My thanks to Hullo for sponsoring The Loop this week. You already know the ergonomics of your desktop workstation are important; have you considered your sleep ergonomics? Hullo customer Matt writes:
“I’m kind of shocked myself at how big a difference it’s made, and surprised to find myself writing one of those seemingly overenthusiastic reviews, but Hullo deserves it. So worth it—the ability to precisely shape the pillow so that it supports my neck just right is something I’ll never want to give up!”
Check out Hullo for 60 nights. If you don’t like it, just send it back for a refund.
Apple Pay usage in the US is growing, driven by both increased frequency of transactions and the expanding base of iPhone 6 owners, according to The Auriemma Consulting Group (ACG) Apple Pay Tracker, which interviewed 500 iPhone 6 and 6+ owners between May 29 and June 15, 2015. Forty-two percent of US Apple 6/6+ owners reported having used Apple Pay, virtually identical to the proportions reported in two previous waves of the study conducted in February and April 2015. “While the proportion of users has remained stable, the denominator has grown through new iPhone and Apple Watch sales and the upgrade cycle. We’ve also seen the average number of transactions increase both in-store and in-app,” says Marianne Berry, Managing Director of ACG’s Payment Insights practice.
So the proportion of iPhone 6 users using Apple Pay is staying constant, but as the number of iPhone 6 users increases, Apple Pay use increases proportionately.
Imagine one thousand musicians all playing at the same time, all in sync, singing in perfect rhythm and harmony. The goal was to convince Foo Fighters to come to Cesena, Italy and play for them.
Not long after, this appeared on the Foo Fighter’s official Twitter account:
Ci vediamo a presto, Cesena…. xxx Davide
Roughly translated, that’s: See you soon, Cesena…. xxx Dave
A friend of mine recently gave me a stack of old Apple documents, and included were scripts for three Apple-approved radio ads pushing the Apple IIc for the holiday season of 1984.
The three ads — titled 20 Gifts, Christmas Card and Perfect Present — extol the virtues of the machine, including its compatibility with programs written for the IIe. Dealers also promised easy credit and help with the purchase of accessories such as a modem or mouse.
If you’re a MacBook user, you’re losing an average of 1 hour of total battery life by using Chrome. Firefox is a little better, but Safari is the clear winner. You’ll want to use Safari if you want to get the most battery out of your laptop.
Wow! An hour of laptop life is a huge difference. There’s a lot more to the study, worth a scan.
Using insights from our more than 500 million Shutterstock downloads, discover which emotions businesses, marketing agencies, and media organizations are using to design an ongoing relationship with their customers.
I’m not a fan of infographics, but I did find this fascinating.
As security researcher Nicholas Weaver put it in a (now deleted) tweet, ”Imagine if Windows patches had to pass through Dell and your ISP before they came to you? And neither cared? That is called Android.”
The way Android users get updates is just so screwed up.
I’ve been playing with a replacement calculator for the Mac. Magic Number has been out for a while, but is new to me. There is an incredible amount of functionality built into the calculator, yet it is incredibly easy to use.
To get a basic sense of Magic Number, spend a few minutes going through the Getting Started page. Note that a number of the screen shots are short little animations (start them by clicking the classic play triangle).
The thing I like the most about Magic Number is that the math looks like math. For example:
Even after you enter a calculation, you can edit individual elements and recalculate. This is the tiniest tip of the iceberg here. Magic Number is incredibly robust, chock full of features. And a new, free update is coming in mid-August, supposedly full of new stuff. Can’t wait.
Apple has been criticized for the curvaceous project being closed off and suburban in its orientation (large earthen berms will block the public’s view of the campus from bordering streets). But the new public visitor’s center shows Apple is at least making a concession to the public’s great interest in the Spaceship.
The plans show a super-modern glass-walled structure topped by a carbon-fiber roof with extended eaves, punctuated by large skylights. On the ground floor: A 2,386-square-foot cafe and 10,114-square-foot store “which allows visitors to view and purchase the newest Apple products.” Stairs and elevators take visitors to the roof level, about 23 feet up. There, they’ll be able to behold the multi-billion-dollar campus.
There was never any doubt that Apple would have some sort of area for the general public, similar to the present Employee Store. Whether it will be a full blown Apple Retail location where you can buy Apple’s hardware (unlike the Employee Store where the general public can only buy accessories and Apple-branded merchandise) remains to be seen.
Former Top Gear presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May have signed up for a new motoring show on Amazon Prime, set to air in 2016. The news ends months of speculation about the trio’s future on TV after the BBC refused to renew Clarkson’s contract following a “fracas” during filming this year. The deal is a major coup for Amazon’s streaming service, which lags behind rival Netflix, and although there are no details of how much the firm paid for the trio, a company insider told the London Evening Standard: “We have made a significant investment.”
It’s a three year deal and set for broadcast in 2016. Clarkson is a buffoon but there is no argument that the trio, even for non-car lovers, are a fun team to watch. I’m looking forward to seeing the new format and whether or not this version of the show is better or worse now that the boys will be free from the restraints of the BBC.
Tom Brady, responding to accusations that he destroyed his phone to hinder the Deflategate investigation:
I also disagree with yesterdays narrative surrounding my cellphone. I replaced my broken Samsung phone with a new iPhone 6 AFTER my attorneys made it clear to the NFL that my actual phone device would not be subjected to investigation under ANY circumstances.
No matter your take on Tom Brady, there’s no arguing he has great taste.
