November 24, 2014

Washington Post:

Researchers coated subjects’ hands with Lactobacillus, a harmless bacteria that you don’t typically come across in a public bathroom. The idea was to mimic hands that hadn’t been washed properly. After drying hands, researchers went in and conducted 120 air-sampling tests. They found that Lactobacillus counts in the air were 4½ times higher near high-powered jet dryers than around warm-air dryers. And bacteria counts were 27 times higher near warm-air dryers than when subjects used paper towels.

Ok, that’s it. I’m simply not going to use public washrooms any more.

Handbrake:

HandBrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs.

Handbrake has been my go to video converting app for years.

Medium:

Cyberspace may be ancient history for Gibson, but how our future unrolls before us has once again captured his attention. After sticking fairly close to the present for his last half-dozen novels, The Peripheral is Gibson’s most wide open and far-ranging adventure in decades. Multiple futures, near and far, collide. Characters zip back and forth in time, conspiracy theories come true, and an apocalypse unfolds in slow motion, with all the inexorability of a slowly rising tide.

I’ve been a huge fan of Gibson’s since I first read Neuromancer as a kid. It’s is still the first and only book that blew my mind so much that, when I read in pretty much one sitting, I immediately turned back to page one and started reading it again.

New York Times:

Those who saw Odell Beckham Jr.’s acrobatic catch live on Sunday night at MetLife Stadium probably could not fully appreciate it in real time. Those who saw it on video — millions, once the awe spread on social media — were dazzled by his seemingly impossible body control. And those who saw still photographs of the catch might have wondered, how did the photographer capture that?

Jeffrey Furticella, a picture editor on the Sports desk at The New York Times, reached out to some of the photographers who shot the catch on Sunday night.

As a photographer, I always love to read the stories behind the images.

World record jump of the Lotus F1 team

This world record jump is not only not what you’d expect, it’s also bat-poop crazy.

Last week, public outcry over the poorly thought through Mattel book, Barbie’s I Can Be a Computer Engineer caused Random House to pull the book, Amazon to drop the book, and Mattel to apologize. Here’s a good run down of that part of the story.

What I like best is what happened next. Developer Kathleen Tuite put together this tool to let you re-caption the book in a more appropriate fashion.

You can search Twitter for #FeministHackerBarbie to follow along, or check out this Tumblr feed for some of the best.

Do you know the difference between continually and continuous? When to use I/me, who/whom? How about the difference between everyday and every day?

This grammar cheat sheet is chock full of examples, some of them more obvious than others. Worth bookmarking, especially if you do a lot of writing.

This is the season of food drives. The cold weather and holidays heighten the demand for donations of all sorts to local food banks. This fantastic piece digs into food bank donations, highlighting the most useful items and those that won’t survive the trip through drop off, storage, packing, and delivery.

Worth a read and, if you please, worth passing along to your friends and family. [h/t Stu Mark]

Tough times for the Gray Lady, along with the rest of the newspaper industry. I hate to see this happen. Not sure there’s a short term business case to be made for a buyout. Jeff Bezos saved the Washington Post. Is there a hero out there for the New York Times?

Bloomberg:

Leaders of Samsung Electronics Co.’s mobile-phone unit may be replaced as the controlling Lee family tries to revive a business where profits slumped by $4.5 billion as upstart Chinese vendors won market share.

The management restructure, part of a revamp across the more than 70 companies that make up Samsung Group, is the first under heir apparent Lee Jae Yong since his father Lee Kun Hee was hospitalized in May after a heart attack. Hundreds of executives at companies including Samsung C&T Corp. and Samsung Heavy Industries Co. are expected to change jobs.

The next big thing just blinked.

November 23, 2014

Apple donating portion of sales to (RED)

Apple on Sunday said it would mark World AIDS Day 2014 by donating a portion of sales at Apple’s retail and online stores around the world on two of the biggest shopping days of the year—Friday, November 28 (Black Friday) and Monday, December 1.

Apple is also setting up a special (RED) section of the App Store and working with developers of 25 apps to offer exclusive new content where all proceeds will go directly to the Global Fund to fight AIDS.

applered

“Apple is a proud supporter of (RED) because we believe the gift of life is the most important gift anyone can give,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “For eight years, our customers have been helping fight AIDS in Africa by funding life-saving treatments which are having a profoundly positive impact. This year we are launching our biggest fundraising push yet with the participation of Apple’s retail and online stores, and some of the brightest minds in the App Store are lending their talents to the effort as well.”

Among the apps that are working with Apple are Angry Birds, CSR Racing, Clash of Clans, Despicable Me: Minion Rush, DJay 2, FIFA 15 Ultimate Team, and GarageBand. I purchased the extra (RED) GarageBand loops this afternoon.

Apple is not only a company that makes some of the best products in the world, they also care about the people that buy them. Its commitment to (RED) over the years is unparalleled—it’s things like this that makes Apple a company to be proud of.

More information on Apple’s commitment to (RED) is available on its Web site.

