Wireless Internet—and the desire for it—has become an integral part of many consumers daily lives. And the appetite for Wi-Fi doesn’t subside out once they’re in a car.
General Motors has tried to respond to the demand by adding in-vehicle OnStar 4G LTE Wi-FI hotspot to its new vehicles. Starting Friday, the automaker is giving owners access to unlimited data for $20 per month.
GM released a few statistics last month that shows just how much data its customers use while in the car. Chevrolet owners used more than 4.2 million gigabytes (4.2 petabytes) of data in 2016—a 200% from the previous year. To put this data usage in perspective, Chevrolet owners and their passengers streamed the equivalent of more than 17.5 million hours of video in 2016.
As a motorcyclist, that “17.5 million hours” number terrifies me. I understand this particular genie has been let out of the bottle but I’m constitutionally against anything that decreases the amount of time the driver spends focused on driving and looking at and through the “dumb glass” of his windshield and rearview mirrors.
You might have seen articles about absurdly expensive bluefin sold at Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji fish market during the first sale of the new year. In 2017, a 466-pounder went for $632,000 — an astronomical price that was still a deep discount from the record-breaking $1.76 million someone paid for a 489-pound bluefin in 2013.
Until the 1970s, bluefin tuna was a literal trash fish. If it wasn’t put into cat food, sport fishermen paid to have it hauled off to dumps (after taking a smiling photo next to their strung-up carcasses). Until the mid-1900s, tuna’s reputation was so bad in Japan that it was referred to as neko-matagi, food too low for even a cat to eat.
Now, bluefin is the most expensive fish in the ocean.
I had no idea bluefin tuna used to be considered garbage fish. I do know we are overfishing at an unsustainable level.
A battery that lasts an entire year before you need a recharge. Pair with 4 different devices, each one getting its own dedicated keyboard button to make switching between devices trivial. Supports Mac and iOS devices.
At $95, this looks like a no-brainer purchase. Great find by Jeff Benjamin. Watch the video below and buy the keyboard here.
Great tip (and links) from Rob Griffiths on replacing any fluorescent bulbs in your house or garage with new LED bulbs. Do it. You’ll have better light and they’ll last forever.
‘I was told that I had to undergo a surgery and there were two methods. One totally sedated or, two, to wake me up during surgery.’
But because the second option had a much greater chance of success, he decided to choose that.
My guess is, they wanted to make sure they were cutting in the right place, his ability to play the guitar was an indicator. Both oogy and fascinating.
Apple’s Macs and iPads have lost significant ground in the U.S. educational market during the last three years, in 2016 slipping to third place behind Chromebooks and Windows devices, according to new research.
At an operating system level, Chromebooks continue to gain market share, reaching 58% in 2016, up from 50% in 2015. The strong combination of affordable devices, productivity tools via G-Suite, easy integration with third party platforms/tools, task management/distribution via Google Classroom and easy device management remains extremely popular with US teachers and IT buyers alike.
And:
Whilst the growth of Chromebooks has certainly been a major headache for Apple and Microsoft, they are not standing still. Both made major developments through 2016, Apple announcing the ‘Classroom’ app and major education focused functionality updates on iOS 9.3, including the ability to share iPads.
To me, the issue is not Apple devices losing luster. As the linked report makes clear, this is about the growth of Chromebooks and the Google ecosystem. Google’s ecosystem is incredibly affordable, just perfect for the education market.
Apple Inc. sued Qualcomm Inc. in a U.K. court, adding to lawsuits across the globe in a sprawling battle over patents and licensing fees between the iPhone developer and the largest designer of mobile phone chips.
And:
Apple is separately suing Qualcomm in California, accusing it of monopolizing the market for chips for wireless devices and withholding $1 billion in retaliation for cooperating with South Korean antitrust authorities.
At the heart of the dispute between Apple and Qualcomm is a push by phone makers, with support of some regulators, to reduce the patent royalties Qualcomm charges. Qualcomm gets the bulk of its revenue from selling chips, but more than half of its profit from a separate licensing business.
If I read this right, Bare Bones Software will take all of TextWrangler and fold it into the demo version of BBEdit. When your free 30-day demo expires, you’ll still have basic BBEdit features and ALL of the TextWrangler features.
Smart move, and respectful of the user base. And it still doesn’t suck.
Spotify this afternoon announced that it has hit a new milestone, reaching a total of 50 million paying subscribers. That’s up from 40 million in September, suggesting Spotify is growing at a rapid pace despite the surging popularity of Apple Music.
I wonder where all of these people are coming from. Are the Tidal and Pandora users or are they new users that have never used streaming services before? Clearly, there’s still a lot of growth in the streaming business.
