Wired:

There’s no way to anticipate the emotional impact of leaving your home planet. You look down at Earth and realize: You’re not on it. It’s breathtaking. It’s surreal. It’s a “we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto” kind of feeling. But I’ve spent a total of 55 days in space, over the course of five missions for NASA, and I’ve learned that being out there isn’t just a series of breathtaking moments. It’s a mix of the transcendently magical and the deeply prosaic. It can be crowded, noisy, and occasionally uncomfortable. Space travel—at least the way we do it today—isn’t glamorous. But you can’t beat the view!

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. Hell, I still do.

Tina Roth Eisenberg finds some really interesting things.

More trouble for Sorkin’s homage to Steve Jobs. I do hope this film gets made, does not get butchered. [h/t Stu Mark]

CNBC:

Customers have misused Wal-Mart’s price match promotion to obtain $400 PlayStation 4 consoles for less than a quarter of the retail price using third-party sellers on Amazon.

The company announced on Nov. 13 that it would price-match select online retailers, including Amazon.com.

However, any Amazon member with a registered selling account can create authentic looking pages and list items “for sale” online. Consumers need only take a screen capture of the page and show it to a cashier at checkout in order to request the price match.

That’s a helluva scam.

When the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were first released, the PaintCode app folks put together this web page to demystify the various screen sizes and pixel configurations. Great stuff.

But Ole Begemann was not satisfied with that stock analysis. He dug deeper, using a closeup camera rig to take pictures of the iPhone 6 Plus screen doing its downsampling magic. Pretty pictures, and he published all his code on GitHub for folks who want to try this themselves.

Know anyone that uses a remote webcam or baby monitor so they can keep an eye on things while they are not at home? You might want to pass this along.

It’s chilling to think that someone in Russia has access to a webcam placed in a child’s room. Ironic that that device was placed there for safety’s sake.

From Intel’s site:

The Code For Good Campaign will help support Code.org, CodeClub, and GirlsWhoCode globally to educate, inspire, and equip the next generation of developers with the computing skills they need to pursue 21st century opportunities.

Retweet any of the tweets on the page (here’s one of them) and you’ve done your part.

This kind of stuff is amazing and unacceptable.

I’ve seen a lot of people misunderstand what a prototype is. I should send this link to them.

Interesting article from Jacob Gube.

The report notes that Beats will continue to be a paid service and will likely be rebranded under the iTunes umbrella. The move could come alongside the launch of the Apple Watch, with users able to push Beats music from their iPhones to the wearable device.

This makes perfect sense to me.

On this episode, Jim and I talk about Uber, the Mac’s “Second Act”, how to learn to play guitar and what effects pedals are!

Sponsored by lynda.com (Start learning something new by visiting lynda.com/thebeard and get a FREE 10-day trial where you can access all of their 2,400+ courses), Animoto (use code AMPLIFIED at checkout and you’ll get 10% off a new Pro Annual subscription), and Backblaze (Click the link to get a two week free trial and then it’s just $5/month per computer for unlimited backup, and it backs up fast).

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 $9.99, the same as the price of an album in iTunes. FoundSounds is available on the iOS app store now.

Answer some questions and The Grid will not only build a site for you, it will also adapt with you. I have no idea if this works, but I can’t wait to try it out and see how it does.

I’ve looked at a lot of blogging/Web site platforms over the years, but I’m really impressed with Barley. There is no admin area, so everything is done on the page itself—you just start typing and it becomes a new post. Very slick platform.

The Guardian:

Their name might sound a bit ominous, but the 1,500-strong gang…is a long way from the Hell’s Angels.

They’re called the blood bikers: men and women all over Britain who dedicate a few evenings a week to transporting hospital deliveries across the country as stand-ins for the daytime professionals. They are all volunteers, and in 2013 they responded to around 35,000 urgent requests from hospitals, saving the NHS hundreds of thousands of pounds. They take everything from blood and platelets to medicine and breast milk.

Great story about how volunteers on motorcycles transport medical supplies around Britain. Reminds me of another great organization called “Riders for Health” who do something similar in Africa.

Narrative:

In 1976, America turned 200 and cities around the country planned bicentennial celebrations. Twinsburg, a suburb of Cleveland, turned the event into double the reason to celebrate by dedicating one day of its bicentennial celebration to twins. Thirty-seven sets of twins attended that first celebration.

