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.
A lot of desktop software has moved to the browser and this trend doesn’t stop with photo editing software. Here are the 7 greatest online photo editors that will rival your desktop software. Depending on the job that needs to be done some of the online editors are easier to use, quicker and/or more affordable.
I’m a big fan of Adobe’s Lightroom but these online tools can do a lot of what desktop apps do.
With the backdrop of the Olympics and a comically botched election, this summer is bound to be what Ricardo Marques, a vice president from Budweiser, calls “maybe the most American summer ever.”
So Budweiser is going to potentially ingenious, potentially absurd branding extremes. The company has kept the same can you already know, but when you look closely, you’ll realize that it has swapped out its own name, “Budweiser,” for “America.” That’s right, Budweiser has renamed its beer America for the summer.
Is it just me or does this seem less “patriotic” and more “weird and pandering” to anyone else?
Apple Pay is becoming much more useful in Canada, as the mobile payment system adds several major Canadian partners including Royal Bank and CIBC.
Those banks say they’ll accept Visa and MasterCard credit card payments through compatible Apple devices starting today and Bank of Montreal said the feature is “coming soon.” ATB Financial and Canadian Tire Bank are also participating.
The system launched in Canada late last year, but hasn’t had much pickup because the big banks had been reluctant to sign up. Apple Pay used to only work with non-bank American Express cards, which are rare in Canada. Tuesday’s announcement will also make Apple Pay available to users with Interac debit cards issued by RBC and CIBC.
Dag Kittlaus took to the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to show off Viv, the intelligent assistant his company is building as a follow-on to Siri, which his team built and sold to Apple.
Watch the video below to see Viv in action. But in a nutshell, here are some queries that showcase Viv’s capabilities:
What’s the weather like at home today?
This first one is pretty simple and one that Siri handled just as well.
Was it raining in Seattle three Thursdays ago?
This is the first point of departure for Viv. While both Siri and Viv know how to do the date math (Siri knows three Thursdays ago was April 21st), Viv can go back in time for the weather, Siri cannot. Not that important, but keep reading.
Will it be warmer than 70° near the Golden Gate Bridge after 5pm the day after tomorrow?
This is far more complex a query than Siri can handle. If you ask Siri, “Is it warmer than 70°?”, you’ll get the familiar, checking the web for “Is it warmer than 70°”. Viv parsed and responded correctly to this query.
Here’s another query:
Send Adam 20 bucks for the drinks last night
This query shows how Viv works with third party services. In this case, Venmo is used to send $20 to a friend, Adam. Presumably, Viv already had context that Dag had drinks with Adam last night and knew enough about Adam to send the money.
Another third party demo:
Send my mom some flowers for her birthday
Viv connects to Pro Flowers and shows some arrangements. Dag follows up with:
What about tulips?
Viv interacts with Pro Flowers and changes the offerings to show tulip arrangements. Dag makes the purchase and the flowers are on their way. Key to all this is Viv’s ability to save context, to remember what was discussed previously, make adjustments to the model of a current query, but also to tweak the model of a larger context, like a future meeting or a past event.
We’ve now gone well beyond Siri.
Get me a nice room in Palm Springs for labor day weekend.
Here Viv interacts with another third party, Hotels.com.
I need a ride for six people from my office to Madison Square Garden
This time it’s Uber. In this case, the request was for a vehicle big enough to seat six people.
Interestingly, Viv appeared to have been built on a Mac and was demoed running live on an iPhone. Dag got several phone calls during the demo, so Viv was running on a device, not a simulator.
Unlike Siri, Viv is wide open. There’s a Viv Developer Center where developers go to build new apps and teach Viv new things. One can imagine building a specialized Viv context for your environment.
To be clear, Siri is incredibly useful and steadily gains knowledge on the server side (Apple adds new data without having to update Siri on your phone). This is not a slam on Siri. Viv is next generation.
