Since getting an Apple Watch last fall, I’ve been disappointed by the lack of content. To help address this, I made my own game a few months ago (a 3D RPG), but obviously it still didn’t address the bigger issue. An idea I had was to port an existing catalog, and emulation made perfect sense.

Very cool.

[Via MacRumors]

My thanks to Twocanoes Software for sponsoring The Loop with SD Clone 3 this week.

If you do any projects that use SD cards (like the Raspberry Pi), check out SD Clone. SD Clone makes an exact copy of your SD card right on your Mac and makes it easy to restore back to either a single SD card or multiple SD cards at once. You’ve spent a lot of time getting a Raspberry Pi project exactly right and want to make an image of your SD card to protect all that work. SD Clone makes creating an image simple. If you want to make multiple of copies of that SD card to start shipping your project, SD Clone restores up to 8 SD cards at once, making it super fast to do something that was slow and painful before. SD Clone can also check any SD card to make sure it is not failing or isn’t a counterfeit. Learn about these features and more here.

Get 50% off all editions of SD Clone 3 this week with coupon code SDCLONELOOP

I used to collect vinyl albums when I was younger because that’s all that was available, but they are making a huge comeback. I was amazed with how many new and old albums were available on vinyl.

Go to the main page, scroll down, click on the genre you want, and then on the right hand side click “vinyl” for the format. Lots of choices here.

Are you frustrated by trying to figure out how to get started encrypting email with iOS Mail? It’s easy in macOS, but not so much so on the iPhone or iPad. I’ve dug into the process, consulted dozens of forum posts and support articles. Then I tested, retested, and tested my process again. As of iOS 10.2.1, the process I detail below should get you going with sending encrypted email under iOS, using Apple’s Mail app.

If you are interested in encrypted email in iOS, this is worth a read.

io9:

When the first trailer for Universal’s The Mummy reboot came out, one of the most impressive moments was the scene where Cruise, Wallis, and a bunch of soldiers were being tossed around a crashing plane like a bunch of ragdolls.

“Tom said, ‘Yeah we’re gonna do it for real, we’re gonna get on a real plane and we’re gonna crash,’ and I thought, ‘This is just never gonna happen,’” director Alex Kurtzman said.

Love him or hate him, you’ve got to admire Cruise for pushing the envelope when it comes to these stunts.

The Fader:

On Friday, Chance The Rapper posted series of tweets detailing his relationship with Apple Music in an attempt to defend his status as an “independent artist.”

The Chicago rapper claimed that Apple paid him for two weeks of exclusivity for his mixtape Coloring Book on their music streaming platform Apple Music. “That was the extent of my deal, after 2 weeks it was on SoundCloud for free,” he wrote. “I needed the money and they’re all good people over there.”

I don’t know if the $500,000 Apple paid for the exclusive is out of line with other deals but I do have a prediction: After shooting his mouth off, Apple will not have any more exclusives from this artist.

Recode:

Some of Uber’s self-driving cars aren’t driving as smoothly as the company hoped they would. Documents circulated throughout the company’s self-driving group, which Recode obtained, gives us a first look at the progress of the ride-hail company’s robot cars in Pennsylvania, Arizona and California.

The top line: Uber’s robot cars are steadily increasing the number of miles driven autonomously. But the figures on rider experience — defined as a combination of how many times drivers have to take over and how smoothly the car drives — are still showing little progress.

Our future full of autonomous cars may be further away than the “experts” think.

Lifehacker:

Bee populations are in decline, and Cheerios wants to help. So far, so good. But they are sending free packets of wildflower seeds to people all over the country—and some of the flowers included are invasive species that, in some areas, you should probably not plant.

Forget-me-not is banned as a noxious weed in Massachusetts and Connecticut, for example. The California poppy is nice in California, but listed as an “invasive exotic pest plant” in southeastern states. And many of the flowers on this list are not native to anywhere in the US, so they are not necessarily good matches for our local bees.

When I first heard about this giveaway on social media, I thought it was a good, cute way to help an “endangered population” of bees. But read the article. As mentioned above, the seed packets are not “one size fits all” and actually may be harmful to your particular area. The article does list several other, better ways you can help both honey and wild bees.

