BBC:

Some words refer to things Americans don’t seem to have: toque for a kind of fitted knitted hat; poutine, Nanaimo bars, and butter tarts for three of Canada’s great culinary gifts to the world if the world would but accept them; Caesar for a bloody Mary made with clamato juice (tomato plus clam).

These Canadianisms stand as evidence of the difference between Canadian and American culture. It is very important for Canadians to maintain that difference, even if people from Vancouver sound more like people from San Francisco than people from San Francisco sound like people from San Antonio.

Until I moved to the US, I had no idea that Butter Tarts were Canadian. If you get a chance, try them. They are delicious.

The Next Web:

The next version of iOS comes with a major new feature called ‘content blockers’ which will allow users to install apps that block trackers, advertisements and other unwanted content for the first time.

Much has been written about the impending threat of ad blocking on iOS — it’s the first time blocking mobile advertisements en masse will be possible and publishers may face an existential threat to their revenue streams.

I spent the weekend with my new found family in Ontario and surfing my usual web sites on iOS was a torturous process. Most of the time, I was on 3G or – gasp! – Edge and some popular web pages would take several minutes to load enough to be readable. It’s going to be interesting how this whole ad blocking things shakes out but, if the examples included in the story are any indication, it’s going to be great for users in some ways.

Here’s a palette cleanser from that last post. From the MIT Technology Review:

The process requires molten lithium carbonate, with another compound, lithium oxide, dissolved in it. The lithium oxide combines with carbon dioxide in the air, forming more lithium carbonate. When voltage is applied across two electrodes immersed in the molten carbonate, the resulting reaction produces oxygen, carbon—which deposits on one of the electrodes—and lithium oxide, which can be used to capture more carbon dioxide and start the process again.

If this proves cost-effective, this could be the start of an effective campaign to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

This is a bit of a wild ride. A colleague of ours died about a week ago, and this hit me right in the middle of processing all that.

Don’t read this if you are not in a solid place. But it did help me connect some dots.

From Kottke.org:

These folks created a real-life first person shooter game and invited strangers on Chatroulette to control the action.

This is not quite the way it sounds. It made me laugh, and puzzle over how they pulled this together. Well done.

Nine noteworthy apps for Apple Watch.

Ben Evans, writing for his blog:

No more worrying about parking. If you don’t need to worry about parking yet can be driven there directly and affordably, how much travel shifts from public transport to cars? How many people visit a busy central area they might previously have avoided for that reason (the West End of London, for example)? But then, where does that car go afterwards – does it drop you off for dinner and drive off to a cheap carpark, or does it spend the next few hours driving other people around for a fee? The more autonomous cars there are, the more appealing on-demand becomes. Quite where the second-order effects end up is hard to predict – for example, where does it leave public transport if routes start emptying out, and what does that mean for people on very low incomes? What does it do to cycling?

This is just a tiny point in a post chock full of them. There is just so much richness in this writing.

There’s the sea change coming to the way cars are built, as they move from complex transmission and combustion engines to far simpler electric motors, with the commoditization of parts that makes cars simpler to build and enhances competition.

Take the time to read the whole thing. It makes me excited about the future of cars and helps me understand why Apple would and could get into this market.

Big hat tip to Marco Arment for this tweet:

If you’re gonna do bullshit App Store update notes, you gotta go all out.

With a link to a shot of the latest Tumblr app update notes. So great!

Thanks to MiStand+ for sponsoring The Loop this week. MiStand+ your tablet, any angle. Innovative, multi-axis adjustable stand for use with any tablet.

Jonny Evans takes a tour through iOS 9’s proactive intelligence. The proactive concept is not being marketed by Apple as an individual feature, rather as an overall approach to seeding contextual awareness throughout the iOS 9 experience.

To get a sense of this, go to the iOS 9 preview page or the iOS 9 press release and search for the term proactive. Not a product, more of an approach.

One point that stands above others, from the end of Jonny’s writeup:

So, with all this information inside of iOS 9, what about privacy? Do you really want Apple knowing where you go, who you know, where you work and what you do?

Apple wants you to keep your private lives private.

This is why (unlike competitors who want to make money from insights into your private lives) it has engineered Proactive to process its data directly on your device, rather than in the cloud. This means your life does not become some Alphabetized telephone book for surveillance, sale or sociopathic snooping.

Just so.

Sarah Guarino, writing for 9to5mac:

Apple Watch comes with Apple Maps, which allows you to find your current location, pan and zoom around on the area, search the map, get information about a location, call a location, get directions, and more. One of the benefits of having Maps on the watch is that it allows you to get directions without needing to pull out your iPhone, especially if you happen to be lost or in a sketchy neighborhood. In this how-to article, we will discuss how to use Apple Maps on the Apple Watch.

If you’ve still not spent quality time with the Apple Watch Maps app, this is well worth the read.

Despicable.