I suspect Apple has similar plans for the next generation of Siri. Hopefully, part of those plans will open up Siri to developers and allow for customization. It’ll be interesting to see if Apple addresses future Siri plans at WWDC.
Worldwide PC shipments (desktops, notebooks, two-in-ones and tablets) totaled 101 million units in Q1 2016, as total volumes dipped by 13% year-on-year to their lowest point since Q2 2011. Apple continued to lead the market into the first quarter of 2016 with shipments of just over 14 million units, despite falling 17%.
I suspect we’ll see a nice burst to shipped units when Apple updates the retina MacBook Pro.
The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs developed pancreatic cancer in 2004. He then spent a great deal of time with doctors and the healthcare system until his death in 2011. While that personal health journey had a great impact on Jobs personally, it turns out that it affected Apple’s top management, too. During this time, Jobs discovered how disjointed the healthcare system can be. He took on the task of trying to bring some digital order to various aspects of the healthcare system, especially the connection between patients, their data, and their healthcare providers.
And:
It seems clear that Apple’s management has now and will continue to have a major focus on bridging the gap between a person and their healthcare providers. I believe Apple is on a mission to improve the overall health of its customers as well as that of the healthcare system, a task Jobs gave them before he died. And while Apple’s products define Jobs’ legacy, it may turn out that his and Apple’s greatest contribution may be to bring greater order to the fragmented healthcare world.
It is within this backdrop that the Apple Watch was born.
The sense I get from reading this is, though Steve may not even have been aware of the Apple Watch design effort, his battle against cancer was a major motivating force behind the Apple Watch design and creation.
This is a long post, but worth the time. There’s a lot of insider’s detail specific to Twitter, but there’s also a lot of insight into privilege, large tech companies, management styles, and being true to yourself.
Thanks for sharing this, Mike. I hope it effects some change and brings you some peace.
Apple is awarding 350 scholarships to students and members of participating STEM organizations and is also offering 125 scholarships to developers with financial limitations.
Elon Musk can say whatever the heck he wants and get away with it, Tim Cook has to watch every last word even as he has repeatedly delivered the goods.
And:
First, [Musk] produces a quarter that is in line, meaning that he’s losing about $19,059 per car, near a record high.
Second, even as he doesn’t even make the number of cars he promised for the quarter – 17,000, below the 19,000 that analysts were expecting – he’s now projecting he will make 500,000 cars by 2018 and a million by 2020. His transparency is shameless. While he boasts the seemingly impossible – and I put “seemingly” in there because otherwise I am just calling him a liar, and I think he believes the numbers – he uses the forecast both to urge you to send more to him and to raise more money from Wall Street.
Who else but Musk could say: “If you place your order now, there’s a high probability you will actually receive your car in 2018.”
On Tim Cook:
Cook forecasted almost perfectly for the quarter just reported. Yet I defy you to find more than handful of stories that didn’t typify the quarter as a huge shortfall. It was right dead in line, for heavens’ sakes.
As for the forecast? What was Cook supposed to do? Make up one that showed better numbers than he can deliver? Given what he has in the pipe, and what he can see, barring a surge of orders for the new iPhone SE – something that’s entirely possible if you extrapolate comments from supplier Qorvo last night – he had to do what he did to reset growth for the quarter.
Whatever your take on Jim Cramer, there’s something to his comments. Musk is running on promises of growth. Tim Cook has delivered growth and posts accurate projections.
Spotify, which was created in Stockholm 10 years ago, now boasts of having close to 100 million users in more than 59 markets, despite increasing competition and, so far, a lack of profits.
Spotify claims it has 30 million paid users compared to Apple’s 13 million. Both Apple and Spotify say they are growing, so the users are coming from other services, or they are new to streaming.
We all know by know that Apple doesn’t do social well at all, and that includes Apple Music. Its failed attempts with Ping and Connect underscore the company’s lack of understanding in attempting to engage customers in the social realm. However, I’ve been testing a free new app called SoundShare that really gets the integration of social and music.
