From an extensive post on the Molly Watt Trust blog (raising awareness of Usher Syndrome):

I have Usher Syndrome, which means I was born deaf and in the last ten years I have lost most of my sight. What I see in good light is like looking through a small letterbox. The bits out to the side and above and below are a white, misty haze. In dim light, or at night: I am almost completely blind.

If there was ever a good time to be losing your sight when you are already deaf, it is 2016. We are on the verge of great technology breakthroughs that will help to level the playing field even for those who are both deaf and blind. Driverless cars, haptic virtual reality, wearable technology – they will all soon be an everyday reality.

And:

Now enter, centre stage – The AppleWatch!

This little unassuming piece of tech has already made my life as a deafblind person much easier, but what has really blown my mind is the potential that it offers deafblind people for more relaxed, equal lives.

I was kindly given my AppleWatch by the Molly Watt Trust who are on a mission to improve the lives of those with Usher Syndrome, by providing them with accessible technology. Molly Watt, who is also deafblind due to Usher Syndrome, was an early and enthusiastic exponent of the AppleWatch.

Fantastic post with an extra little nod towards the benefits of Apple Pay. Well done, Molly Watt Trust and Lady Usher.

[H/T Jonny Evans]

Marco Arment:

A few Tesla vehicles have had accidents with Autopilot enabled recently, and I’ve gotten countless questions about these incidents and the nature of Autopilot from people who aren’t Tesla owners. Tesla and the media haven’t clearly communicated what these features do (and don’t do) to the public, so I’ll try to help in whatever small way I can as a Model S owner for a few months so far.

This is a terrific walkthrough on Tesla’s autopilot, a glimpse into what’s coming for cars in general, as well as a reality check on where autonomous driving stands. Things are changing fast as we move towards autonomous vehicles all around us.

Time:

There’s a new Iron Man. Well, Iron Man for now. She’s still working on the name. The events at the end of the comic-book event series Civil War II will result in Tony Stark stepping out of the Iron Man suit and a new character, Riri Williams, taking over, Marvel tells TIME.

And:

Riri is a science genius who enrolls in MIT at the age of 15. She comes to the attention of Tony when she builds her own Iron Man suit in her dorm.

I like where this is going. I was not a big Iron Man fan as a kid, not a judgment so much as I just didn’t really encounter that particular comic at the right age.

But the first Iron Man movie and Robert Downey Jr.’s particular ownership of that role changed all that instantly. RDJ’s Iron Man spoke to me. This was my world. Glad Marvel made this particular film, brought me along for the ride. And I am looking forward to seeing Riri Williams take shape. I have high hopes.

This link will take you to a page that shows you the Google services that are tracking you, along with a history for each of those services.

It would be interesting to see a list of all the data Google has harvested from me. I’d also like to see the same thing from Facebook and Apple.

There are some heavy hitters attending this event every year.

Taking advantage of the rise in mobile photography, Pinterest says its image-discovery app in coming months will let users point their smartphone cameras at something, and the app instantly will search within its vast online showroom of 75 billion images for a visually similar match of the items in the photo.

This idea has been around for a long time, but the technology has never really been there to allow it to succeed. Honestly, I’m still not sure it’s there, completely. It’ll be interesting to see how Pinterest tackles all of the little problems involved in making this work.

There is nothing that can go wrong with this.

Diaz said his motivation for attacking Google was that the company was watching him, according to an affidavit filed in a U.S. District Court. He told police he kept journals detailing the times he thought the company was watching him, the affidavit said. He also mentioned Facebook and Google CEO Larry Page during the interview.

Somehow, I don’t think we’re talking about your typical privacy complaint here.

The discovery follows a recent incident in Houston in which a pair of car thieves were caught on camera using a laptop to start a 2010 Jeep Wrangler and steal it from the owner’s driveway. Police say the same method may have been used in the theft of four other late-model Wranglers and Cherokees in the city. None of the vehicles has been recovered.

This problem is only going to get worse from here.

Verizon is hiking rates and increasing data across all its plans. For instance, the basic “S” plan will cost $35, a $5 rise, and offer double the data at 2 gigabytes and the high-end “XXL” plan will cost $10 more at $110 and offer 24 gigabytes as opposed to the previous 16 gigabyte limit.

I’ll be honest, that sounds reasonable to me.

Julie Zhuo, Product design VP at Facebook:

Being able to measure stuff gives you insight into what people are doing within your product. Unless you like living under a rock, having more information is a good thing. Sure, you need to be able to sort through what information is important and what isn’t, but arguing that the whole concept of having more information is bad is not really a defensible position. Metrics is not the villain.

Information is good, it’s what you do with it.

So companies introduce what Kowitz calls an “artificial waiting” pattern into their interfaces. These are status bars, maybe a few update messages, to construct a facade of slow, hard, thoughtful work, even though the computer is done calculating your query.

It is absolutely fascinating how the mind works and how designers have to slow things down in order for us to believe them.

Memories is a new way to save Snaps and Stories on Snapchat. It’s a personal collection of your favorite moments that lives below the Camera screen. Just swipe up from the Camera to open Memories!

One of my favorite apps of all time.

