Oh God, what is this?That’s the first thought you might have when a notification appears on your iPhone or iPad prompting you to download a “Carrier Settings Update.”If you’re like me, you’ll shrug and tap the Update button (YOLO!). But others might be a little more wary, and want to know what the update is for and whether it’s safe to download before taking any action.Unfortunately, getting answers to these questions is much harder than it should be.
I had this happen while setting up a friend’s phone yesterday. Finding info on what it is was frustratingly difficult.
if you’re going to ever think about buying lottery tickets, a moment like this — when the Powerball jackpot has reached remarkable highs — is the best possible time.
The biggest and most generally applicable reason buying lottery tickets is a non-terrible idea is this: It is fun to imagine one’s future after arriving at vast wealth.
I’ve always loved the Fran Leibowitz line of, “Your odds of winning the lottery are the same whether you play it or not.”
It’s a piece of cake. You can’t put lipstick on a pig. Why add fuel to the fire? Idioms are those phrases that mean more than the sum of their words. As our Open Translation Project volunteers translate TED Talks into 105 languages, they’re often challenged to translate English idioms into their language. Which made us wonder: what are their favorite idioms in their own tongue?
Many of these are even more nonsensical in English. My favourite is, “You sing like an elephant farted in your ear!” Hat tip to Lori Taber.
Both of these are great reads. The first is from re/code, called Ten Years of Google Maps, From Slashdot to Ground Truth. This is a big picture story, showing the three threads that came together to create the Google Maps we know today:
The grand example for Search by Location was you were supposed to be able to search for coffee shops near Palo Alto. But Taylor remembers that Sun Microsystems put its address at the bottom of every page of its website, and it named its products after coffee (most famously, Java). So that broke the entire example.
“It had zero users per day,” says Taylor, who is now CEO of productivity startup Quip, after a stint as CTO of Facebook.
That original product was made much more accurate by licensing Yellow Pages information, but it wasn’t the dramatic leap forward that people at Google — particularly now-CEO Larry Page — were hoping to make.
So Google sought inspiration and talent from outside. Just before it went public, it made three relatively small acquisitions in 2004: Keyhole, Where2 and Zipdash.
About a year ago, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, T-Mobile, Cellcom, Bluegrass Cellular, and US Cellular (collectively organized via the Cellular Telephone Industries Association, or CTIA) agreed to a series of provisions with the FCC to make it possible for consumers to unlock their phones.
The deadline for that agreement was yesterday, February 11th. Which means that, as of right now, you have the right to unlock your phone, provided you meet the basic criteria for unlocking.
You can read the FCC human-friendly version of the provisions here. Worth a few minutes of your time to do so. Know your rights.
And you can read the CTIA version of the guidelines here.
Good to have these links handy if you run into any resistance trying to unlock your phone.
If you are new to Photos for OS X, the coming replacement for iPhoto, spend a few minutes reading this piece Jason Snell wrote for TidBITS.
Then take a look at this FAQ, responses to questions raised by the TidBITS article.
From the TidBITS article:
The banner feature of Photos is its integration with Apple’s iCloud Photo Library service. You can (optionally) set Photos to automatically upload your photos to Apple’s iCloud servers, where they’re backed up and accessible from iOS devices. (iOS device access will be included in iOS 8.2, an update that will presumably be delivered around the same time that Photos is released.)
My photo library is well past the default maximum size of my iCloud account. My question is, once Photos for OS X is released to the public, will that limit increase? Or will Apple customers making the move to Photos be forced to choose to either take on a monthly iCloud storage fee or stick to local storage? Is this a business development strategy for Apple?
Karen Webster, in her weekly piece for PYMENTS.com, interviews PayPal’s GM of Retail, Brad Brodigan. She then follows this with some cogent analysis. The whole thing is worth reading, but here’s a few nuggets:
What merchants see in the mobile opportunity in-store is the opportunity to remove friction, and not introduce it, into the shopping experiences of their customers.
And, today, in-store, that isn’t the act of paying for something.
What does introduce friction is a consumer trying to keep track of offers, coupons, sales, shopping lists, preferences, reviews, recommendations, pricing, inventory availability, having to mill around the store looking for stuff, and then having to schlepp to a specific place in a store and stand in line to pay for something. Not only does all of this introduce friction for the consumer, it introduces friction for the merchant, too – not to mention lost sales opportunities.