“I am going to show you how touchscreens help me,” he says to the camera. Moments later, we see Hills in his wheelchair, facing a desk with an iPad perched atop. We watch Christopher, a resident of Queensland, Australia, move forward slightly, struggle for a moment, and then pause, unable to reach the iPad screen.
“I keep reading things about the touchscreen overtaking the mouse and keyboard and this really scares me,” he confesses into the camera. Hills’ Athetoid cerebral palsy has left him unable to walk or use his hands, and, at that moment in 2012, his fears were understandable. “I think touchscreens are an amazing technology, but my disability means I can’t use my hands — so let’s face it,” he says. The video — shot, edited, and posted by Hills — is an arresting reminder of an alarming truth: Technologies aimed at, hyped by, and marketed toward an able-bodied majority often overlook the eager constituency of the disabled.
Apple added the first version of Switch Control in iOS 7. That, along with other assistive technology, changed everything for Christopher. Instead of touchscreen technology being a barrier to keep him out, it became a life changing boon.
“The thing that comes to mind is the day I made my first phone call. I was 15. I was able to call mum at work. As you can imagine, this was a very big thing,” Hills told BuzzFeed News of using Switch Control for the first time.
Anyone that’s every listened to me talk about guitars knows how much I love Taylor. Their workmanship, attention to detail, and tone are second to none. I just got this beauty today.
“It was just right there,” he told Ars. “It was hovering, I would never have shot it if it was flying. When he came down with a video camera right over my back deck, that’s not going to work. I know they’re neat little vehicles, but one of those uses shouldn’t be flying into people’s yards and videotaping.”
Some drone owners are morons. There was a case in California where firefighters were trying to get a blaze under control and people with drones prevented helicopters from getting into the air. Jesus people, use your common sense.
Whether it is the fear of carrier overages, or just the preconceived notion that WiFi is faster, most of us continue to log into WiFi expecting it to be blazing fast. But it isn’t really true, both from my personal, anecdotal and totally unreliable point of view and from a data-backed view. Most of the popular public WiFi platforms like Starbucks WiFi, Xfinity, hotel WiFi and a whole lot of others are quite slow compared to a good LTE connection—especially Verizon, which is pricey but reliable.
This is so true. I connect to WiFi just assuming it will be faster than LTE, but many (most) times it just sucks.
AppleInsider has a roundup of the early reviews. Good for Microsoft if they’re able to pull this off—the last couple of releases alienated many of their users.
My friends Dave Wiskus and Joe Cieplinski have started a new band and podcast called Airplane Mode. In the first episode they tell the story of how they moved to New York City and started a band.
If you ever get the chance to hear Pixar’s Michael B. Johnson speak, you should leap at the chance. Known to the Twitterverse as @drwave, Michael is an incredibly entertaining speaker and, it turns out, a terrific interviewer.
In addition to his role supervising the Tools Story/Editorial team at Pixar, Wave is on the Board of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. The video below, filmed at the Cartoon Art Museum, is a fascinating interview Michael did with three people who witnessed the early days of NeXT firsthand: Doug Menuez, Peter Graffagnino, and Don Melton.
Lots of anecdotes including Steve Jobs, a bit of early Apple, and lots of the birth of various technologies that came together at NeXT.
The New York Times pulled together a very short, clickable questionnaire that’ll give you a sense of how your personal information might be compromised, along with a series of links to articles laying out the major recent attacks, from the Adobe breech on down to UPS.
One piece of information I found most interesting:
If you were the victim of more than one breach, some security experts recommend freezing your credit. To do so, call Equifax, Experian or TransUnion and ask to have your account frozen. The credit agency will mail you a one-time PIN or password to unfreeze your account later. If you plan on applying for a new job, renting an apartment or buying insurance, you will have to thaw a freeze temporarily and pay a fee to refreeze the account.
I think this might be a pain, but if you are at risk, this is a step worth considering.
I got a disturbing text a few days ago. Seems that when a business associate looked up my business name in Google, they saw a message, just below the main site URL, that said “This site may be hacked”.
Grammar aside (Google is not giving permission to hack the site, they are letting me know that the site might already be hacked), this is a pretty disheartening message to see, especially on a site you worked so hard to bring to life.
In a nutshell, the message is telling you that Google scanned your site and has detected the possibility of malware. In their words:
You’ll see the message “This site may be hacked” when we believe a hacker might have changed some of the existing pages on the site or added new spam pages. If you visit the site, you could be redirected to spam or malware.
In my case, I had an old install of WordPress on the site, one that I no longer used and one that was not exposed via any publicly linked pages. Somehow, the varmints got in and added some extra PHP files to the site. The code was cryptic, using arrays of bytes that clearly held a stream of code to be executed by another chunk of code.
No matter, I wiped the server clean, changed my passwords, reinstalled the site from backup. By the time I got all this done and tested, it was late and I was done for the day. All that remained was to figure out how to connect to Google to get the site rescanned.
Woke the next morning, ready to dive into the Google bureaucracy, and what do you know, the message was gone. My theory is that Google maintains a list of hack-tagged sites, rescans on a regular basis.
I have to say, I appreciate the help Google. You really had my back there. Thanks.
Ever wonder why there’s no way to listen to a replay of Elton John’s Rocket Hour from Beats 1 in its original broadcast form, with Sir Elton’s full repartee?
Serenity Caldwell does a phenomenal job explaining the licensing rights associated with the various elements that make up Apple Music and how that impacts the ability to replay Beats 1 shows. Great writing, great research.
