflecting only 0.036% of the light that strikes it (measured at 700nm). It is currently available in two versions, either directly applied to surfaces using vacuum-deposition technology or by spraying and then post-processing.

Vantablack is not a black paint, pigment or fabric, but is instead a functionalized ‘forest’ of millions upon millions of incredibly small tubes made of carbon, or carbon nanotubes. Each nanotube in the ‘Vantablack forest’ has a diameter of around 20 nanometres (that’s about 3,500 times smaller than the diameter of the average human hair), and are typically from around 14 microns to 50 microns long. A surface area of 1 cm2 would contain around a billion nanotubes.

So how dark is it really?

This stuff is fascinatingly weird.

Ars Technica:

If you want to get a fitness tracker, you have to decide is if you want one that’s compatible with a heart-rate monitor. Learning your heart-rate patterns, both during a workout and during daily activity, can show you a lot about your health. According to Harvard’s Health blog, your resting heart rate is a key factor to determining your overall current and future health, and monitoring heart-rate changes over time can give you more of the information you need to lead a healthy life.

Chest straps and optical heart-rate monitors are the two most common types of pulse trackers available for modern wearables, and they both use similar methods to measure your pulse. However, their key differences in methodology and design will dictate which device you choose when picking a workout companion.

I’ve been looking for an “all day” heart-rate monitor for a while now. This article helped narrow down my choices.

Business Insider:

Apple employees will begin moving into a new campus in Cupertino, California this month. The new Apple headquarters, named Apple Park, is a single ring, about a mile in circumference, set in a large campus that will be covered in plants and trees. Late Apple CEO Steve Jobs once said that the new campus was “a shot at building the best office building in the world.”

It will house 13,000 employees on over 2.8 million square feet of office space. Apple employees will enjoy fruit trees, a massive fitness center, and a workspace that’s been carefully overseen by Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer. The Apple HQ has been compared to a UFO and the Pentagon — and after about $5 billion in costs, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook, it’s ready to open.

Here’s a look at Apple Park over the past five years, and what still needs to be done

There are some great photos here and some details I hadn’t read before.

The Walrus:

Several well-publicized studies have shown that the fillets served up on restaurant plates often don’t match what’s listed on the menus. Oceana, a United States–based environmental advocacy group, recently compiled the findings of 200 studies and determined that out of 25,700 seafood samples from fifty-five countries, one-fifth were mislabelled—for instance, in many cases, the salmon labeled as “wild-caught” was in fact farmed.

A Canadian study in 2011 showed that in a sample of more than 200 seafood items obtained from various fish retailers and restaurants in cities including Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, 41 percent were misidentified.

As a native Nova Scotianer, I love to eat anything that comes out of the ocean. And, even after reading this scary article, that won’t change. But I’ll definitely be more mindful.

Marco Arment supplements his wired headphone review with this for Bluetooth headphones:

My criteria for this review is what someone seeking good all-around headphones today probably wants:

• Bluetooth
• Closed-back for isolation, ideally with active noise cancellation (ANC)
• Portable enough to fit in a small bag; suitable for listening at a desk, bringing on an airplane, and wearing outside
• Definitely under $500, and ideally under $300

Bookmark this, pass it along.

I found the whole article fascinating, but this part in particular grabbed my attention:

Macrae and Curran’s arcade route – a series of machines they owned and operated both for their own profit and for the benefit of students – quickly expanded to three dorms, but they soon had trouble with declining revenues as people began to master the games. As arcade operators themselves, they had a direct financial stake in making the games more interesting. So they did what any clever MIT student would do in that situation: confront the problem with mathematical precision.

And:

At this point in the video game world there were these kits called speed-up kits or enhancement kits that were being sold directly to arcade owners. The first really successful one was for Asteroids because people learned how to beat Asteroids, and they could play forever on a quarter. So somebody game up with a little circuit that you could clip on, and wow, it made the game much more difficult.

I had no idea that was a thing. Amazing little nugget of video arcade history.

Peter Kafka, Recode:

Apple isn’t done trying to sell you pay TV.

Here’s Apple’s latest proposal: It wants to sell consumers a premium TV bundle, which combines HBO, Showtime and Starz.

Apple already sells each of those channels individually. But it has approached the three networks about rolling them up into a single package, as conventional pay TV operators sometimes do.

No value in a bundle unless it is cheaper than the sum of its parts. And that’s been a tough thing for Apple to achieve, at least so far.

Jean-Louis Gassée offers a state of the union on the iPad past and near future, and the potential for the iPad to take more business from the Mac and PC. Very interesting read.

Imagination Technologies:

Imagination Technologies Group plc (LSE: IMG, “Imagination”, “the Group”) a leading multimedia, processor and communications technology company, has been notified by Apple Inc. (“Apple”), its largest customer, that Apple is of a view that it will no longer use the Group’s intellectual property in its new products in 15 months to two years time, and as such will not be eligible for royalty payments under the current license and royalty agreement.