Making the payment process painless is only half the solution. Integrating with the world outside the iOS ecosystem is the other half. Reducing the friction between Apple Pay and the world of loyalty programs, coupons, shopping lists, and preferences will ultimately steer and speed consumer adoption of Apple Pay.
PayPal is starting to look a lot more like a company that’s placing its bets on leveraging the synergies between its merchant services group and its consumer payments capabilities and a lot less like a company that is trying to double down on being a “payments” company.
That suggests that PayPal’s ambition isn’t to compete as a payments app with Apple Pay (or Samsung Pay) at the point of sale for payment – but to perhaps take a page out of the Alipay play book and become a commerce and financial services brand that creates a trusted and reinforcing circle of services around businesses and consumers.
The sense here is that PayPal is conceding the payments war, trying to diversify outside that area to remain relevant.
This weekend, a man wearing a skull mask posted a video on YouTube outlining his plans to murder me. I know his real name. I documented it and sent it to law enforcement, praying something is finally done. I have received these death threats and 43 others in the last five months.
The Led Zeppelin reissue campaign continues in 2015, turning the spotlight on the double album Physical Graffiti. The deluxe edition of the group’s sixth studio album will arrive 40 years to the day after the original debuted on February 24, 1975. As with the previous deluxe editions, Physical Graffiti has been newly remastered by guitarist and producer Jimmy Page and is accompanied by a disc of companion audio comprising previously unreleased music related to the original release.
Heineken NV, the world’s third-largest brewer, forecast growth against a tough market backdrop in the year ahead after reporting higher revenue for 2014 and increasing its dividend.
“THIS GUITAR WILL NOT PLAY DOOM METAL. This guitar needs to play GOOD RIFFS and not BORING doom riffs. If your favorite band is Black Sabbath, I can’t sell this guitar to you. If you own a Fender or Gibson and want to upgrade, I can’t sell this to you (Ibanez Japanese guitars are the PRIME of guitar craftsmanship crafted by the ancient Japanese wizards—if you think otherwise, you haven’t played one of these HEAVY METAL BATTLE TANKS.)
“If you want to play REAL GUITAR RIFFS, this guitar is for you! If you have a Marshall full-stack in your bedroom, THIS GUITAR IS FOR YOU. If you say you are ready to buy this guitar and show up to buy it wearing a Mastodon shirt, I can’t sell it to you. I MEAN RIFFS, not some banjo jangle pentatonic shit. If you own an HM2, this guitar is perfect. You can get the perfect chainsaw distortion with these HOT HIGH GAIN RAIL PICKUPS. Real riffs only.”
Each month, Foremost releases a limited-edition collection of clothing — three-to-five items per gender — alongside an interview series with some of the world’s most prominent, interesting, and creative personalities.
Good luck to my friend, Matt Alexander, on his new project.
An original and significant element of Apple’s retail stores is disappearing. Over the past month workers have been removing the “atom” symbol that has pinpointed the Genius Bars since the first store opened in 2001, and they are replacing it with wall graphics to match those recently installed in back-lit wall displays.
I’ll be sorry to see them go. One of my favourite photos I ever took was of Steve Jobs at the opening of the first New York Store. He was leaning forward on the Genius Bar and I framed a perfect shot of him with the word “Genius” right about his head.
The number of stolen iPhones dropped by 40 percent in San Francisco and 25 percent in New York in the 12 months after Apple Inc added a kill switch to its devices in September 2013. In London, smartphone theft dropped by half, according to an announcement by officials in the three cities.
This was a real concern for cities around the world. The drop shows how powerful the kill switch has been as a deterrent.
Serenity Caldwell is a miracle worker. She put together a transcript of Tim Cook’s talk at the Goldman Sachs conference. Given the casual, conversational nature of his talk, that was no easy feat.
Listening to Tim Cook’s Goldman Sach’s talk, I was struck by this statement, made in the midst of a discussion of the upcoming Apple Watch release:
I think one of the biggest surprises people are going to have when they start using it is the breadth of what it will do. Obviously, it’s a precision timepiece. And, just like you’re wearing a watch and you probably think it looks really cool…I’m not sure I do, but…
This last bit was followed by a pretty solid wave of laughter from the crowd. My first thought was, snap, did Tim Cook just call out this Goldman Sachs dude for his poor taste in watches? Why would he do that?