Spotify is preparing to launch a lossless audio version of its streaming service, according to multiple sources. The offering, which is currently called Spotify Hi-Fi, will offer lossless CD-quality audio to users — similar to what Tidal offers in its Hi-Fi service.
I’m interested to see what the response will be to this service. Lossless isn’t something Apple ever seemed to be keen to offer users, but they may be forced into it if Spotify’s becomes popular.
The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team was debugging an issue causing the S3 billing system to progress more slowly than expected. At 9:37AM PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended. The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems.
It’s good that Amazon got to the bottom of this and let all of its customers know exactly what happened.
When filmmakers and other folks in the know make mention of “pure cinema,” they are referring to films that rely heavily on their imagery for storytelling. Cinema is, after all, a visual medium, not just a place for dialogue to come alive, and as such to distinguish itself from other storytelling media cinema must take advantage of its particular facets.
Alfred Hitchcock was perhaps the most significant purveyor of pure cinema in his time, he was a filmmaker that infiltrated your senses and emotions more often on a visual level than a written one.
I’ve been a huge Hitchcock ever since I found out one of my relatives worked with him in the 1950s. As the article points out, we think of him as a director of suspense films but his visual artistry and manipulation of your emotions through images was incredible.
More than two million people have watched an eight-year-old goalie from Brampton bust a move — right on the ice.
A Facebook video of Noah Young dancing in his skates and goalie pads to the Zay Hilfigerrr and Zayion McCall song ‘Juju On That Beat’ has gone viral in less than 24 hours.
Noah’s mom, Paige Rowswell, says the footage is from his novice AAA team’s last game on Saturday and was posted by someone on Monday.
Hockey isn’t the only thing we Canadians do on ice. We can bust a move, too.
2016 wasn’t exactly the best year ever, and it appears it was also pretty bad for photography. LensVid has issued a report on the camera industry facts from 2009 to 2016. When you compare camera manufacturing, sales, and shipment, you will get pretty unexpected and drastic differences. 2016 seems to be the worst year for cameras so far, with the drop of whopping 81% when compared to 2010? So, what happened? What caused these enormous drops?
If you are a camera manufacturer, these are absolutely brutal numbers. While the camera on your iPhone may not have killed the DSLR market (yet), it has certainly decimated the point and shoot and consumer DSLR segments. The industry had hoped mirrorless cameras would take off but the numbers show no evidence of that.
Today, Outlook 2016 for Mac is adding support for Google Calendar and Contacts—available first to our Office Insider Fast community. We’re excited to be delivering on these highly-requested features for Mac users and matching our Outlook apps for iOS and Android, providing Google accounts with a more powerful way to stay in control of the day ahead.
With these updates, Outlook will now also sync your Google calendars and contacts. The experience will be very similar to what you are familiar with in Outlook today, with support for all the core actions—such as add, delete, edit time and location. All changes will update back and forth with Gmail or Outlook for iOS and Android, so everything is in sync across all your devices.
This additional interoperability can only be good for users and it’s great to see Microsoft opening up to other services like this. Gone are the days when all their customers used their products exclusively and helping users integrate “third party” services helps everyone.
The new iOS Home app webpage now boasts a layout consistent with other recently updated Apple web assets, notably pages dedicated to hardware products.
A video takes viewers through a day in the life of a HomeKit user. Waking up to her iPhone alarm, the actress says, “Good morning Siri,” invoking a scene that turns on a ceiling fan and raises house blinds. She taps on a Home app scene labeled “Breakfast Time,” which triggers an iHome smart plug connected to a coffee maker.
I love that Apple is doing this and I hope they do much more to promote HomeKit. People have endless frustrations in trying to create this kind of automation in their home and HomeKit promises to make things much simpler — in theory.
Dozens of companies, including Amazon, Apple, IBM and Microsoft, have signed on to a Supreme Court brief supporting a transgender boy’s fight against his school district over which school bathrooms he may use.
The businesses, 53 in all, joined a brief that the Human Rights Campaign, a nonprofit organization supporting gay rights, planned to file on Thursday. The advocacy group is urging the Supreme Court to side with Gavin Grimm, a transgender student represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, in his case against the Gloucester County School Board in Virginia.
Very interesting to see the list of companies who have signed this brief.
When you think about Paralympic sports, you probably imagine events identical to the Olympics but altered, maybe even made easier, to ensure people with disabilities can compete. That’s a common misconception—many disabled athletes compete in both the Olympics and Paralympics and outperform their able-bodied peers, no special accommodations required—and its absurdity is perhaps best symbolized by a single brutal sport: wheelchair rugby, which also goes by its original name of murderball.
You probably know it as “wheelchair rugby” but that name doesn’t do it justice. It really can be awfully, wonderfully brutal.