Terrible. Completely avoidable.

Mark Gurman, writing for Bloomberg:

Investors impatient for Apple’s next breakthrough will be happy to know that Cook is very serious about AR. People with knowledge of the company’s plans say Apple has embarked on an ambitious bid to bring the technology to the masses—an effort Cook and his team see as the best way for the company to dominate the next generation of gadgetry and keep people wedded to its ecosystem.

Apple has built a team combining the strengths of its hardware and software veterans with the expertise of talented outsiders, say the people, who requested anonymity to discuss internal strategy. Run by a former Dolby Laboratories executive, the group includes engineers who worked on the Oculus and HoloLens virtual reality headsets sold by Facebook and Microsoft as well as digital-effects wizards from Hollywood. Apple has also acquired several small firms with knowledge of AR hardware, 3D gaming and virtual reality software.

And:

Building a successful AR product will be no easy task, even for a company known for slim, sturdy devices. The current crop of AR glasses are either under-powered and flimsy or powerful and overwhelmingly large. Apple, the king of thin and light, will have to leapfrog current products by launching something small and powerful.

Adding AR features to the iPhone isn’t a giant leap. Building glasses will be harder. Like the Watch, they’ll probably be tethered to the iPhone.

And:

In 2015, Apple recruited Mike Rockwell, who previously ran the hardware and new technologies groups at Dolby, the iconic company known for its audio and video technology. Rockwell also advised Meta, a small firm that makes $950 AR glasses and counts Dolby as an investor.

Rockwell now runs the main AR team at Apple, reporting to Dan Riccio, who’s in charge of the iPhone and iPad hardware engineering groups.

Read the whole thing. I can’t wait for Apple’s take on AR. This is a gigantic problem, combining the difficulties of crafting brand new, power hungry hardware with sophisticated, layered, ground-breaking software. To me, this is way bigger than the Apple Watch, a much harder nut to crack.

Will Apple start with vertical applications, designed for a specific space like, say, construction, or home design? Or will they try to craft a killer AR app usable by the masses?

Will Apple bring Siri into the mix? If so, how deeply? And, if so, how will they leverage Susan Bennett’s voice? At some point, doesn’t Siri need some backup talent in case Susan is unavailable?

Why not? This is just the tip of the iceberg. Why not add in tech that lets us speed up a video, dropping duplicated frames when a camera shot stays in place for an extended period, or when a transition from scene to scene is overly slow? How about a smart button that lets us jump from scene to scene to more accurately find a specific spot in a movie?

For purists, this is anathema. I get it. But the beauty of adding tech like this is, you can easily just ignore it. It’s not the same as the difference between a director’s cut and one cut for commercial TV. Those are different as night and day and there’s nothing you can do to convert the cut up version to the original.

I applaud the layering of AI in this space. Bring it on. Just be sure I can disable any add-ons and watch the content in its original form.

Julio Ojeda-Zapata, writing for TidBITS, digs into the morass of charging accessories for Apple laptops, tablets, phones and watches, presenting nine that made the cut. Spend a few minutes scanning through these, see if any fill a need for you. Good stuff.

Swatch is a major player in the watch space. To give a sense of their size, The Swatch Group employs about 36,000 people. Jean-Louis Gassée writes about the Swatch’s move into the smart watch space and their decision to avoid Android Wear and roll their own solution from scratch.

I found the whole read interesting, but wanted to highlight this bit about how Swatch was born:

Lebanese-born and Europe-schooled, Nicolas Hayek père was a genius.

In 1983, two venerable but mortally ailing Swiss watch industry companies, ASUAG and SSIH, called Hayek to their bedside to perform the last rites and liquidations. The companies had been unable to withstand competition from Japanese quartz watch manufacturers such as Seiko, Casio and Citizen. It was the humane thing to do.

