Test Your Vocabulary:

English has the most words of any language on Earth.

TestYourVocab.com is part of an independent American-Brazilian research project to measure vocabulary sizes according to age and education, and particularly to compare native learning rates with foreign language classroom learning rates.

According to the test, I know over 36,000 words. I bet a lot of them are just different words for beer.

CNET:

If you’ve ever wanted to take a spin around the “Top Gear” test track in the UK, but don’t qualify as a Star in a Reasonably Priced Car, now’s your chance.

As a fan of the UK TV show Top Gear, I really enjoyed “chasing” The Stig around their track.

The mechanics of this particular scam are fairly sophisticated. Most readers would be cautious enough to avoid this trap, but even so, this is worth a read.

When Ian Fleming created the James Bond character, he equipped him with a .25 calibre Beretta M418. Avid Bond fan Geoffrey Boothroyd objected to this choice (too light, limited stopping power) and wrote a letter to Fleming:

I have, by now, got rather fond of Mr. James Bond. I like most of the things about him, with the exception of his rather deplorable taste in firearms. In particular, I dislike a man who comes into contact with all sorts of formidable people using a .25 Beretta. This sort of gun is really a lady’s gun, and not a really nice lady at that. If Mr. Bond has to use a light gun he would be better off with a .22 rim fire; the lead bullet would cause more shocking effect than the jacketed type of the .25.

May I suggest that Mr. Bond be armed with a revolver?

Great story.

Users of flagship smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone 5s and Samsung’s Galaxy S4 are continuing to suck down more data than their tablet-wielding counterparts, according to a large-scale survey of mobile data consumption in 2013 conducted by JDSU (which last year bought mobile data analytics company Arieso, the company that previously ran the annual survey).

Is there something about the evolution of the architecture of mobile phones that makes later models consume more data? Is there a correlation to the adoption rate of the most recent OS rev? In other words, the latest model of a phone enables faster transmission speeds and typically runs the latest OS. Or is there something more complex at work here?

The story behind what may have been the biggest Internet failure in history involves an unlikely cast of characters, including a little-known company in a drab building in Wyoming and the world’s most elite army of Internet censors a continent away in China.

On Tuesday, most of China’s 500 million Internet users were unable to load websites for up to eight hours. Nearly every Chinese user and Internet company, including major services like Baidu and Sina.com, was affected.

Technology experts say China’s own Great Firewall — the country’s vast collection of censors and snooping technology used to control Internet traffic in and out of China — was most likely to blame, mistakenly redirecting the country’s traffic to several sites normally blocked inside China, some connected to a company based in the Wyoming building.

Fascinating.

Is this creepy? A form of stalking? Not sure, but it certainly is clever and a great little read. And, bottom line, it worked!

While at NAMM, Jim joins Dan and special guest Merlin Mann to talk about their favorite Macs new and old, the future of the computer in the home, the power of portable and wearable devices, amps, guitars, Yamaha’s purchase of Line 6, new gear, why Jim isn’t getting a new Mac Pro, and more.

Sponsored by OmniGraffle (use code for % off), Harvest (use code 5BY5 for 50% off), Hover (use code BEARD for 10% off your first purchase), and Shutterstock (use code DANSENTME114 for 25% off).

I love the idea of this. Watch the movie on the site to see it in action.

Calendars 5 is complete re-imagining of what the best mobile calendar experience should be.

Calendars 5 is smart, excels in both tasks and events and runs on any iOS device you might have.

This looks really nice.

I just don’t know what to say about this.

This is a new site from Russ Hughes, the man behind Pro Tools Expert. Russ has turned Pro Tools Expert into the must-go-to site for everything Pro Tools and is now turning his attention to Logic Pro. Russ won’t be doing the new Logic site on his own—he’s turning to Dennis Van Den Driesschen, who is the founder of the popular Danski’s Logic Pro Blog. It’s certainly going to be interesting to see if Russ and Dennis can turn the new Logic site into something as big as Pro Tools Expert. With their history, I’m betting they can.

This is great. A family kept a mysterious note from their grandmother for 20 years. The note was a series of letters, clearly some sort of code. Try as they might, they could not decipher this last message from grandma. So they posted it online. 15 minutes later, they had their answer.

I don’t want to spoil the surprise, so I won’t post the resolution here. Read the thread from top to bottom. See if you can work out the puzzle before you get to the end of the thread.

The shuttle buses that transport workers for huge tech firms like Google, Facebook, and Apple between San Francisco and Silicon Valley every day have come under heavy fire lately, but today a vote was passed unanimously on a pilot program that the city hopes will help ease those tensions. In front of a meeting room packed full with journalists and citizens, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) just approved a proposal that will see commuter shuttle buses pay to share approximately 200 spots with city buses.