It’s a funny moment. But I wonder if it was truly accidental. I wonder if that was a choreographed move, an intentional shot across the bow of traditional watchmakers, telling the world that a new standard of cool is coming.
Tim Cook talks Apple accomplishments, Law of Large Numbers, Mac market share gains, Swift, HealthKit, HomeKit, CarPlay, Apple Store growth, emerging markets, global partnerships, climate change and the First Solar solar farm investment, Apple Watch, and a lot more.
My favorite quote from his talk:
We’re actually not focused on the numbers, we’re focused on the things that produce the numbers.
Also, re the First Solar investment:
It’s enough power for almost 60,000 California homes, and it’s enough to provide renewable energy for all of our new campus…every other office that we have in California, all 52 retail stores we have in California, and our data center in Newark.
Did you know there is a preference pane in your Mac’s System Preferences called Internet Accounts? Internet Accounts acts as a central repository for your major internet service accounts. Though you can set up accounts for your email services inside Mail, and set up Twitter and Facebook logins on the web, you can do all those things within Internet Accounts and the services will become much more globally available.
To get a sense of why you’d want to do that, spend a few minutes reading the linked article.
Yesterday, I had an issue with my trackpad. I started down the road to making a Genius Bar appointment, resigned to living without my computer for a few days while Apple has a swing at repairing the problem.
As it turns out, Apple called me, was able to talk me through the repair so I didn’t have to so much as get out of my chair. Here’s that post, in case you are interested.
Point being, the best repairs are the ones you do yourself. To that end, spend a few minutes reading Joe Caiati’s Mac troubleshooting guide, posted on 512 Pixels.
Joe is a former Apple Genius and writes from hard-won experience. He walks you through a very logical sequence, starting here:
When you’re tackling an issue on your Mac, there are three overall troubleshooting categories you must keep in mind. Is the issue software, hardware or environmental? It sounds very basic, but figuring out which category your problem fits into will get you far when diagnosing it.
Great place to start if you are having trouble with your Mac.
A number of owners of Samsung’s smart TVs are reporting this week that their TV sets started to interrupt their movie viewing with Pepsi ads, which seem to be dynamically inserted into third-party content.
“Every movie I play 20-30 minutes in it plays the pepsi ad, no audio but crisp clear ad. It has happened on 6 movies today,” a user reported on Reddit, where a number of others were struggling with the same problem.
The sense I get is that this may be an error (though that is still not clear), but the presence of the ad on the TV’s media storage does seem to point to the emergence of advertising originating on the TV itself, as opposed to the traditional ads that come embedded in the stream from the cable company or network.
Consumers rarely ever get to know about these deals — unless something goes wrong, which seems to be exactly what happened in the case of that Pepsi ad that popped up on Samsung TVs this week. That’s bad, because there are other issues at hand than interruptions from unwelcome ads. Who, for example, gets what kind of data when TV manufacturers strike deals with advertisers? And how can consumers opt out of data collection altogether?
The project in Monterey County, California will provide enough energy for 60,000 homes as well as Apple’s future head office in nearby Cupertino, Cook said at a Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco.
“We know in Apple that climate change is real. The time for talk is passed,” he said. “The time for action is now.”
Three volunteers are on the shortlist to be among four people on the Mars One programme, the first manned space flight to Mars – a one-way trip that’s effectively a suicide mission. Why do they want to leave Earth, and who are they leaving behind? As the list of potential Mars explorers is whittled down further on 16 February, meet those competing to be the first to land on the Red Planet.
The company is stepping in to tell everyone to calm down and that those 1984 references are way off base. In a blog post plainly titled “Samsung Smart TVs Do Not Monitor Living Room Conversations,” the company does acknowledge that its clumsy, broad-strokes privacy policy could’ve used some clearer language.
The problem for Samsung is that, even if their TVs don’t work the way they are accused of working, many of us have no problem believing they’d be sleazy enough to do that.
Unlike the transistor, the lithium-ion battery has not won a Nobel Prize. But many people think it should. The lithium-ion battery gave the transistor reach. Without it, we would not have smartphones, tablets or laptops, including the device you are reading at this very moment. There would be no Apple. No Samsung. No Tesla.
In 1980, Goodenough, a whip-smart physicist then aged 57, invented lithium-ion’s nervous system.
He says, “I’m only 92. I still have time to go.” What a great attitude.