That is a major blow to the company. Their stock dropped about 60% on the news, shaving hundreds of millions off the market value in just one day.

But Imagination will not go quietly:

Apple has used Imagination’s technology and intellectual property for many years. It has formed the basis of Graphics Processor Units (“GPUs”) in Apple’s phones, tablets, iPods, TVs and watches. Apple has asserted that it has been working on a separate, independent graphics design in order to control its products and will be reducing its future reliance on Imagination’s technology.

Apple has not presented any evidence to substantiate its assertion that it will no longer require Imagination’s technology, without violating Imagination’s patents, intellectual property and confidential information. This evidence has been requested by Imagination but Apple has declined to provide it.

Seems clear that Apple is going its own way, that this is more of a license fee negotiation to avoid a complex and costly lawsuit. Though a custom GPU is no trivial task, Apple owns enough chip design experience and can hire any additional GPU-specific expertise they need to make this work.

Note that Apple owns 8% of Imagination and was reportedly in talks to buy the entire company in March 2016 but the talks are said to have ended without an offer. This does smell a bit like a hardball negotiating tactic, with Imagination going public they way they did. Apple’s long advance notification could be the first step in the dance to lower royalties.

Legal issues aside, if Apple and Imagination do part ways, this seems a positive move for Apple, a chance to control even more of the stack, reduce their fabrication costs, and add more graphics power across the product line.

The Wirecutter:

Everyone can benefit from an increase to their privacy and security, and reliable services are available for less than $4 per month. Setup is automated, too—you need only install a small application. To track down the best advice about what a VPN can and can’t do for everyday people, we rounded up research and advice from around the Web, and we spoke with Rich Mogull, the CEO of security consultancy Securosis.

Mogull is my favorite guy to talk to about Mac security issues. With all the talk about ISPs (potentially) selling your browsing data, there’s been a lot of talk of VPNs and what they can (and can’t) do for you.

Ars Technica:

Thanks to the success of Guardians of the Galaxy, blockbuster sci-fi adventures can be trippy again.

That’s what you’ll see in this first full-length trailer for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, the tale of Valerian and Laureline, two spacio-temporal agents hired to guard the universe’s only intergalactic library in the insanely colorful cosmopolis Alpha. The film is directed by The Fifth Element mastermind Luc Besson, whose most recent movie was the transhumanist hit Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson. As for Valerian’s plot, there’s some kind of vague menace threatening not just the future of knowledge, but all of space-time.

The story looks fun, but the backstory is downright fascinating.

I loved The Fifth Element for its visuals and even enjoyed the utter goofiness of the movie. And I’ve been a fan of Besson since I saw “Léon: The Professional” so I’m really looking forward to this movie.

Time:

NASA made photography a high priority during the Apollo missions, redesigning cameras that could operate in the punishing environment of space and inventing ultra-thin film that would allow a single roll to contain 200 exposures. Of the thousands of pictures taken, only a comparative few were chosen for the public to see. They were the best of the images, no surprise, and that made sense. But their very perfection sometimes made them seem almost sterile. It was the outtakes—the astronaut in the clumsy pose, the litter left on the lunar surface, the too-bright sun flaring off the lens—that revealed the missions to be the often unglamorous, often improvisational camping trips they were.

Now, a team of four European designers have chosen 225 of the least seen—and in some cases least polished—of the Apollo trove and released them in a dazzling book titled “Apollo VII – XVII.” The wonderfully imperfect collection provides an entirely new perspective on the flights we thought we knew.

I love these photos. Make sure you watch the associated video as well.

Which?:

When it comes to laptops, battery life can be a key buying decision. But Which? has discovered that the battery life claimed by laptop manufacturers rarely lives up to reality, with our tests finding it often falls drastically short. Which? testing has shown that almost all laptop manufacturers overstate their battery claims. In some cases, the battery life estimates were double what we achieved in our lab testing.

It’s not all bad news, however – our tests found that with Apple MacBooks, you could meet or even exceed the claimed battery life, according to Apple.

Good news for Apple but shameful that other manufacturers’ stated claims fall so far short.

Backchannel:

Over the past several years, the conventional wisdom has been that cruising the net would yield the best prices in the travel, hotel, and car rental spaces. There’s been a tidal shift in the travel industry, to a point where most of us use aggregators to book our trips.

Over time, however, the convention has flipped. And as the business models that on which these aggregators rely are getting tighter, the deals are getting worse. How can you be certain you’re getting the lowest quote? The short answer is, you can’t.

I haven’t had to travel for a while but, when I did, I used aggregator sites heavily. But I always checked with the individual airline before I made the sale just in case. Looks like that’s even more true now.