The Verge:

Over the next 18 months OTG will install 6,000 iPads on tables, bars, and stations near waiting areas throughout United Airline’s terminal at Newark. Flashing your boarding pass in front of the iPad’s camera pulls up your United profile, with flight information, travel updates, and frequent flier miles. The program, which is opt-in, learns your preferences from your past purchases and recommends things it thinks you might want to buy. If you never buy the orange juice, it will start showing you other options; if you keep buying steak frites, it will show you steak sandwiches. “This is the game changer for personalization,” says Albert Lee, OTG’s chief technology officer.

It’s a $120 million project that will bring 55 new restaurants to the facility, some quite high-end for an airport. There will be sushi, bahn mi, steak, dim sum, barbecue, a french brasserie, and a ramen pulling station beneath a metal mesh tower. All of them will use the iPad ordering system.

Beneath the glitzy new hardware, OTG is using iOS to automate its restaurants’ workflows. When you buy something, OTG’s software, called Flo, sends the order directly to an iPad in the kitchen. You pay either with frequent flier miles or with a credit card, swiped at a reader on the table. When the order is up, the kitchen notifies a server through an iPod touch each employee carries. If an order doesn’t get picked up in a timely manner, the system pings the entire staff. “We have accountability every step of the way to make this a much more efficient process,” Lee says.

There are a number of restaurant chains that use iPad ordering systems. I think it makes the experience more interesting, certainly, but it also makes the whole kitchen to table process more efficient, gives more control to the patron. For example, no need to flag down a waiter to get a drink refill, get another order of ceviche for the table, or pay the check.

Bringing this experience to the airport is a natural fit. Privacy is an issue, as you are giving away personal data in exchange for more personalized service. And I can’t help but suspect that data will be packaged and sold. Interesting times.

Wall Street Journal:

At companies hoping to be the next big thing and older ones trying to keep up, the role of office manager has transformed into a so-called workplace coordinator, who often leads a staff of aim-to-please specialists. Such employees function as concierges, responsible for everything from planning outings to memorizing favorite granola-bar flavors.

Chris Lavoie, a global event strategist at Adobe Systems Inc., is working on a planned whiskey tasting for employees next year. Talent programs manager Sue-Min Koh of Riot Games Inc., maker of the hit “League of Legends” videogame, hired a snow maker to pump 10 tons of snow on the company’s basketball court in Southern California for an employee celebration.

At online media provider Shutterstock Inc., Razia Ferdousi-Meyer says her responsibility “to know who likes the Kind bars, who likes the potato chips, who likes the coconut water” feels like her previous job as a guest-relations coordinator at a Ritz-Carlton hotel overlooking Manhattan’s Central Park.

Ahem. Let’s get with the program, Jim.

Yet another reason to appreciate Canada

This is a perfect example of Canadian awesomeness. Always willing to lend a hand to a neighbor in need.

November 22, 2014

My sincere thanks to FoundSounds for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.FoundSounds is a unique new mobile app blurring the line between a social network and a collaborative art project. The premise is simple: if you find a sound you like, record it and share it with the world. Recordings are geotagged, and you can browse them by scrolling through a timeline or exploring a map. You can also construct sound collages that create intriguing sonic geographies. If enough sounds have been recorded in your area, consider taking a sound walk, which allows you to listen to recordings made near you. Walking past a concert venue would allow you to hear previous performances from that location, while passing by a new building would trigger the sounds of its construction. The vision of FoundSounds is to create a space where people can listen to sounds they might not normally hear. FoundSounds costs $0.99, the same as the price of a song on iTunes. FoundSounds is available on the iOS app store now.

MythBusters’ brilliant take on Gorilla Glass

Watch as MythBusters Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman take on Gorilla Glass, the super strong glass that protects your mobile phone.

First things first, know up front that the video below was produced for Corning. But that said, I found it incredibly fun to watch and I learned a lot along the way.

There are two parts to this video. Part one is here. But to me, the more interesting of the two is the one below, the one that focuses on the compressive strength technology that makes Gorilla Glass so strong. Enjoy!

[h/t Stu Mark]

As a reminder, Aereo built a series of antenna farms to gather local US TV broadcasts, then attempted to build a business based on rebroadcasting those signals over the net.

But we encountered significant challenges from the incumbent media companies.

While we had significant victories in the federal district courts in New York and Boston and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, the reversal of the Second Circuit decision in June by the U.S. Supreme Court has proven difficult to overcome. The U.S. Supreme Court decision effectively changed the laws that had governed Aereo’s technology, creating regulatory and legal uncertainty. And while our team has focused its energies on exploring every path forward available to us, without that clarity, the challenges have proven too difficult to overcome.

Accordingly, today, we filed for Chapter 11 reorganization proceedings.

You can read the full letter from Aereo on their new front page.

November 21, 2014

The biggest change for some of you, however, will be that we have decided to remove the commenting function from the site. We thought about this decision long and hard, since we do value reader opinion. But we concluded that, as social media has continued its robust growth, the bulk of discussion of our stories is increasingly taking place there, making onsite comments less and less used and less and less useful.

