This sort of interactive media exploration is something the New York Times does very well. Just a heads up: Some of the song lyrics are NSFW and the songs play when they scroll into view, so consider headphones before you dig in.

But do dig in.

Nice anecdote from Guy Kawasaki, former Chief Evangelist for Apple.

John Voorhees, MacStories:

The App Store looks a little different today. If you opened it and thought you accidentally landed on the Games category page, it would be understandable. But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, Apple has launched a major promotion of the finest indie games available on iOS. According to the App Store Games Twitter account, the promotion is running for the next twelve days.

Lots of great games.

Back in January, developer Steve Troughton-Smith discovered a new one-handed keyboard embedded in an iOS 10.3 beta. And because he’s a nice guy genius, Steve went ahead and built a Swift playground so you can play with it, too.

Here’s Steve’s tweet, with a link to the playground:

In case you wanted to check out iOS 10’s unpublished ‘floating’ iPad keyboard, here’s a Swift Playground for you: https://t.co/nuUV8XsmeO

— Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) March 10, 2017

And here’s a post by Ben Lovejoy, with a bit of background.

Digg:

Here in the US, the Food and Drug Administration is responsible for regulating what is microwave-safe. A plastic dish that meets their approval will say “microwave-safe” somewhere on the container, or feature a square icon with wavy lines.

The thing is, the FDA is not going out and testing every single plastic dish on the market, they’re just set the testing standards for a microwave-safe dish. It’s up to the manufacturer to test to the FDA’s standards, and then label their goods as microwave-safe. In other words, there are microwave-safe containers, and then there are containers which have yet to be proven as microwave-safe.

Just to be on the safe side, I never microwave anything in the container it comes in.

deMilked:

The guys at the Librairie Mollat, a bookshop in France, have been gathering quite a bit of attention lately thanks to their awesome photo series, in which they match readers with their book covers.

The bookshop’s Instagram account has already garnered the attention of over 23,000 followers, and you’re about to understand why.

This is brilliant. Makes me want to go to a bookstore and do the same thing. Now, if only I could find a bookstore.

It’s the Digital Artist’s Dream Bundle: Corel Painter 2017, AfterShot 3, ParticleShop, & Over 10 Hours of Corel-Approved Training.

The bundle would cost $768 is bought separately, but it’s on for $248.

The Verge:

Do you think technology from circa 1680 can still surprise and delight in the age of the iPhone and Alexa? I didn’t, but boy was I wrong.

I often forget this when looking at the human timeline from my 21st century vantage point. Then last weekend I discovered the “detector Lock” in the Rijksmuseum, created by British locksmith John Wilkes. The lock (and those like it) is a triumph of 17th century technology and a precursor to the so-called “smart locks” we see flooding the market today.

Make sure you watch the associated video. This technology is cool now. It must have seemed like magic 340 years ago.

Ken Segall:

Like many, I have a habit of idealizing the “good old days” with Steve Jobs. Keep in mind that I’m an ad guy. It’s incredibly rare that people like me get to work directly with the CEO, and even more rare that the CEO is so passionate about doing great work.

So when I look back, I tend to romanticize even the difficult times, even though I know darn well that the tense moments were … well, tense. Especially with Steve.

Return with me now to the thrilling days of yesteryear, as the color iMacs were about to be unveiled.

I love Segall’s reminisces about his time at Apple. I was privy to one of these outbursts many years ago when I was in the room as Jobs called a well-known tech columnist and chewed his ass off for a good five minutes. It was a magnificent example of barely controlled fury, peppered with some remarkable curse words.

MacStories:

Notes in 2017 isn’t too different from its iOS 9 debut. Apple added integration with the Pencil in late 2015, private notes with iOS 9.3, and they brought sharing and collaboration features in iOS 10, but the app’s core experience is still based on the foundation laid two years ago. Unlike, say, Apple Music or Apple News, Notes has remained familiar and unassuming, which gives it an aura of trustworthiness and efficiency I don’t perceive in other built-in Apple apps (except for Safari).

Viticci is an iPad Warrior and does a deep dive into what seems like a simplistic iOS app. It doesn’t have to be.

I found Stephen Hackett’s account, and notes, of his training to be interesting.

Associated Press:

They make it look so damn effortless.

Watching from afar, curling looks like a marriage of shuffleboard and bocce ball on ice that requires about the same amount of physical ability. The kind of recreational activity that usually involves an adult beverage, and where having a modicum of athleticism is all that’s needed.

Just glide gracefully across the ice before gently gliding the 44-pound stone down the 146-foot sheet and yelling at your teammates to occasionally brush away at the ice in front of the rock.

Simple, right?

Every now and then, some sportswriter gets it in his head that curling is easy and anyone can do it so they go out and try it. They always get proven wrong. It’s a more physical, challenging sport than what you imagine and also very technical.

Washington Post:

A wildflower superbloom is underway in the desert Southwest in March after seven inches of winter rain. Anza-Borrego State Park in California hasn’t experienced a bloom so prolific since at least 1999 according to park officials.

The purple sand verbena is widespread in the Anzo-Borrega right now. It’s native to the Southwest and it thrives in well-drained soil. Pristine white primroses are also in bloom among yellow-flowered brittlebush. But, according to hikers’ reports, the most uncommon flower in bloom this year is the purple, notch-leaved phacelia.

It’s “a very rare event,” one hiker noted on the Anza-Borrego Desert Natural History Association website.

If you are a photographer and live anywhere in the area, you owe it to yourself to get out and shoot this. The pictures on the story make the area look absolutely amazing.

Online room renting service Airbnb Inc said on Thursday it had raised $1 billion in its latest round of funding, valuing the company at $31 billion.

Investors clearly believe the company will overcome all of the issues its having with cities putting restrictions on rentals.