A federal appeals court has thrown out a jury verdict that had originally required Apple Inc to pay $533 million to Smartflash LLC, a technology developer and licenser that claimed Apple’s iTunes software infringed its data storage patents.
Not only did they win the appeal, the judge said the patents should have been ruled invalid.
Bootlegging gangsters of the 1920s and 30s firing a barrage of bullets at the G-men in pursuit—that’s the mental picture you might have of the Tommy gun. But while the Thompson submachine gun was designed for the trenches of World War I and gained notoriety as a gangster’s weapon, it was the battlefields of World War II that saw it win its place in history alongside the other best-known firearms of all time, with as many as two million made.
I loved old gangster movies as a kid (and even still) and you always saw the bad guys with a Tommy Gun. I had no idea of the history behind it.
Quick—which side of your car is your fuel filler on? No running outside to look, that’s cheating, and you might get hurt pulling your pants on. Chances are most of you at the very least had to take a moment to think about this. I suspect you won’t think long about what side your steering wheel is on. That’s because, unlike other crucial parts your car, there is no standardized place for what side you pump fuel into your car. Why not?
This is one of those things you don’t think about but, when it gets explained, makes a lot of sense.
Uber Technologies Inc Chief Executive Travis Kalanick on Tuesday said it was time for him to “grow up” and get help after a video was published showing him getting into an argument with a driver for the ride service who complained about pay rates.
This is truly one of those Apple Pencil accessories you never knew you needed until you see it in action. No more hunting for lost lightning caps, that pesky charging cap stays put, even when plugged in. No more rolling away from you when you set it down or storage difficulties, the custom pen clip keeps your Apple Pencil in place on the table and in the pocket. And no more slippery fingers, the leather grip provides a sturdy tactile feel while letting you be as precise as you want.
Lego’s latest fan-designed collectible set is a team of five female NASA scientists.
Lego accepts idea proposals from fans every year, creating a shortlist of options based on support from the internet. The latest winner is a “Women of NASA” set designed by Maia Weinstock, featuring Lego minifigures of astronauts Mae Jemison and Sally Ride, astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, and mathematician Katherine Johnson.
This is pretty cool. Congratulations to the women honoured and to Lego for creating this set.
Try naming an iconic Canadian designer. You can’t? Here are three: Allan Fleming, who created the Canadian National Railway logo. Georges Huel, the guy behind the symbol for the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal. And Burton Kramer, whose work includes branding the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
I’m embarrassed to say, but I couldn’t have named three designers.
Revealed in early February, and launched on Tuesday, Facebook Video is a free app for the fourth generation Apple TV, with an emphasis on video shared across the social network. The app pulls videos from user feeds presented mostly without user commentary beyond emoticons.
In our testing, Facebook’s Video app works well, and wasn’t impaired by lengthy buffering. However as far as quality goes, what you see is restricted by how and when the video was sent to Facebook.
I’m not a heavy Facebook user but I can see how this could be very popular among those who like watching videos on and from the site.
YouTube TV—a streaming service that will offer conventional TV channels streamed across the net to phones, tablets, PCs, and TVs. The company is only saying it will be available in “the coming months.”
But it’s disclosing most of the other vital facts about what the service will offer, and on paper, at least, they sound like a serious rival to existing services such as Sling TV, DirecTV Now, and PlayStation Vue.
This might be a good deal for some but no CBS, MTV, Comedy Central and the other channels from Time Warner and Viacom might be a dealbreaker for many.
OverSight monitors a mac’s mic and webcam, alerting the user when the internal mic is activated, or whenever a process accesses the webcam.
OverSight constantly monitors a system, alerting a user whenever the internal microphone is activated, or the built-in webcam is accessed. And yes, while the webcam’s LED will turn on whenever a session is initially started, new research has shown that malware can surreptitious piggyback into such existing sessions (FaceTime, Sykpe, Google Hangouts, etc.) and record both audio and video – without fear of detection.
It’s free and offers a little peace of mind for the paranoid among us.
You negotiate your starting salary, your rent and your raises. Why stop there? In fact, companies are taking advantage of the fact that customers are averse to conflict — and have started using “no haggle” pricing for products like cars, which consumers have historically been able to bargain for. Alas, even if these set prices make shopping less stressful, you’re likely paying more than you would have after haggling.
Here are three items you should always bargain for — and how to do it.
We don’t have a “haggling mentality” in North America but I’ve haggled on all three of the items mentioned in this piece and have literally saved thousands of dollars off the sticker price.
Alysha Tsuji posted this video on Twitter. Can you imagine this happening to you? It’s like if Michael Jordan showed up at your local hoop and called, “I got next….”