We have some sponsorship weeks available in July and August on The Loop. If you want to get your product or service in front of The Loop readers, this is the only way to do it. Sponsors are exclusive for the week, so it will just be you, me, and the great people who read this site.

If you’re interested, get in touch and let’s hammer something out.

The Verge:

For those who haven’t been following the title’s development, the game uses your smartphone’s camera and sensors, as well as location-based algorithms, to place pokémon in the real world. That way, as you travel around to landmarks and notable locations in your city, you can catch the creatures and then train and battle them at gyms.

Looks like the game is currently available in New Zealand and Australia, not yet rolled out in Japan and the US. Sounds like it’s just a matter of hours or days, though.

I’m a math geek, so this might be more up my alley than most.

That said, every so often, I encounter some basic mathematical concept embedded in nature. This particular story involves the Fibonacci Sequence:

• 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, …

Each term is the sum of the two previous terms. The Fibonacci Sequence crops up in all sorts of places. For example, if you pick up a pine cone and start counting the number of petals (bracts) at each level, it will exactly follow the Fibonacci sequence. Lots and lots of examples of this in nature.

This tweet offers another example, one I’ve not seen before. Basically, you can use the Fibonacci Sequence to convert miles to kilometers and back again.

Crazy, right? If this sort of thing interests you, take a look at the spiral pictures on the Fibonacci number Wikipedia page. Some spooky geeky stuff there.

Into Mac games? Enjoy the list, bookmark the site.

This post by Benedict Evans first digs into the idea of artificial intelligence, then looks at the efforts by Apple and Google to get a sense of who is doing what.

So you can say to your phone: ‘show me pictures of my dog at the beach’ and a speech recognition system turns the audio into text, natural language processing takes the text, works out that this is a photo query and hands it off to your photo app, and your photo app, which has used ML [machine learning] systems to tag your photos with ‘dog’ and ‘beach’, runs a database query and shows you the tagged images. Magic.

If you have even the slightest interest in artificial intelligence, neural nets, speech recognition, etc., this is worth the read.

To get to the sale on your Mac:

• Launch iTunes
• Find the Blockbuster July pane as it scrolls across the top of the iTunes window, tap it

In iOS:

• Launch the iTunes Store app:
• Tap the Movies tab (bottom of the screen)
• Tap the Featured tab (top of the screen)
• Find the Blockbuster July pane as it scrolls across the top of the screen, tap it

Once a movie goes on sale, it appears to stay on sale. For example, the linked article references Pineapple Express, yesterday’s sale movie. It’s still $4.99 in the US store.

Also, different countries appear to have different movies on sale. Rights issues, no doubt.

Not to be confused with yesterday’s MacRumors-linking post, this is a more extensive walk through the iOS 10 beta 2 change-log. Lots of detail.

One of the most interesting features is the new Settings → General → Accessibility → Home Button → Rest Finger to Unlock setting that lets you unlock your phone by touching (rather than pressing) the home button.

From this writeup by Christian Zibreg:

When an iOS device is unlocked, the OS gives apps access to encrypted data.

As a result, launching Camera from the Lock screen of an unlocked device gives you unrestricted access to the whole Photos library as opposed to showing only the images taken during that particular session if you launch Camera from the Lock screen of a locked device.

Here’s another example.

For security reasons, many people prevent Lock screen access for the Notification Center. As much as this great for preventing someone from sniffing around your Notification Center, it’s also a nuisance as reading your incoming alerts requires you to unlock the device.

There’s another example in Christian’s post, and I’m sure a lot more examples beyond that. I wonder what use case brought this feature to the table in the first case.

In a nutshell, the malicious code is embedded in a Mac utility called EasyDoc Converter.app. Given that the app itself does not do what it says it will do (convert files from one format to another), this was a pretty obvious find.

But think of this example as a proof of concept. This malware could just as easily be embedded in a useful tool. If you are going to go outside the Mac App Store, be sure you are downloading a known, vetted product from a known, vetted source.

[Via 9to5Mac]

Great walkthrough from MacRumors. A quick and concise video.

I want to share my experience of using CSS 3D effects for the first time in a real project and to inspire you to take on challenges.

That’s quite a challenge.

The spectacular snap was uploaded earlier this week proclaiming the photographic prowess of its flagship P9 smartphone.

Except it wasn’t.

Filippo Valsorda:

These are dry notes I took in the process of setting up a burner iPhone SE as a secure travel device. They are roughly in setup order.

I believe iOS to be the most secure platform one can use at this time, but there are a lot of switches and knobs. This list optimizes for security versus convenience.

I hope to start travelling in Europe again early next year and am interested in how to secure my iPhone. I don’t think I would go to all the trouble detailed in this post but there are definitely tips and tricks galore many of us can use to be even a bit more secure when we travel.

Said the pair in a statement: “Comcast and Netflix have reached an agreement to incorporate Netflix into X1, providing seamless access to the great content offered by both companies. We have much work to do before the service will be available to consumers later this year. We’ll provide more details at that time.”

Smart move from Comcast.

A Monday night production, “A Capitol Fourth” was not live as-advertised, as it was “spliced in with video from previous years’ spectacles.”

Lying on air doesn’t seem like a PBS thing to do.