Open Culture:

Who doesn’t think of bone-wielding monkey men when they hear the opening notes of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra? Or who doesn’t associate The Blue Danube with a zero-G dance between spacecraft and space station?

2001 might be considered the most expensive (and most profitable) experimental movie ever made. It lacks a traditional narrative. It is largely wordless. The most memorable character in the movie is not a human being but a sociopathic computer. It ends with an awesomely trippy meditation on humanity’s next evolutionary iteration. It’s not an ordinary movie and so music was used in an entirely unordinary way.

Thanks to Spotify, you can listen to over four hours of classical music that Kubrick used in his movies.

I know what I’m going to be listening to for the next four hours.

Associated Press:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says his group will work with technology companies to help defend them against the Central Intelligence Agency’s hacking tools.

In an online press conference, Assange acknowledged that companies had asked for more details about the CIA cyberespionage toolkit whose existence he purportedly revealed in a massive leak published Tuesday.

Assange said Thursday that “we have decided to work with them, to give them some exclusive access to some of the technical details we have, so that fixes can be pushed out.”

The CIA has so far declined to comment on the authenticity of the leak.

Logobook purports to curate and feature the world’s finest logos, symbols and trademarks.

An interesting project, worth digging through, especially if you need to create a logo of your own.

Stephen Nellis, Reuters:

There is at least one thing Siri can do that the other assistants cannot: speak 21 languages localized for 36 countries, a very important capability in a smartphone market where most sales are outside the United States.

Microsoft Cortana, by contrast, has eight languages tailored for 13 countries. Google’s Assistant, which began in its Pixel phone but has moved to other Android devices, speaks four languages. Amazon’s Alexa features only English and German. Siri will even soon start to learn Shanghainese, a special dialect of Wu Chinese spoken only around Shanghai.

And:

At Apple, the company starts working on a new language by bringing in humans to read passages in a range of accents and dialects, which are then transcribed by hand so the computer has an exact representation of the spoken text to learn from, said Alex Acero, head of the speech team at Apple. Apple also captures a range of sounds in a variety of voices. From there, a language model is built that tries to predict words sequences.

Then Apple deploys “dictation mode,” its text-to-speech translator, in the new language, Acero said. When customers use dictation mode, Apple captures a small percentage of the audio recordings and makes them anonymous. The recordings, complete with background noise and mumbled words, are transcribed by humans, a process that helps cut the speech recognition error rate in half.

Fascinating.

Solid, simple tip from iDownloadBlog.

Quora question:

I always see this small black triangle on the inside of airplane walls. What does it mean or do?

And the answer:

The black triangle marks the location of what has been called “William Shatner’s Seat,” the seat with the clearest view of the wing. This is the place inside the airplane from which you can get the best visual check for ice or other problems. The Shatner reference is to one of the strangest Twilight Zone episodes, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, which first aired on October 11, 1963. In it, Shatner’s character sees a gremlin on the wing of the plane he’s a passenger on.

Not sure if this is true, but I did a bit of lookup and there are a number of forums that tell a similar story. Great bit of trivia for your next flight, or the next time you meet William Shatner.

Jake Underwood, MacStories, shows off TouchRetouch, an iOS app that makes it easy to remove objects from photos.

This is like magic to me, removing an object from a photo and using context to replace background in the photo that the camera cannot see.

Wall Street Journal:

Just after 8 a.m. on Tuesday morning, mobile phones belonging to executives on Apple Inc.’s security team began to ring. WikiLeaks had just published a massive trove of documents, purportedly taken from the Central Intelligence Agency, that described the spy agency’s intrusion capabilities for computers and other gadgets, including iPhones.

Apple engineers quickly began calling colleagues to bring them up to speed on the data dump and to coordinate the company’s response to this new security threat, according to a person familiar with the situation.

WikiLeaks dumps, the rest of the world jumps.

Six Colors:

Tom Negrino is dying. He has been for a while, but the day is getting close when he will leave us. Ray Holley of the Healdsburg Tribune wrote a good story about what Tom and his wife, Dori Smith, have been going through.

He will almost certainly go down as the longest-running regular contributor to Macworld. He has written 48 books. Imagine all of this against the backdrop of lifelong health problems. The man is a survivor, and he hasn’t just survived, he’s thrived.

But the end is near.

Tom has been a friend to the Mac Community and a personal friend for many years. It’s absolutely heartbreaking to see him have to go through this but, I know Tom is doing what he can to do this on his own terms. He’s a stubborn guy and he fought hard. But now it’s time for him to go. Be well, my friend.

Gary Marcus, a research scientist who joined Uber four months ago as director of its AI labs, is leaving the company, according to sources. Uber bought Marcus’ startup, Geometric Intelligence, in December, using its 15 employees to form a new artificial intelligence unit.

No word on where he’s going, but I wondered if he’s going to Didi with the others.

Imagine reading a woman’s story about being denied a team reward because she’s in the female minority, or a story about a sexual harassment complaint being dismissed by an HR manager, and thinking, “That sounds about right.” Or reading a follow-up story in The New York Times about inappropriate groping at work parties and saying to yourself, “That’s not surprising.”

We have to be better than this.

Didi, China’s largest ride-hail player, is getting serious about self-driving cars. The company, which acquired Uber’s China assets in August 2016, today is opening an artificial intelligence lab right in the backyard of many of its self-driving competitors in Mountain View, Calif.

They poached some good people from their competitors too.

Lamborghini is open to an all-electric addition to its line-up of luxury sports cars, its chief executive said on Wednesday, evidence that German parent Volkswagen’s interest in producing zero-emission vehicles could extend to the very top end of its brands.

I think it’s safe to say that all manufacturers are working on electric models, especially those owned by Volkswagen.