But rather than pull the plug, Hayek demonstrated his unique combination of management, technology, and marketing savvy by making a counter-intuitive decision: In the middle of the “quartz crisis”, Hayek refused to give up on traditional mechanical designs. He merged the two entities and adopted a project from subsidiary ETA SA, whose CEO, Ernst Thomke, and two engineers, Elmar Mock and Jacques Müller, had come up with a simplified mechanical design that used only 51 pieces when 150 was considered the minimum.

As an aside, the name Swatch was built from Second Watch, not Swiss Watch (as I was told as a kid).

And spoiler, Jean-Louis thinks this move by Swatch will not help it compete against Apple Watch.

Daily Mail:

An incredible video posted by a self-proclaimed extreme aerobatics pilot shows just how difficult it is to land a commercial airline in extreme wind.

Kielak uses both hands which appear to be going wild to maintain control of the plane in the conditions. With the video on Facebook he wrote: ‘I’m always saying that airline pilot gets his salary for one landing per month… this is the day I earned mine.

The video is amazing. It looks like he’s driving a rally car.

Bloomberg:

But none of these (Uber) scandals has the potential financial impact of the one Uber has said the least about: a lawsuit from Alphabet Inc.—the parent of Google and Google’s self-driving car division, now called Waymo—over driverless cars. Waymo says Uber is in possession of, and is basing the future of its business on, technology that was stolen by a former employee.

There’s no doubt that various versions of “autonomous cars” are the future. But, just like the cars we drive from dozens of different manufacturers today, I don’t think that future belongs to just one company.

New York Times:

It is the unofficial soundtrack of basketball, a noise consistently heard but rarely considered — rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the hardwood.

Squeaks are the background rhythm to the game. But that sound is also one of the enduring mysteries of sports, and presents a question that gets scientists talking: Why do basketball shoes squeak?

To understand, it may help to consider violins and the California spiny lobster.

The facetious answer to the headline, “Because of the sneakers”, belies the very interesting science behind it. I love the sound. It’s the sound of my childhood.

Fast Company:

Garry James, 60, is perched on the edge of his hospital bed, temporarily unhooked from monitors that track his vital signs. It’s his third week waiting for a heart transplant, a nerve-wracking process that can stretch out months or even years, but he greets me with a wide smile.

These days, James uses the iPad to message his nurses, order magazines, make notes, browse medication side effects, reserve lodging for his family when they visit from Las Vegas, and review his medical record. The device has helped him feel more in control of his own care. “I want to have an intelligent conversation with my doctor,” James says. “Just enough to be guided on the right path.”

An iPad might not seem revolutionary in the internet age, but it’s actually a big step forward for patients to have digital health information at their fingertips.

Apple has made overtures into the health care market but I don’t think we are even close to seeing what their complete plans are yet.

NBC Bay Area:

Ron Powers spends a few days and nights every week doing strangers’ laundry. For free. And he couldn’t be happier about it.

Driving the streets of Santa Cruz in a van he outfitted with two washers and dryers, the Scotts Valley resident visits homeless shelters and encampments, offering to help keep what few clothes they have clean. The service he offers, Powers said, is not only a chance to do some good but make a connection.

“It’s one thing to wash someone’s clothes, even to feed them and help them, but it’s another to feed the soul,” he said.

What a kind and generous thing to do.

ABC News Australia:

After collecting dust in high-security vaults for more than 65 years, hundreds of reels of film showing Cold War nuclear bomb tests have been declassified by the United States.

From 1945 to 1962, the United States detonated more than 210 nuclear bombs, with multiple cameras capturing each explosion at around 2,400 frames per second. For decades, about 10,000 of these films have been locked away, sitting idle, scattered across the US in high-security vaults. Until now.

A team from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has worked for the last five years on finding, declassifying and preserving the films’ content before it was lost forever.

These videos are simultaneously fascinating, beautiful, and terrifying.

Ars Technica UK:

Google has developed and open-sourced a new JPEG algorithm that reduces file size by about 35 percent—or alternatively, image quality can be significantly improved while keeping file size constant. Importantly, and unlike some of its other efforts in image compression (WebP, WebM), Google’s new JPEGs are completely compatible with existing browsers, devices, photo editing apps, and the JPEG standard.