I’ll admit, I’ve considered this too.

A draft motion seen by the Financial Times says that “unbundling [of] search engines from other commercial services” should be considered as a potential solution to Google’s dominance. It has the backing of the parliament’s two main political blocs, the European People’s Party and the Socialists.

Wow.

Apparently, the new iPhones can do it right out of the box.

Dan Goodin for Ars Technica:

As already alluded, the threat stems from the use of the Android clipboard, which acts as a temporary cache for text that is being copied and pasted, either within the same app or from one app to another. Android has no official programming interface that secures the clipboard. By design, its contents are available to any app installed on the phone, from the highest privileged banking app to one with no privileges at all.

Android wins.

Washington Post:

If you have an Android phone, that device may log your location and velocity data. If you have a YouTube account, Google knows not only what videos you upload, but which you watch, too. There’s Google Maps. Google Play. Google Voice, if you use it to transcribe your missed calls. Between Google Contacts and Chat, the site has a pretty good idea who you’re friends with.

And while browsing data is aggregated differently than information from Google services, if you visit sites running Google Ads or Google Analytics software, Google also generally knows what you look at and what you click. According to one report from UC Berkeley’s School of Information, Google can track user behavior on 88 percent of all Internet domains.

Google is in a position of tremendous trust and responsibility. Not sure I can think of any other company that comes close. Facebook? Not quite the same thing. Facebook doesn’t bottleneck as much activity as Google does, in part because Facebook is a specific solution, not a generic solution like Google. As an example, Google handles a tremendous amount of email. Facebook generates email, but does not store it, and much of Facebook’s email traffic travels over Google’s servers.

Ben Einstein on fit and finish:

What happened when Apple wanted to CNC machine a million MacBook bodies a year? They bought 10k CNC machines to do it. How about when they wanted to laser drill holes in MacBook Pros for the sleep light but only one company made a machine that could drill those 20 µm holes in aluminum? It bought the company that made the machines and took all the inventory. And that time when they needed batteries to fit into a tiny machined housing but no manufacturer was willing to make batteries so thin? Apple made their own battery cells. From scratch.

Pretty much no company, big or small, can afford to do these things. Yes, Apple has done a great job building many of these products and yes, consumers have come to love many of these difficult-to-manufacture features. But you are not Apple.

Interesting take on some design elements that require economies of scale that Apple, and almost no other manufacturer, can afford.

Dan Moren, writing for Six Colors:

You’re listening to a song on your Mac when you have to leave the house. And, if you’re anything like me, there are few things more annoying than stopping a song mid-play. Great, now I have a guaranteed earworm for the rest of the day.

Of course, you could queue up the same song on your iPhone, fast forward to the same place in the track, pause it on your Mac, then press play on your iOS device. Just the kind of delightfully smooth experience we’ve come to expect from Apple, right?

Automatic music handoff from one device to another is on my wish list too. And while we are wishing, please add in integration with my favorite podcasting apps.

Know the difference between iCloud Photo Library and Photo Stream? Katherine Boehret, writing for re/code, walks you through the basics. Good read.

A while back, I posted this on the BlackBerry/Samsung alliance:

Fantastic idea. It further legitimizes the concept of an enterprise/consumer product partnership and gives enterprise managers a valid alternative to IBM and Apple. And by valid, I mean, who in their right mind would choose Samsung/BlackBerry over Apple/IBM? Where’s the beef in the Samsung/BlackBerry alliance? Certainly not with the malware riddled Android.

This New York Times article calls out a specific piece of malware, but there appear to be many others:

A particularly nasty mobile malware campaign targeting Android users has hit between four million and 4.5 million Americans since January of 2013, according to an estimate by Lookout, a San Francisco mobile security company that has been tracking the malware for about two years.

Lookout first encountered the mobile malware, called NotCompatible, two years ago and has since seen increasingly sophisticated versions. Lookout said it believes, based on attempted infections of its user base of 50 million, that the total number of people who have encountered the malware in the United States exceeds four million.

That’s what I mean by malware-riddled.

That’s the new tag line for the Apple Store’s front page. That text is against a background of two kids surrounded by shadowy, soft-sided fantasy. One object in the picture stands out: a hard-sided, rounded rectangle.

Beautiful work.

November 20, 2014

Like most things on the Web, Dropcaps have been done poorly over the years, but perhaps a new CSS property will help.

But for type lovers, WatchKit contained a nice little surprise: a folder containing 23 different variations of the Apple Watch system font, the first one Apple has designed in-house in almost 20 years. Even better, that typeface finally has a name: San Francisco.

I really like the typeface.

Boston Globe:

More than 6 feet of lake-effect snow was dumped in the Buffalo, N.Y., area over the last few days with reports of more on the way. Storms closed a 100-mile plus section of the New York State Thruway, and the US National Guard has been called in to help dig out.

Some amazing photos included in this story. Being from Canada, I’ve experienced these kinds of snow falls when I was a kid – it was a lot of fun then but as an adult, I’m glad I don’t live somewhere I’d have to deal with this on a regular basis.