Earlier this year we reported issues with using the LG UltraFine 5K Display with new MacBook Pros near wireless access points including Apple wireless routers. LG acknowledged issues caused by poor shielding, inventory was pulled from Apple Stores, and revised hardware with proper shielding is now shipping and should be in Apple Stores soon. This week we got our hands on one of the new models with shielding improvements to put to the test and see if the issues have really been resolved.
A rare third party product that has become critical path for Apple. An important problem to fix.
Not every company offers first-class tech support for its laptops. With confusing web resources, unhelpful social media accounts and clueless phone reps, many brands put a lot of unnecessary obstacles between consumers and the help they need.
That’s why, for over 10 years, Laptop Mag has published its annual Tech Support Showdown, in which we go undercover to test and grade the most popular laptop brands.
Apple has Apple Stores combined with excellent phone support. Over the last year, they’ve supplemented this approach with the excellent @AppleSupport Twitter account. Sure, there are stumbles, but Apple remains strong in this area, even as they grow in size and in product lines they have to support.
Apple owns all the oxygen in several territories across its ecosystems, like music-library management and photo management, competing only with giants such as Amazon and Google that can offer similar features. But in the arena of podcast apps, the decentralized distribution of audio episodes has left what seems like just enough room for independent developers.
Over the years, three companies have released version after version of the most popular non-Apple podcast apps: Pocket Casts from Shiftyjelly, Supertop’s Castro, and Overcast from Marco Arment’s Overcast Radio.
Fleishman has a good overview of what are likely the three most popular podcast listening apps.
Today marks 28 years since I submitted my original proposal for the worldwide web. I imagined the web as an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries. In many ways, the web has lived up to this vision, though it has been a recurring battle to keep it open. But over the past 12 months, I’ve become increasingly worried about three new trends, which I believe we must tackle in order for the web to fulfill its true potential as a tool that serves all of humanity.
Interesting and well thought out description of the problems Berners-Lee sees with today’s internet along with possible solutions. Sadly, it’s unlikely there’s going to be any effort to address the issues he describes.
USS Missouri, the third laid down but last completed of the Iowa class, carried a slightly heavier main armament than the South Dakotas and could make five extra knots. The Iowas were the first U.S. Navy battleships to make speed a primary value, and achieved the speed through a longer hull and more powerful machinery.
Indeed, the Iowas are the fastest battleships ever built, outpacing even the Italian Littorios by a knot or two. While no Iowa ever recorded a speed higher than 31 knots, rumors over the years suggested that the battleships might be able to make 35 knots over short distances.
Read this story if only for the amazing photos. I’ve always had a soft spot for these magnificent ships. Aircraft carriers are bigger, can project force further and are (arguably) better but the brutality of a battleship, and the images firing those guns creates, has always fascinated me.
When you step outside after a big rainstorm and take a deep whiff of that fresh, earthy smell, you’re mostly smelling a chemical called geosmin.
It’s a byproduct of bacteria and fungi. And something about rain lofts the chemical — and sometimes the organisms themselves — into the air, a process that not only helps release that earthy smell but may, in very rare conditions, spread diseases.
Somehow raindrops launch tiny living things off the ground.
This is a lot more interesting than it had any right to be.
We all have them. Our guilty pleasure movies. Movies we like that we don’t like to tell other people. Films that bring us unbridled joy while making others cringe in pain. Films so many people hate but you just, somehow, for whatever reason, love. This is my list.
I agree with about a quarter of this list. Some of them are really bad films that I love anyway. No, I won’t tell you which ones they are.
Butchers aren’t just there to grab the second sirloin from the back out of the meat case for you; they are equipped to do all sorts of meat-related tasks, probably much better than you would do yourself. All you have to do is ask.
We spoke to butchers from Stew Leonard’s, Publix, and Sprouts to get a refresher on what you can ask your grocery store butcher to do for you.
For many of us, the local butcher is a thing of the past. But even your local supermarket usually has trained professional butchers who can do special requests. I’m lucky to have a “real” butcher near me (advantage of living in Farm Country) who can do special orders and cuts.
Working near a running jet engine is extraordinarily dangerous. A Boeing 737 engine, running at idle power, has a hazard zone of 9 feet to the front and sides of the engine. This means that, even at idle thrust, a human that walks in the hazard area runs the risk of being sucked inside and consumed by the engine. When the engine is above idle thrust, the hazard zone increases to 14 feet or more. Engines on larger jets, like the 777 have much larger hazard zones. It is absolutely critical that ground crews can identify a running engine and stay away from it.
So very clearly, the spiral is an important feature for helping keep the ground crew safe—pretty much every source out there agrees, here, and it makes a lot of sense. As for the bit about bird strikes, there doesn’t appear to be much conclusive data showing that swirls keep the birds away.
To warn ground crew which engine is spinning makes perfect sense but “the swirls fend off the birds” sounds like complete BS.
My thanks to Marketcircle for sponsoring The Loop with Daylite this week.
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With a white bow in her fine blond hair, Edith Fuller, 5, walked up to the microphone, letting out a deep breath before receiving her 37th word. After more than four hours of competing against children almost three times her age, she had advanced to the final round at the Scripps Green Country Regional Spelling Bee in Tulsa.
“Juh-nah-nuh,” emphasis on the second syllable, was the pronunciation of the word the announcer gave her.
“Juh-nah-nuh,” she replied. “Will you please give me the language of origin?” Edith asked, with the quiet but confident voice of someone far beyond her years.
This might be the cutest thing you watch all weekend. She is a remarkably calm and self-assured young lady. And her skills are incredible. I’m a really good speller and yet, I couldn’t have spelled most of those words.
Are you reading this on a handheld device? There’s a good chance you are. Now imagine how’d you look if that device suddenly disappeared. Lonely? Slightly crazy? Perhaps next to a person being ignored? As we are sucked in ever more by the screens we carry around, even in the company of friends and family, the hunched pose of the phone-absorbed seems increasingly normal. US photographer Eric Pickersgill has created “Removed,” a series of photos to remind us of how strange that pose actually is.
This is a really interesting photo set that might make you think about your phone use a little bit.
Myke Hurley did a fantastic job pulling together this video walkthrough of the Nintendo Switch. It’s informative in the best possible way, conveying lots of detail while still being watchable and interesting.
If you are interested in the Switch, this is absolutely worth your time.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