SoundShare currently works with Youtube, Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, Deezer and SoundCloud. The true magic of SoundShare is not that it supports so many services, it’s that those services can be integrated into collaborative playlists in one app.
Here is how the developer of the app describes it:
When a user creates a playlist inside SoundShare, they can simply add any song they want to it. No matter which music service they are using. For example, let’s say a user just created a SoundShare account and is using Youtube as the audio source. Let’s call him Andy. After searching for a song, Andy can add it to any playlist. In this example, let’s say the Rock playlist.
Now, we have another user, Lisa. Lisa also loves Rock, but she is currently using SoundShare with her Apple Music account. Since Lisa is on SoundShare, she already sees Andy’s Rock playlist. When Andy invites her to also collaborate on it, Lisa is granted permission to add/remove any song she wants. Even though Lisa uses Apple Music and Andy doesn’t, Lisa can go on and simply add any song to it. Andy will see the song she added and if it’s available on Youtube, will also be able to play it, while Lisa will play it using her Apple Music subscription, all without ever leaving SoundShare.
The same principle works for any Spotify user, Deezer user and iTunes users (SoundShare loads and plays the songs that were synced with the device).
With SoundShare and Apple Music (I’ll use that service as my example), friends can follow me and see what songs I’m listening to—you can also keep your profile private if you wish, but that’s not very social.
You can even share songs on SoundShare directly from the Apple Music app using the share tab. Just choose SoundShare when you share the song and it will be there the next time you open the app.
Users can comment on the songs I listen to, like the songs, and basically interact with me based on the music I’m listening to that day, no matter what service I’m using.
With the amount of artists Apple knows in the industry, imagine what they could do with a service like this. I would definitely follow Slash, Ozzy, and Zakk Wylde. That is an incredible way to find new music that your favorite artists are listening to.
One of the big questions is what if you don’t belong to any music service? SoundShare has that covered too:
The cool thing is that if you don’t use any music service, SoundShare will still work. This is where the Youtube integration kicks in. SoundShare uses Youtube to play every song to a user that doesn’t own a Spotify Premium Account, a Deezer account or that have Apple Music. And he can also interact with every other user inside the network, no matter which music service they are using.
Cremation by itself is much better for the environment than embalming, but you can go even further by using cremains to grow a tree or promote marine reefs. The company Coeio has taken ecoburial to a new level by introducing a burial suit that’s lined with spores that decompose the body and grow into mushrooms—from death, life.
As a Nova Scotianer, I’d love to be buried at sea off the coast of my home province. After all the food the ocean has provided me (I’ve eaten hundreds of pounds of lobster), I think it’s only fair I feed the little fishies right back.
Stuttering — a speech characteristic marked by repetitions in sound, prolonged pauses and repeated words. Though stuttering impacts an estimated 70 million people globally, it’s widely misunderstood, leading to widespread stigma.
Often, the person who stutters is seen as lacking intelligence or authority in what they have to say. But, in reality, stuttering is just a variation of “expected” speech.
For many people, stuttering is a lifelong condition, even with treatment like speech therapy.
As a stutterer myself, there is some great advice in this piece if you know anyone who has a stutter. Patience is the key.
Making the connection is the difficult part—a long, vertical line of smoke and then twisting off into a new direction and across the atmosphere.
That’s how you draw letters in the sky with an airplane, and there are only five people on the planet skilled enough to make it their full-time job.
Greg Stinis learned how to pilot one of those planes before he learned how to drive a car. Not surprising for the son of a man who invented a new way to write sentences in the sky, whose plane hangs in a national museum.
I’ve only ever seen skywriting once, when I was a kid, and I distinctly remember being utterly fascinated by it and driving my father nuts with questions.
If you’ve ever used a cellphone, hearing aid, or baby monitor, listened to live or recorded music, or recorded anything yourself, you’re indebted to James West.