Looks good so far. As a photographer, I’m always fighting the battle between file size and image quality. Anything that can help is a win.

Backchannel:

November 5, 2013, a rocket launched toward Mars. It was India’s first interplanetary mission, Mangalyaan, and a terrific gamble. Only 40 percent of missions sent to Mars by major space organizations — NASA, Russia’s, Japan’s, or China’s — had ever been a success. No space organization had entered Mars’s orbit on its first attempt. What’s more, India’s space organization, ISRO, had very little funding: while NASA’s Mars probe, Maven, cost $651 million, the budget for this mission was $74 million. In comparison, the budget for the movie “The Martian” was $108 million. Oh, and ISRO sent off its rocket only 18 months since work on it began.

A few months and several million kilometers later, the orbiter prepared to enter Mars’ gravity. This was a critical moment. If the orbiter entered Mars’ gravity at the wrong angle, off by so much as one degree, it would either crash onto the surface of Mars or fly right past it, lost in the emptiness of space.

What a great story.

My thanks to Twocanoes Software for sponsoring The Loop with Winclone 6 this week.

Winclone is the award-winning Mac app used to backup, clone, restore, and migrate Windows installed on your Boot Camp partition. Winclone 6 adds in a bunch of new features, including full compatibility with the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros, ability to mount your Boot Camp partition as a writable volume, a fresh new look and much more.

Get 50% off all editions of Winclone 6 this week with coupon code THELOOP

Fortune:

Security researchers have identified a “highly effective” phishing scam that’s been fooling Google Gmail customers into divulging their login credentials. The scheme, which has been gaining popularity in the past few months and has reportedly been hitting other email services, involves a clever trick that can be difficult to detect.

Researchers at WordFence, a team that makes a popular security tool for the blog site WordPress, warned of the attack in a recent blog post, noting that it has been “having a wide impact, even on experienced technical users.” (See these people, whose accounts were targeted.)

Here’s how the swindle works.

No, “everyone” isn’t but it is (unfortunately) a very clever phishing scam that can catch the unwary off guard. It also points out the effectiveness of two-factor authentication and password managers like 1Password. They wouldn’t load your password on the phishing site because the fake site URL wouldn’t match the real one in 1Password.

[H/T Daniel Jalkut]

TechCrunch:

ABC News is rolling out an updated Apple TV application, live today, which makes the news division the first to offer a simultaneous multi-stream viewing experience in its tvOS application. At launch, there are a dozen different live streams users can choose from, presented in a row as the bottom of the screen. These can be placed in either a dual-screen mode or even a quad-screen view, depending on your preferences.

Multiple live streams is something you’d normally associate with sports apps – like the MLB at Bat Apple TV app, for example, which lets viewers watch games side-by-side. Fox Sports and Canal in France also offer a similar feature.

For a news junkie like me, this would be incredibly cool but only if I could choose different news sources. Alas, that’s not yet possible.

Nieman Lab:

Designed to help people diversify their news consumption habits, Read Across the Aisle tracks how often users read stories from roughly 20 news sources across the ideological spectrum, with The Huffington Post at the far left of the spectrum, Fox News at the far right, and others like The New Yorker, NPR, and The Christian Science Monitor in between. A slider bar at the bottom of the screen moves from left to right based on how much time users spend reading news from certain sources, and how ideologically extreme the app deems those sources to be.

The app is designed to help users escape their news consumption bubbles. When the user’s reading habits skew too far to either side, the app triggers a notification recommending that they switch things up.

One of the dangers of the ability to personalize everything on the internet is that we sequester ourselves in walled gardens. We get information that is not only tailored to our wants and needs but also actively blocks out and ignores even slightly “dissenting” opinion. This app can help combat that.

Mrs. Porter’s 2nd grade class survey:

A second-grade class in Indiana is learning about graphs, and they need you to help by filling out their survey.

“Please help our class as we study surveys and graphs. We would love to see how many responses we can get and all of the different places our responses come from. Each student in our class has created one of the questions in this survey.”

This is just too cute for words.