Wall Street Journal:

StoreDot Ltd., a Tel-Aviv based start-up, says it hopes to at least make the charging process faster–unveiling Monday a prototype charger that promises to take you battery from a tiny sliver of red to 100%, all in about 30 seconds.

My natural reaction is a healthy skepticism. That said, here’s an article from last October on StoreDot’s work with bio-organic LED displays, and another from November on biological semiconductors. There’s certainly some science behind the show.

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Esquire:

Cinema exists to project our dreams. Science-fiction cinema exists to project our most creative dreams—time-travel, alternate worlds, expanded consciousness, and more. That’s why we’re science-fiction maniacs and why we gathered up our top 100 movies.

Interesting list and a great primer for those unfamiliar with the genre.

Calgary Sun:

Mounties were called about a John Deere 6400 tractor with a front-end bucket being stolen from a property a few kilometres from the break-and-enter complaint.

Mounties began following the movements of the tractor as it drove through fields, crashing through farmers’ fences and trees.

One of the officers stopped a nearby snowmobiler.

“He asked if the snowmobile operator would let him jump on the back and follow these tracks to see if we could find where the tractor had gone,” said Larocque.

The best part? The Mountie asked the snowmobiler if he could hitch a ride. Not demanded. Not commandeered. Asked. Oh Canada.

Daily Mail:

Take a look at a map today, and you’re likely to see that North America is larger than Africa, Alaska is larger than Mexico and China is smaller than Greenland. But in reality China is four times bigger than Greenland, Africa is three times bigger than North America and Mexico is larger than Alaska.

The distortion is the result of the Mercator projection, the map most commonly seen hanging in classrooms and in text books, which was created in 1596 to help sailors navigate the world.

Maps have always fascinated me and this is “old news” but if you have kids, go ahead and blow their mind showing them the Mercator map they are likely familiar with compared to other maps like the Gall-Peters projection.

Popular Mechanics:

Back in 2002, John Moore, an anthropologist at the University of Florida, calculated that a starship could leave Earth with 150 passengers on a 2000-year pilgrimage to another solar system, and upon arrival, the descendants of the original crew could colonize a new world there—as long as everyone was careful not to inbreed along the way.

It was a valiant attempt to solve a thorny question about the future of humans in space. The nearest star systems—such as our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light-years from home—are so far that reaching them would require a generational starship. Entire generations of people would be born, live, and die before the ship reached its destination. This brings up the question of how many people you need to send on a hypothetical interstellar mission to sustain sufficient genetic diversity. And a new study sets the bar much higher than Moore’s 150 people.

According to Portland State University anthropologist Cameron Smith, any such starship would have to carry a minimum of 10,000 people to secure the success of the endeavor. And a starting population of 40,000 would be even better, in case a large percentage of the population died during during the journey.

Interesting problem. To me, the answer depends on whether one of them is Jean Luc Picard.

Netscape was a huge part of the history of the web. A bold move by some pretty big players.

Well written, easy to follow. [Via Rafiq Sarlie]

I did not know this. Gmail makes it easy to drop out of a reply all email thread. Great idea.

Love a well thought out piece of furniture. This is clever.

If you in any way make your living, or hope to make your living, via the App Store, I think you’ll find this fascinating. For example:

I ran a simple query on my data to determine the distribtion of user ratings. I found that 60% of apps do not have any user ratings

I’m surprised by this. Zero ratings. Not one person took the time to rate 60% of the apps. To me, that means 60% of the apps never get found, never find an audience. [Via iOS Dev Weekly]

From the New Yorker:

One night in March, 2013, Rami Ismail and his business partner Jan Willem released a game for mobile phones called Ridiculous Fishing. Ismail, who was twenty-four at the time and who lives in the Netherlands, woke the following morning to find that the game had made him tens of thousands of dollars overnight. His first reaction was not elation but guilt. His mother, who has a job in local government, had already left for work. “Ever since I was a kid I’ve watched my mom wake up at six in the morning, work all day, come home, make my brother and me dinner—maybe shout at me for too much ‘computering,’ ” he said. “My first thought that day was that while I was asleep I’d made more money than she had all year. And I’d done it with a mobile-phone game about shooting fish with a machine gun.”

Great read.

Found this to be an entertaining read, both as an observer of the valley/VC subculture and a fan of Elon Musk.

I thought it was ridiculous too, but when you look at some of the other words that have been trademarked, maybe it’s not.

Why would you use images when you can do this.

The first made into a stool is nice.

Much respect to this kid.

The Loop Magazine Issue 24:

In this issue, Jim Dalrymple talks to Keith Urban about songwriting and his guitar collection; Gavin McKeown goes to car racing school; Arthur Turnbull tells a story about trying to see Prince in 1988; Carson Suggs looks at our reliance on technology; and Lee Peterson wonders if we can be productive using Apple’s iOS apps.

Mozilla Chief Executive Brendan Eich has stepped down, the company said on Thursday, after an online dating service urged a boycott of the company’s web browser because of a donation Eich made to opponents of gay marriage.

“We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act,” wrote Mozilla Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker in a blog post. “We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry.”

Wow, that’s incredible.

