April 1 is widely known as April Fool’s Day, the day when friends prank each other and companies scramble to show off just how “fun” they can be.
But the foolish celebrations have a longer history than you’d expect. According to the Museum of Hoaxes, clear references to the holiday date back to at least the 1500s, when Flemish writer Eduard De Dene published a poem in 1561 about a nobleman who plays an April 1 prank on his servant.
And the references could date back even earlier. A line in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale by Chaucer referencing “Syn March began thritty dayes and two” — which could refer to the 32nd day of March, i.e. April 1 — has some speculating that the passage, written in 1392, could be the first reference to April Fool’s Day.
In the days before widespread internet, April Fools Day was kind of fun. Granted, I was much younger then. But now, it’s just tedious, lame, and unfunny.
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Within days of Congress repealing online privacy protections, Verizon has announced new plans to install software on customers’ devices to track what apps customers have downloaded. With this spyware, Verizon will be able to sell ads to you across the Internet based on things like which bank you use and whether you’ve downloaded a fertility app.
Jeff Butts and Dave Hamilton did some tests on the new Apple File System (APFS) and posted the results. There’s certainly a lot to like, but as with most low-level systems there will be plenty of debate.
What happens if you refuse to listen to what “can’t be done?” Samsung believes the only way to achieve the impossible is by refusing to accept anything is.
Wonderfully silly and funny ad ruined by utterly incoherent taglines at the end.
ESPN has lost more than 12 million subscribers since 2011, according to Nielsen, and the viewership erosion seems to be accelerating. Last fall, ESPN lost 621,000 subscribers in a single month, the most in the company’s history.
In some respects, the challenges facing ESPN are the same that confront every other media company: Young people simply aren’t consuming cable TV, newspapers, or magazines in the numbers they once did, and digital outlets still aren’t lucrative enough to make up the deficit.
But while most of ESPN’s TV peers have courted cord cutters—CBS and Turner Broadcasting, for instance, are allowing anyone to watch some of their March Madness games online for free—ESPN’s view cuts against the conventional wisdom in new media.
It was always assumed sports would be immune from cord cutters because there was no other way to get sports live. The pundits ignored the fact people simply aren’t watching live sports as much.
How can we generate a uniform sequence of random numbers? The randomness so beautifully and abundantly generated by nature has not always been easy to extract and quantify. The oldest known dice (4-sided) were discovered in a 24th century B.C. tomb in the Middle East. More recently, around 1100 B.C. in China, turtle shells were heated with a poker until they cracked at random, and a fortune teller would interpret the cracks. Centuries after that, I Ching hexagrams for fortunetelling were generated with 49 yarrow stalks laid out on a table and divided several times, with results similar to performing coin tosses.
But by the mid-1940s, the modern world demanded a lot more random numbers than dice or yarrow stalks could offer.
This is another of those articles I love – ones that turn out a lot more interesting than they have a right to be.
Well, that didn’t take long. As seen in the video below, a user’s picture taken by one Galaxy S8 is used to unlock another Galaxy S8. Not good, not good.
Wait, we can spin this. That’s how good the camera on the S8 is. So realistic, it can hack itself!
Three new iPad Pro ads, hitting themes that should resonate with students. The titles are “Light and powerful”, “All day battery”, and “All your school stuff”.
If you have even the slightest interest in space and rocketry, take a minute to watch the latest SpaceX launch. This is the first time a previously launched rocket has been reused. This will change the equation, make it much cheaper to launch a satellite. Amazing accomplishment.
If you just want the launch itself, jump to about 18:45 in. The landing of stage 1 back on Of Course I Still Love You (the drone ship) is a little trickier, as the video feed was cut off due to a line of sight issue, but jump to about 27:30 in to get the crew reaction. First there’s a groan of disappointment as the folks watching find out the video cut out, but then…well, watch for yourself.
I absolutely love what SpaceX has accomplished here. They have changed the future of space exploration.
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Nearly a year ago, Twitter announced it would begin distancing itself from the requirement that all tweets could only contain 140 characters by no longer counting some things – like media attachments or @ replies towards the character count. However, it didn’t begin testing the change with @ replies until last fall. Today, Twitter says this change to replies is rolling out to all users across the web, iOS and Android.
The built-in macOS app switcher is great if all you use are one-window applications. But you probably have many windows open in many apps, possibly with many tabs, and navigating them all is a pain. Enter Witch, with which you can switch everything.
I just Googled “alarm dust,” “alibi sweatshirt,” and “sleuth intelligence.” Then I shopped for industrial dehydrators, scanned a Pinterest page for concrete decks, and read something about nuclear war.