Companies that operate the buses will soon have to pay $1 for every stop they make, every day, to the SFMTA — amounting to about $1.5 million over the 18-month pilot (set to start in July 2014). The agency won’t earn any profit from the money it collects, though; instead, it’ll use the fees to cover the new permit program, enforcement, and further evaluation of the pilot. Prior to today, Silicon Valley shuttles typically would use SFMTA bus stops throughout the city without express permission, leading to potential traffic snarls — as well as a sentiment that these companies were taking advantage of the city without giving anything back.

This seems fair and, hopefully, will satisfy both sides.

In a summary judgment order entered late on Tuesday (January 21, 2014), Judge Lucy Koh, the federal judge presiding over two Apple v. Samsung patent cases in the Northern District of California, found Samsung’s Android-based devices to infringe an Apple patent on word recommendations (autocomplete) and declared a Samsung patent on multimedia synchronization invalid.

This spells trouble for Samsung.

Prior to this ruling, Apple and Samsung were asserting five patents each in this two-way patent spat that started in 2012, roughly a year after the worldwide dispute between the two market leaders broke out in the same district (it subsequently turned out into a global battle with filings in ten or more countries). After the summary judgment decision, Apple still has five patents in play, one of which has just been found infringed (leaving to the jury only Samsung’s invalidity defense), while Samsung is down to four patents.

The trial begins on March 31.

This is a fascinating interview with Raffi Krikorian, Vice President of Platform Engineering at Twitter.

Ever wonder how many tweets go out at any given time? Or what event caused the biggest traffic burst ever recorded at Twitter? This was a surprise to me:

So what you’re referring to is the Castle in the Sky event is what we call it internally, and that was a television show that aired in Tokyo. We did our new record of around 34,000 tweets a second came into Twitter during that event. Normally, Twitter experiences something on order of 5,000 to 10,000 tweets a second, so this is pretty far out of our standard operating bounds.

An interesting read, even if you are not a systems architect.

Peter Cohen goes back in time (OK, not really!) to revisit his favorites of 30 years of Macintosh.

My personal favorite? No question, it’s the Macintosh IIci. I remember it well. Jean-Louis Gassée was the head of Macintosh development. He wore a fashionable diamond earring, and I believe he took personal pride in rolling out this particular model. Of all the Macs, either before or since, I found it the easiest to take apart and put back together. It was just so well designed.

I am awash with nostalgia. Sniff.

Bill Murray is a national treasure. And now he answers all your questions in this Reddit “Ask Me Anything”.

Great post on the chilling effect of trademark law by Kirk McElhearn.

Where do the ethical obligations of journalism kick in? If you are a blogger, does that make you a journalist? Do you have an obligation to double-check your sources to verify the accuracy of everything you post?

Julie Strietelmeier, a self-professed “tech geek writer” got an email from a reader, telling a story that started when a friend wore his Google Glass into a movie theater (they were prescription lenses) and detailed his detainment by homeland security. Follow the headline link and read the story. It’s worth it.

The details of the story aside (it really is a chilling read), there are two things that really jumped out me.

As this post already asked, what obligations did the writer have before posting the story online? Lots of bloggers ran with it before Julie felt pressed to verify the details. In a sense, she was coerced into behaving like a journalist. I’m in a similar boat. I don’t have the resources to ferret out news stories. I read a lot, and post stories I find compelling, thought provoking, or just fun. When I can, I do some basic fact checking to make sure what I post passes my own internal truth detector, but I am more of a scientist than a journalist. My own sense of journalistic integrity comes from wanting to do a good job, wanting to get it right, not from any sort of official journalism-school training.

The second thing that stood out was the fact of wearing Google Glass into a movie theater. Some people might say, this is an obvious no-no. Google Glass can record video, and wearing it into a theater is asking for trouble. True. But get used to it. In some small number of years, the ability to record will be so incorporated into our clothing and our bodies, movie theaters will either have to close, or the movie industry will have to accept a certain level of piracy as a given.

Gizmodo:

Can you spot the fakes? Hundreds of amazing images wash over our greedy eyeballs each and every day, clogging our Twitter timelines and Facebook feeds. Many of them are fakes, lies, or both. Like these!

I’m seeing more and more of these being passed around Twitter. Even worse, being passed around by people who should know better.

Backup service Backblaze answers the question, “Which hard drive should I buy?”

Pretty cool little story.

On February 4, 1968, Lizzie Bravo was quite possibly the most surprised human being on earth. It seemed like another routine “waiting to see the Beatles” day, when all of a sudden Paul McCartney emerged and walked toward the group of thrilled young ladies. Paul asked the assembled female fans if any of them could hold a high note.

Lizzie, and another groupie named Gayleen Pease, quickly volunteered. As the other girls watched in disbelief, Lizzie and Gayleen were taken inside Abbey Road studios. The girls’ fantasy of fantasies was about to come true- they were not only going to see and meet the Beatles, they were going to sing on a Beatles song!