Quartz:

“What Google really wants is for everybody to be signed in to their Google accounts all the time,” a Google insider told me in passing last month.

This change affects only Apple users who have upgraded to iOS 7, the latest version—but that’s 85% of iOS devices. They no longer have the ability to remain anonymous as they watch videos on YouTube or navigate their cities using Google Maps.

“Don’t be evil” indeed.

I didn’t ask for games. I didn’t ask for photos. I asked for a streaming media solution that could do things right: Something easy to pick up, simple to use, and something that actually made the experience of playing and navigating through multimedia, dare I say it, fun.

Amazon promised all of the above with Fire TV, which the company unveiled Wednesday at an event in New York City. Unfortunately, the device doesn’t live up to its own hype. Perhaps Amazon’s homegrown solution was a bit premature and its ambitions too lofty, because while Fire TV can do almost everything, little of it is done right.

Ouch.

I remember the first time I saw the X Games on TV. Snowboarding? On TV? It just seemed odd. But now snowboarding has become mainstream, a big draw in the Winter Olympics.

Turns out, this same thing is happening with video games. Though I shudder to think that video games will ever make its way into the Olympics, there is no doubt that watching other people play video games has also gone mainstream.

Ever hear of the term Let’s Play? Let’s Play videos allow you to watch someone else play a video game. To get a sense of how huge Let’s Play has become, go to YouTube and search for Let’s Play. Scroll through the many, many videos and check out the number of views. More than a million views for a single Let’s Play video is actually quite common.

To me, the linked article is just the tip of the iceberg. In other words, I think the 71 million number is way low.

Molly Wood, of the New York Times, talking about your search history:

YOUR search history contains some of the most personal information you will ever reveal online: your health, mental state, interests, travel locations, fears and shopping habits.

And that is information most people would want to keep private. Unfortunately, your web searches are carefully tracked and saved in databases, where the information can be used for almost anything, including highly targeted advertising and price discrimination based on your data profile.

She suggests that you visit this page to visit your history and, if you choose, erase it.

Google makes it easy to find your personal web history, manage it and even delete it. Just go to http://google.com/history and log in to your Google account. There, you will see your entire history and can browse it by category. For example, in the last month, I’ve done image searches for Gal Gadot (who will play the new Wonder Woman), “pointy nail trend” and “Wayne Rooney hair transplant,” plus a few more intelligent things, I’m sure.

Trouble is, many Google account users might not have access to their Google search history. Go ahead and click the link. If your history comes up, no need to keep reading. But if you get a message that says, “We are sorry, but you do not have access to this service”, read on.

Turns out that Google has a setting that enables web history. If you use Google Accounts to enable your own Google-backed domain, history is likely to be disabled for everyone in your domain. If you want to enable your search history, take a read through this support page for some suggestions on ways to enable your Google history. This particular post worked for me. It’s a little tricky and depends on your setup.

My guess is, Apple would not do things this way.

Ah, another patent troll success story.

Follow the headline link for a wealth of data on app sales from the iOS and Mac App Stores, Google Play, Amazon, Windows Phone and PC. For eBooks, there are numbers for Apple iBooks and Kindle. This data has been available for years and is well known in the developer community, but not so well known in the general tech community.

Where does App Annie get its data? This article, though a bit dated (from May, 2012), gives a good sense of things, at least from the iOS side:

The firm offers a sales analytics tool for developers that both gathers their sales numbers and processes them. Indeed, App Annie’s analytics tool is used by over 150,000 apps and, in particular, over 40 percent of the top 100 publishers by revenue.

Once a developer connects their App Annie account with their iTunes Connect account, the sales data is automatically downloaded and processed.

While App Annie keeps the data from that tool completely anonymous, it does combine all the download and revenue data it has access to together to build a global model of sales.

After a nearly blemish-free record that culminated in a $3 billion acquisition by Google, Nest today issued a surprising halt to sales of Protect, its gesture-controlled smoke alarm. One of the device’s key features was that you could wave at it to turn it off. Turns out, sometimes people wave their arms around when there’s a fire in the house, too. Thus, as CEO Tony Fadell put it, “This could delay the alarm going off if there was a real fire.” Oops.

“Without getting into counsel’s discussions, I can tell you that as a rule, the White House objects to attempts to use the president’s likeness for commercial purposes, and we certainly object in this case,” he said.

Fucking morons at Samsung.

Priceonomics:

Susan Kare “was the type of kid who always loved art.” As a child, she lost herself in drawings, paintings, and crafts; as a young woman, she dove into art history and had grandeur dreams of being a world-renowned fine artist.

But when a chance encounter in 1982 reconnected her with an old friend and Apple employee, Kare found herself working in a different medium, with a much smaller canvas — about 1,024 pixels. Equipped with few computer skills and lacking any prior experience with digital design, Kare proceeded to revolutionize pixel art.

Kare is a legend and I never tire of reading or hearing about her story.

When Amazon introduced the Fire TV yesterday, much was made about the ability to do voice search on the device. In the linked post, Kirk McElhearn walks through the process of doing the same thing on Apple TV, using the iOS Remote app. Cool beans.