The thing is, I’m not in the market for a new dehydrator. Concrete decks aren’t really my style, and I still have no idea what “alarm dust” is. I didn’t visit any of these web sites of my own volition—a website called Internet Noise did, all to obscure my real browsing habits in a fog of fake search history.
This won’t actually “protect your privacy” but the idea is interesting – make your search history useless to advertisers. And, if you’re bored, watching the site do its searches is weirdly fun.
This video is a couple of years old (MotoGP doesn’t allow newer videos “out in public”) but it’s still gorgeous slo-mo my favorite motorsport. Keep in mind that, when the bikes are straight up and down, the speeds can be over 200mph and, even when leaned over (55-60 degree lean angles), the riders are often going over 100-120mph around the curves. Watch on the biggest screen you can.
Starting this spring, McDonald’s special sauces will be available at grocery stores. The bad news? Only in Canada. The line-up will include Big Macs’ proprietary sauce, as well as the special Mayonnaise and Tartar sauces.
Last time McDonald’s made the sauces available to the public, they were auctioned on eBay for up to $100.
Do people really want to put this stuff on their home burgers? Granted, I haven’t had a MacDonald’s burger in 20+ years but I don’t remember the sauce being so spectacular I’d want to buy a jar of it myself.
In one sense, nothing changed this week, because the requirement to obtain customer consent before sharing or selling data is not scheduled to take effect until at least December 4, 2017. ISPs didn’t have to follow the rules yesterday or the day before, and they won’t ever have to follow them if the rules are eliminated.
But the Senate vote is nonetheless one big step toward a major victory for ISPs, one that would give them legal certainty if they continue to make aggressive moves into the advertising market.
As Dave points out, you can’t buy individual web history but it will be able to be bought in the future in aggregate. This article explains and has some good advice how to minimize the effect on you.
First things first, totally get that I led with a question. But not so sure Betteridge’s law applies here.
Samsung rolled out their latest and greatest smartphone yesterday, the Galaxy S8. Interesting phone, includes a new digital assistant named Bixby, a fingerprint scanner/encrypted facial recognition, and a desktop dock (a la Microsoft’s Continuum).
Bixby is not ready for primetime, but this article will give you a sense of Samsung’s plans. Note that the current incarnation has none of the tech Samsung got when they bought Siri’s original maker, Viv, so there’s clearly a long way to go there.
As to the fingerprint scanner, I am struck by the fact that Samsung placed it on the back of the phone, adjacent to the camera and, most importantly, made it off center. Back of the phone means you are searching for the scanner blindly. Adjacent to the camera means you’ll be regularly touching the camera lens cover (dirty/oily hands mean camera lens smudges).
And off center is a design bias, likely designed for right-handed people. The Apple Watch has a design bias as well, but you can turn your watch upside down if you want to switch wrists, there’s a setting that flips the interface. But the phone has no such mechanism. A nit, but the devil is in the details, no?
So now we get to the crux of the matter, the desktop dock, called Dex. The Dex is a hockey puck shape, an inch or so wider than the phone, with a fliptop cover that reveals a USB-C port into which you plug your phone. Dex has other ports and connects to a desktop display, mouse, and keyboard.
You can read about the details and watch a video of Dex in action in this Engadget article. Bottom line, when the Galaxy S8 plugs into the Dex, you’ve got access to a desktop experience, complete with mouse cursor. This is still Android, but a desktop hybrid. And I like it.
Phone docking into desktops is not new. Not sure if this is the first example of this concept, but back in 2011, Motorola had a product called the ATRIX 4G, allowing one of the early Android phones to dock with and power a Motorola laptop.
Back to the headline. Could this be the future of the Mac? As iPhone processing power increases, could Apple create a hybrid desktop product driven by some future version of the A10 Fusion (the 64-bit system on a chip that drives the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus), a product that looks and acts like an iPhone, but that doubles as a desktop experience when you plug it into a dock, complete with large display, mouse, and keyboard?
If that device was powerful enough to support applications like Xcode, Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut Pro, etc., this could greatly simplify Apple’s product line, pushing all software development to Swift and iOS.
There have been several well documented efforts to raise money to buy the browsing history of individual members of Congress. Can’t be done, at least not legally. That’s not the way it works.
Read on for the details but, bottom line, don’t give these folks your money.
A report published this week from mobile analytics firm Verto has found that Apple Music attracted 40.7 million monthly unique users to its service in the U.S. in February. In comparison, Pandora came in at number two with 32.6 million users, and Spotify took third place with 30.4 million unique users for the month.
Spotify is still in front when counting paid users, but this is a good sign for Apple Music.