West is the co-inventor of the electret microphone used in all of those devices and more. It’s estimated that over 90 percent of the microphones in use today are electret mics, and more than 2 billion of these devices are produced worldwide every year.
I’ve never heard of an electret microphone but this is a fascinating story.
LG Innotek today joins Fingerprint Cards in announcing a fingerprint module that can be integrated under the same glass cover as a phone’s display, obviating the need for a button. This will allow smartphone makers to have truly seamless designs while still offering the now-mandatory fingerprint authentication — and both companies expect devices with this new technology before the end of the year.
And:
LG Innotek points out that waterproofing a smartphone becomes significantly easier without a discrete button for the fingerprint reader. Plus the sensor itself is less susceptible to being scratched if it sits under the same tough cover glass as the display. Fingerprint readers have to be particularly robust, by microelectronics standards, because they sit on the exterior of a device.
Imagine if your phone knew who was holding your phone, no matter where your finger made contact. This tech is likely coming to Android. It will be interesting to see if Apple responds in some way.
I’m a big fan of Polygraph’s music chart mechanism. You can pick a specific year at which to start, then start listening. As the week’s go by, you’ll hear the top song on that week’s Billboard chart.
The default starting point is sometime in 1997. Easy to change on the fly. Very fun.
Periodically, PayPal runs a promotion selling iTunes gift cards at a discount. Caveat emptor. That said, I’ve made this purchase before and it’s worked just fine for me. This is available strictly via email.
Hip-hop star Drake sold more than one million copies of his new album, “Views,” in less than five days when it was available only on Apple Inc.’s iTunes download store and its subscription streaming service, Apple Music — a rare achievement in an age of rapid streaming growth and declining sales of downloads and CDs.
But Apple’s head of content, Larry Jackson, said that Drake was able to rack up such global sales precisely because he used the company’s streaming service to market the album and corral his fans into one place.
Over the past year Drake has hosted 20 episodes of his radio show, OVO Sound, on Apple Music’s free Beats 1 radio station, using the show to announce the album release details and to debut several songs, including his hit “Hotline Bling.” Apple also advertised the album on the iTunes home page and is running TV ads for the album during the National Basketball Association’s playoff games.
The album sold 632,000 copies in the first 24 hours.
Late last month, Apple brought in some podcasters to discuss the business of podcasting. From a New York Times article, which we linked to over the weekend:
> Interviews with over two dozen podcasters and people inside Apple reveal a variety of complaints. The podcasters say that they are relegated to wooing a single Apple employee for the best promotion. That sharing on social media is cumbersome. And that for podcasters to make money, they need more information about their listeners, and Apple is in a unique position to provide it. The problems, they say, could even open up an opportunity for a competitor.
Marco Arment responded with this blog post. Lots of good takeaways from Marco’s post, but this is a big one:
> Big podcasters also apparently want Apple to insert itself as a financial intermediary to allow payment for podcasts within Apple’s app, likely aiming to tap into the popularity of integrated features like those used by slots apps to handle in-app purchases and monetization. We’ve seen how that goes. Trust me, podcasters, you don’t want that.
> It would not only add rules, restrictions, delays, and big commissions, but it would increase Apple’s dominant role in podcasts, push out diversity, give Apple far more control than before, and potentially destroy one of the web’s last open media ecosystems.
Federico Viticci followed with his own take for MacStories:
> The great thing about the free and decentralized web is that the aforementioned web platforms are optional and they’re alternatives to an existing open field where independent makers can do whatever they want. I can own my content, offer my RSS feed to anyone, and resist the temptation of slowing down my website with 10 different JavaScript plugins to monitor what my users do. No one is forcing me to agree to the terms of a platform. My readers are free to link to my articles, copy them, print them, subscribe to my feeds, and view them in any browser or feed reader they like. > > Big Platforms are scared of this openness. I see an intrinsic beauty in it that no platform, corporation, or Leading Content Professional could ever convince me to abandon.