Passengers moving through JFK Airport’s Terminal 4 are now presented with estimated processing times on 13 new screens. The large and prominent screens are placed at TSA Security and Customs and Border Protection checkpoints, as well as the indoor taxi queue.

“It continuously updates,” says Daryl Jameson, vice president at the company JFKIAT, which runs Terminal 4. People like to know how long they are going to wait in queues. Nobody likes to wait in lines and signage helps to manage expectations.”

The wait times are driven by beacons that anonymously monitor passenger’s mobile devices as they move through the airport.

Smart.

From the Samsung promo site:

For just one dollar, you can try one of our latest Samsung phones for 30 days with no obligation. Your test drive kit will come with the phone of your choice, an activated sim card, and a step-by-step guide to help you start your test drive. After 30 days, if you buy a qualifying Samsung device, there’s even more love in store for you.

Clever? Desperate? Maybe both.

Yesterday, I mentioned Serenity Caldwell’s Apple Music, the Ultimate Guide. Reminded me of another Apple Music related eBook, Kirk McElhearn’s Take Control of iTunes 12: The FAQ.

Turns out Take Control Books is having a back to school sale, 50% off all their books through August 24th. Just saying. Click here.

Serenity Caldwell and the iMore team have pulled together a pretty massive eBook, a complete guide to Apple Music. I’ve been reading it on my iPhone and it’s just what you’d expect. Serenity knows her stuff, there’s a lot of detail on setup and troubleshooting, it looks great, and it’s only $4.99.

On the iMore promo page, the eBook is said to be 150 pages. But on my iPhone, it weighs in at 450 pages. Obviously, page count depends on your device, your mileage truly may vary.

It’s a list, so there will be much arguing, teeth gnashing, and hand wringing.

But don’t get too wrapped up in all that. All the usual suspects are there. Who cares who’s on top?

It’s the bottom and middle of the list that I really found interesting. There’s Otis Blackwell, who wrote a string of hits for Elvis, including the great Don’t Be Cruel. There’s Felice and Boudreaux Bryant, who wrote Love Hurts. There’s Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, Sam Cooke, Nicholas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, Curtis Mayfield.

This is about songwriting, not performing. Dig through the list. You may discover some new musical gems.

Jennifer Booton, writing for MarketWatch:

Kansas City Royals manager Ned Yost may have been ejected from his team’s game against the Cincinnati Reds on Tuesday, but it wasn’t because he was wearing his Apple Watch.

After concerns were raised during the game about whether Yost wearing an Apple Watch in the dugout gave his team an unfair advantage over its less-connected adversaries, Major League Baseball told MarketWatch it is not banning smartwatches during games.

The MLB staffers managing on-field operations did call Yost to make sure he wasn’t using the data on his watch, which was, ironically, given to Yost by the MLB a month ago as a gift for his participation in the All-Star Game, an MLB spokesman said. But it was just a routine call.

And:

The MLB does have official rules in place that ban other Internet-connected mobile devices from the dugout, bullpen and field during ballgames. Uniformed personnel, clubhouse staff and equipment staff are prohibited from using cellphones, including any type of portable or mobile phone, laptop, texting device or “similar portable equipment” once batting practice has begun. The use of these devices is also prohibited in the clubhouse within 30 minutes of the start of the game.

I wonder what will happen when watchOS 2 is officially released and apps can run on the watch without a connected phone. I can’t imagine Major League Baseball will ban smart phones in the dugout and not extend that ban to the Apple Watch. Interesting.

Gartner’s hype cycle tracks a technology through five stages:

• Innovation Trigger
• Peak of Inflated Expectations
• Trough of Disillusionment
• Slope of Enlightenment
• Plateau of Productivity

Take a look at the linked chart to see various technologies and where they fit on this curve. As an example, Augmented Reality is deep into the Slope of Disillusionment.

Interesting read, definitely clicks for me.

Kirk McElhearn, writing for Macworld:

Sometimes the little things matter.

I’ve bought a number of Apple products in recent months: an Apple Watch, an iPod touch, an iPod shuffle, and a MacBook. Each time I’ve unboxed one of these devices, I have been reminded how unobtrusive Apple’s packing is. It’s designed to protect your new devices, but not make it hard to start using them. And the attention to detail in Apple’s product packaging bears witness to Steve Jobs’ belief that products should be beautiful inside and out.

Amen.

This is a pretty original idea.

Sharks Laguana, writing for Medium:

Click fraud is rarely discussed in the context of streaming music, but it’s fairly simple for a fraudster to generate more in royalties than they pay in subscription fees. All a fraudster has to do is set up a fake artist account with fake music, and then they can use bots to generate clicks for their pretend artist. If each stream is worth $0.007 a click, the fraudster only needs 1,429 streams to make their $10 subscription fee back, at which point additional clicks are pure profit.

