Colorizing retoucher Jordan J. Lloyd of Dynamichrome took vintage photographs of global landmarks under construction and added color to them to give us a different look at history.

These are outstanding.

[Via Kottke]

The colors they chose don’t look connected to the colors of the old icon’s rainbow. In short, it looks and feels like an altogether new brand for Instagram, not an update or refresh of their old brand — and I’m not convinced that was the right move.

Some interesting thoughts from Gruber. As with most major design changes, this one is polarizing, as John points out.

I want McDonald’s fries and bacon. Or McDonald’s fries and anything… or bacon and anything.

Calling him “one of the last members of the original Siri team,” The Information reported on Wednesday that Darren Haas has left Apple for General Electric. He’ll join Steve D’Aurora, another ex-Siri team member who resigned from Apple for GE a few weeks ago.

The changeups also come a few days after a team of ex-Siri personnel unveiled Viv, a new, advanced virtual assistant that aims to offer functionality well beyond what Apple’s Siri can currently do. Demonstrated tasks include ordering a car from Uber, buying flowers from FTD, and ordering tickets from a variety of services, and offer intelligent, contextual responses, such as alternatives when a showtime for a movie is sold out.

This is very sad, especially considering what we’ve seen from the now departed Siri team and what they’ve done with Viv. These types of advances is what we expected Apple to do with Siri.

Loop Canada:

Anyone who’s been to the Canadian Tulip Festival in Ottawa knows that there’s no shortage of bright, beautiful colours. But this year, there will be one flower that overshadows them all.

On Monday, a red and white tulip created to honour Canada’s 150th birthday was unveiled at Commissioners Park. It was engineered to resemble the Canadian flag, and you can think of it as a personal “thank you” from the Netherlands.

The story is a bit misleading – there’s no actual information on how the tulip was engineered – but it’s still a great story about the remarkable affection and friendship the Dutch have for and with Canada. You can see the Canada150 tulip at the Canadian Tulip Festival this weekend in Ottawa and buy it for your own home garden at Home Hardware stores this September.

Before the introduction of Apple News in iOS 9 I was a big user of Flipboard. I’ve used RSS readers in the past but I’ve always liked the casualness of being able to flip through the current news and add stories for reading later. I was pretty hooked on this way of working and when News launched I tried it straight away, it wasn’t ready for prime time. It was slow and didn’t seem to update correctly but with iOS 9.2 it had a big update making it useable and reliable.

Here is how to use Apple News, it’s how I use it daily and gotten the most out of it.

Interesting article from an RSS and Flipboard user. I’ve never really used Apple News—it seemed like a solution in search of a problem to me, but if you’ve been considering using it, take a look at what Lee wrote.

I love these examples of what CSS can do.

Sports Illustrated:

After 67 years as baseball fans’ best friend, Vin Scully—the voice of summer—is in his final season in the booth. Want to know the man behind the mike? Pull up a chair…

If you are a fan of baseball, you owe it to yourself to listen (you don’t even have to watch) Dodgers games that Vin Scully is broadcasting. If you are a podcaster, listen to how Scully does his job. Listen to his cadence and the way he uses his voice. I’m not even a Dodgers fan but I will often listen to their games just to hear the sound of Scully’s voice and marvel at how he can talk almost constantly for the entire game and be entertaining the whole time.

I always find these types of deep looks into design very fascinating.

Stephen Hackett wrote a piece looking back at iTunes Ping. Apple just never really gets social and music integration.

Cabel Sasser, the co-founder of Panic, made the coolest sign I’ve seen in a long time. Really.

More than one thousand MFi controller compatible games. Nice resource.

I’ve passed by Microsoft stores many times. I have yet to see one that is crowded. Their continued existence is a mystery to me.

Ben Thompson:

This, then, is the deep irony of this controversy: Facebook is receiving a huge amount of criticism for allegedly biasing the news via the empowerment of a team of human curators to make editorial decisions, as opposed to relying on what was previously thought to be an algorithm; it is an algorithm, though — the algorithm that powers the News Feed, with the goal of driving engagement — that is arguably doing more damage to our politics than the most biased human editor ever could.

The fact of the matter is that, on the part of Facebook people actually see — the News Feed, not Trending News — conservatives see conservative stories, and liberals see liberal ones; the middle of the road is as hard to find as a viable business model for journalism (these things are not disconnected).

There are a lot of sides here. Does Facebook have the right to publish news as they see fit? Certainly.

But the central issue is the slow erosion of the traditional journalism model. We traditionally have limits on ownership of news outlets. Limits on the number of newspapers, radio stations, and TV outlets a single entity is allowed to own.

Facebook, Google and, to a much smaller extent, Apple, are testing those limits in a completely new way. In my opinion, the real danger occurs not in Facebook’s approach to news, but in giving any single entity the ability to control too great a slice of it.