It’s hard to make money creating content, whether it be writing, filming, or podcasting. There’s a temptation to hand over the reins, with the hope that a large platform will bring in infrastructure, detailed access to customer usage patterns and, most importantly, a steady paycheck. Improve your podcasts effortlessly by investing in professional podcast editing services.
The App Store offers a similar temptation. In the beginning, there was gold in them hills, but as more and more folks showed up to reap the riches, it got harder and harder for a small player to make a living building apps. When you buy Spotify monthly listeners, you make a direct investment in the credibility and visibility of your work. With around 11 million artists on Spotify all competing for the same attention, purchasing real social signals can be a game changer.
Good writing on Marco and Federico’s part, worth reading. Not clear to me that there is an easy solution. The App Store offers a precedent, but not a perfect match. The vast majority of apps flow through Apple’s review process and promotion mechanism. Podcasting is still an open standard. No bottleneck to pass through for permissions, an ultimately free market, albeit one in which it’s tough to make a buck.
The default setting will enable you to stream about 3 hours of TV shows and movies per gigabyte of data. In terms of bitrates, that currently amounts to about 600 Kilobits per second. Our testing found that, on cellular networks, this setting balances good video quality with lower data usage to help avoid exceeding data caps and incurring overage fees. If you have a mobile data plan with a higher data cap, you can adjust this setting to stream at higher bitrates.
In a nutshell, you can now change the quality to:
Off (don’t use cellular data, meant for WiFi)
Low (4 hours per GB)
Medium (2 hours per GB)
High (1 hour per GB)
Unlimited (use cellular, meant for unlimited data plan)
To get to this setting, launch the Netflix iOS app, click the hamburger menu (upper left corner), scroll down the sidebar and tap App Settings.
Huawei is shamelessly copying Apple here. Yes, it migrated the fingerprint sensor like a flounder’s eye and eliminated the mechanical home button, but the two phones share similar antenna bands, styling, and finish. They even sport the same proprietary star-shaped security screw, in exactly the same spots. After all, if you want your phone to resemble an iPhone, you’ve got to nail the details.
But this screw, called a pentalobe, does more than make the P9 look a bit more like an iPhone. It keeps you from opening your phone and impedes recycling it when you finally toss it. And it offers another reminder that where Apple goes, others follow, even if what’s good for Apple isn’t always good for the orchard.
This is remarkably blatant. Just look at the image.
Late last month, Apple brought seven leading podcast professionals to the company’s campus in Cupertino, Calif., to air their case to a room full of employees, according to two people who were there. The people would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements. The company made no promises, the people said, but several pressing issues for podcasters were discussed in frank terms.
Apple has problems, there’s no question about that. I hope these types of meetings will help, but we’ll see—I have my doubts.
One image looms above the rest: Ray Lussier’s photograph of Bobby Orr immediately after he scored the Stanley Cup-winning goal for the Boston Bruins in Game 4 of the 1970 Finals. The black-and-white image shows Orr in mid-air, hovering above the ice, as all of Boston Garden—all of New England—erupts.
In honor of the NHL playoffs on now (I’m halfheartedly cheering for Nashville and Pittsburgh – both cities I used to live in), this is a really interesting back story of one of the greatest action photos ever taken.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has been named as one of several tech industry executives that will speak at Startup Fest Europe, a festival geared towards helping startups grow faster, according to the event website.
In the iOS 10 Apple Music redesign, the Connect feature will follow Ping’s lead and will be demoted. Apple Music Connect currently exists as its own tab across the Apple Music interface, but multiple sources say that the feature will lose its tab and become integrated into the “For You” recommendations page.
I do hope this is true. Connect is the most useless thing since Ping. However, I hope that “integrated” into For You doesn’t mean that it will be mixed in with my recommendations—that would completely ruin the For You tab for me. Just kill Connect and be done with it.