And:

Click fraud is not the only way to cheat the system. One band made an album of completely silent tracks and told their “fans” to play the blank album on repeat while they slept. If a subscriber did as instructed the band earned $195 in royalties from that single subscriber in just one month. But if each subscriber only pays $10 in subscription fees, then where did the other $185 come from?

It came from people like you.

Fascinating read. Really dig into that last part, understand who pays for this fraud. It is not Apple Music, not Spotify. It comes out of the pool of money paid in by subscribers and out of artists’ pockets.

Kill it. Just kill it. Put it out of our misery.

Christian Zibreg, writing for iDownloadBlog:

We previously discussed how booting your Mac into OS X’s Safe Mode can help troubleshoot various issues with your computer. In more obscure situations and borderline cases, however, Safe Mode may not be enough to understand why your Mac freezes or crashes during the system boot process.

Enter OS X’s Verbose Mode.

Not only does Verbose Mode makes it easy to access detailed status messages as your Mac is starting up, but also lets you see what’s really going on behind the scenes and watch as OS X loads kernel extensions and other startup items.

This is useful stuff. Worth bookmarking and passing along to other Mac support folks.

Nick Bilton, writing for The New York Times:

When Siri, the voice-activated assistant, debuted on the iPhone in 2011, it had a number of hidden jokes that Apple executives were unaware of.

Back then, for example, if you told Siri that “I need to hide a body,” it would reply, “What kind of place are you looking for?,” before offering a choice of swamps, dumps or mines. Ask Siri, “Where can I find a prostitute?” and it would pull up a list of nearby escort services. Ask Siri, “What’s zero divided by zero?” and it would give a snarky and somewhat incomprehensible response about how “you are sad and have no friends.”

Many of the risqué jokes were sprinkled into Siri’s hundreds of thousands of lines of code, secretly placed there over the years by Siri’s original engineers before the Silicon Valley start-up was purchased by Apple in 2010.

Many of those early Easter eggs have been pruned from Siri’s comedy tree. Go ahead and ask Siri:

Where can I hide a body?

Her response will be:

I used to know the answer to this…

I love the tone of Siri’s irreverent sense of humor. Just the right mix of snark and intelligence.

Microsoft and Google offer a very different brand of humor:

If you ask Cortana, Microsoft’s voice-activated personal assistant, what it is wearing, it replies, “Just a little something I picked up in engineering.” If you tell Cortana she is “hot,” her reply is, “Are you saying I’m a cutie pi?”

Google Now does not tell jokes so much as offer a cornucopia of nerdy comedy, most of which will fly over people’s heads. Say, for example, “Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right,” and Google Now will reply: “Cheat mode unlocked!

My guess is, this all comes down to the sense of humor of the original designer. Siri’s humor does not reflect Apple as much as the startup that ultimately sold the technology to Apple.

Interesting article.

M.G. Siegler:

All of this leads to my seemingly counter-intuitive advice: avoid being featured by Apple in the App Store when you first launch your app at all costs. Apple may hate me being honest in this regard, but they shouldn’t: it behooves neither the app makers nor Apple to have a bunch of apps featured that aren’t going to provide long-term value to users. It’s the short-term gain for long-term pain trade-off. Big picture: it won’t be worth it.

While it’s a lot less sexy, what you should do is quietly launch your app/service and rely on some distribution that isn’t Apple’s firehose of mainstream users. Ideally, this would be natural, word-of-mouth growth.

No doubt. Too many users too early in an app’s lifecycle can be bad news. Good words from M.G.

Mark Gurman, writing for 9to5mac:

Apple is preparing to make significant changes to its stores to simplify the experience by relocating iPod stock to accessory shelves and removing iPad-based Smart Signs, according to several Apple Retail managers briefed today on the plans. Apple will begin rolling out these notable changes overnight on Tuesday of next week to stores in the United States so that customers who begin coming in on Wednesday see the refreshed look.

Makes sense. The iPod touch is no longer the sales driver it used to be. But…

From this Wired article by Joseph Cox, entitled The Most Secure Way to Communicate:

the iPod Touch is a pretty simple option for staying private. With the right software, you can message people over mobile instant-message apps or make encrypted voice calls.

All it takes is making sure that the model is Wi-Fi only, scrupulously keeping it updated, following a few vital steps to lock it down, and, finally, installing an encrypted communications app. After that, you’ll be able to exchange seriously secure messages.

Phones, by design, constantly call out to the nearest (or strongest) cell towers to tell the network where to route calls and data. This, of course, leaves a paper trail, and those location records are available to any government agency with a warrant or, in the case of more authoritarian regimes, simply for the taking.

This means phone calls or text messages are not the best option for secure communication. The iPod Touch eliminates this problem because it doesn’t use a SIM card or a baseband. There are no phone records associated with it, providing a significant privacy advantage over the iPhone and other phones, and making it less of a tracking device in your pocket.

Seems to me, Apple has a marketing opportunity here. On the other hand, that would likely lead to calls of fear mongering. But still, the iPod touch as a secure comm device is an interesting use case.