This is both terrifically informative and fun to read. If nothing else, make your way through the comic at the top of the article, where the author receives an unexpected invitation. Fantastic!

Note that this was published about a year ago. Big thanks to Twitter follower CV for the link.

Reuters:

Oracle Corp and Google faced off on Tuesday in a $9 billion copyright retrial, with Oracle accusing Google of stealing programming to become the world’s leading smartphone player and Google saying it acted legally as a true innovator.

At the heart of this:

Oracle claims Google’s Android smartphone operating system violated its copyright on parts of the Java programming language, while Alphabet Inc’s Google says it should be able to use Java without paying a fee under the fair-use provision of copyright law.

Lots of eyes on this:

The case has been closely watched by software developers who fear an Oracle victory could spur more software copyright lawsuits. However, investors see little risk for Google because the company could afford to pay a one-off fine, and the possibility of an injunction that would force Google to pay ongoing royalties to Oracle appears remote.

Originally went to trial in 2012, jury was deadlocked.

Here’s the original letter, part 1 and part 2.

Here’s Tim’s reply. Short, sweet, and thoughtful.

New York Times:

The chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee demanded on Tuesday that Facebook explain how it handles news articles in its “trending” list, responding to a report that staff members had intentionally suppressed articles from conservative sources.

In a letter, the chairman, Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, asked Facebook to describe the steps it was taking to investigate the claims and to provide any records about articles that its news curators had excluded or added.

And:

Mr. Thune’s actions raised further questions about the content seen by the 1.6 billion people who regularly use Facebook. The platform’s growing role as an arena for news distribution has raised some concerns that it could have undue influence over the flow of information, but any effort by the federal government to regulate or investigate editorial decisions could run into First Amendment protections.

And:

“The notion of Congress looking into or investigating how a medium of communication decides what to say threatens on its face First Amendment rights,” said Mr. Abrams, a partner at the law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel.

This is an incredible display of arrogance. Will Congress investigate the Washington Post for bias? How about Fox News?

Long story short, reset your settings. But read the post to learn about the impact of this move, what you should do to minimize the pain.

WhatsApp has a user base of more than a billion users worldwide. Facebook paid about $20 billion for the company back in 2014. Now WhatsApp has expanded their reach to the desktop, with clients for Mac and Windows.

Here’s a link to the download.

Locate and remove duplicate files, even if they’re in remote corners of your system. Gemini 2 scans your whole disk speed-of-light fast, no matter how massive it is. Dig through scan results and hand-pick the files to erase, or better — let Smart Select do all the work.

Very nice looking interface and something I know I could use.

The Black Album Drums is a drum library for BFD3 and Kontakt 5.5 (full version) inspired by the drum sound featured on the “Black Album” by Metallica from 1991.

This is pretty special—these guys found the kit played on that record, not just the same model, but that exact kit.

Castamatic is the best way to listen to podcasts on any iOS device. Quickly assemble a custom sequence of shows to listen to, create a smart playlist, and listen to your favorite shows with top-notch audio quality, thanks to Castamatic’s custom DSP algorithms.

Another interesting podcast app.

Cheers bearded people!

Visa “has demanded that we allow fraud-prone signature verification for debit transactions in our U.S. stores because Visa stands to make more money processing,” Wal-Mart said.

The retailer pays about five cents more for a signature transaction than a PIN payment, said a person familiar with the rates.

I had no idea they paid more per transaction for a signature.

Yahoo News:

A teenager from Quebec has discovered an ancient Mayan city without leaving his province’s borders.

William Gadoury is a 15-year-old student from Saint-Jean-de-Matha in Lanaudière, Quebec. The precocious teen has been fascinated by all things Mayan for several years, devouring any information he could find on the topic.

During his research, Gadoury examined 22 Mayan constellations and discovered that if he projected those constellations onto a map, the shapes corresponded perfectly with the locations of 117 Mayan cities. Incredibly, the 15-year-old was the first person to establish this important correlation, reported the Journal de Montreal over the weekend.

Then Gadoury took it one step further. He examined a twenty-third constellation which contained three stars, yet only two corresponded to known cities.

Gadoury’s hypothesis? There had to be a city in the place where that third star fell on the map.

What an incredibly clever kid. I think at 15, I was still learning to tie my sneakers properly.

Wired:

The biggest problem with a 120-sided die is not its size, or its weight, or even its price. The biggest problem with a 120-sided die is no one knows what to do with it, a fact not lost on the people who created it. “We were a little concerned to make this because it’s so expensive and there’s no real use for it,” says Robert Fathauer.

Fathauer is one half of Dice Lab, a small company in Phoenix that explores the wonder of polyhedra in dice form. The D120 is its most ambitious project yet, one that, frankly, makes absolutely zero sense but is awesome just the same.

The D&D nerds out there (a group I am proud to be part of) are undoubtedly trying to figure out a way to use these. If nothing else, at only $12 each, I’d buy a couple just to add to my dice collection.