The world’s largest gathering of twins and multiples still attracts around 2,000 sets the first weekend of every August.

What a weird, cool place that would be in August.

I’m reading this book right now and I’m really enjoying it. Interesting to note that Jony Ive does the Foreword.

John Hodgman, from his blog, commenting on the story about an Uber VP suggesting digging up dirt on journalists:

I’m know he’s very sad and I know Uber is very sad. But to my mind, the only honorable (and SMART) move for himself, and the company he claims to be proud of is: resign, already. That he couldn’t, and Uber couldn’t take the hard next step and fire him, is baffling to me.

If this isn’t a fireable offense, are there any? Can Uber make ANY hard decisions? Or worse, would they only fire a person who had less wealth and prestige within the industry? What if one of their drivers made comments like that to a reporter? Or an intern?

[h/t to Stu Mark]

John Gruber dug into Google Analytics to get a sense of the percentage of Daring Fireball readers on an iPhone 6 vs iPhone 6 Plus vs other models. Terrific idea, good read.

Since Apple’s release of WatchKit yesterday, developers of all stripes have been digging through the SDK, trying to get a sense of what you can and can’t do. There’s a gold rush feel to it all, mirroring (in a much smaller way, perhaps) the excitement that surrounded the release of the original iPhone SDK.

Part of the analysis centers on the question of the OS at the center of Apple Watch. There’s some conjecture that Apple Watch runs iOS because the WatchKit UI elements are subclasses of UIKit classes. On one hand, reuse of elements of the UIKit framework isn’t the same thing (to me at least) as running the same OS.

On the other hand, it’s certainly not an unreasonable conjecture.

Good post by Jake Marsh, pulling all this together.

Twitter has long maintained a searchable index of recent tweets, about a week’s worth of tweets updated in real time. But they’ve now adopted that indexing technology to allow you to search from a database of every tweet ever sent, starting with this one.

To read about the technology behind this new index, click here.

Far more interesting is Twitter’s advanced search page. Take it for a spin.

As an example, use the date fields at the bottom to search from March 21, 2006 through April 30, 2006 (a span of 40 days) for the word pizza. To move back a year at a time, click in the date field, then click the date at the top of the popup. Click again to move back a decade at a time.

This search should yield 11 tweets, not including the promoted tweet. If you search for pizza between Jan 1 through Jan 7, 2007 (a span of 7 days) you’ll get 28 hits. Not particularly scientific, but it is interesting to see the growth of Twitter. If and when Twitter opens this up as an API, would be interesting to build an app that maps search terms over time.

No new features, but this is one of the best apps ever made.

Not sure which shirt looks best on you? Wondering if you take the Seahawks or the 49ers this Sunday? Ask your friends with Straw! Get instant responses delivered in real-time right to your phone, in a super visual, easy to decipher way.

I spoke with the developer about this app this afternoon and I really like it. It’s a cool way to get people’s opinion and share the results with whoever you want.

Initial users, fans, developers, even Sergey Brin—nobody seems to have much interest in this piece of shit product anymore.

Apple Watch represents a new chapter in the relationship people have with technology. Starting early 2015, you will be able to deliver innovative new experiences to your customers on their wrist. Learn how your existing app notifications can easily show up on Apple Watch. And by leveraging WatchKit, you can take your apps even further by extending and enhancing their functionality on Apple Watch.

This is a huge day for Apple. It may seem like this is just another SDK release for developers, but this is where Apple learns just how interested developers are in making apps for its new device. We’ve all seen it before with companies competing with Apple for iPhone and iPad apps—they matter to the consumer a lot. Products that don’t have deep developer support have a good chance of failing. When Apple does release the Apple Watch next year, they want to be able to stand up and brag about how many apps are already available. It’s an important day.

Apple is cracking down on Notification Center widgets in iOS once again, this time telling Neato that its note taking widget is unacceptable and will need to be removed due to the fact that it includes a keyboard.

I don’t understand Apple’s overall stance on this issue. I agree that some companies will, given the opportunity, take it too far and clutter the Notification Widget. However, there are times when an expanded widget makes sense.

Even the product page is the same as Apple’s for Nokia’s new tablet.