January 5, 2014
Written by Shawn King
Jalopnik:
People on two continents mourn the death of 92-year-old William Overstreet Jr. He was a resident of Roanoke, Virginia, a retired accountant, and like many men from his generation, a veteran of World War II. And in the spring of 1944, Overstreet did something people in France and the U.S. still talk about. Overstreet, who died Sunday at a Roanoke hospital, is remembered for being the U.S. Army Air Corps pilot who flew underneath the Eiffel Tower’s arches in his P-51 Mustang during an aerial battle while in hot pursuit of a German fighter plane, which he ultimately shot down.
Stones. Great, big stones.
Written by Shawn King
Vulture:
Vulture corralled legendary rap-rock producer Rick Rubin, Sir Mix-a-Lot (real name: Anthony Ray), the video’s director Adam Bernstein (also of Breaking Bad fame), and others to bring you the story behind the behind-centric classic.
Somewhere on the internet is a hilarious video of myself, John Welch, Sam Crutsinger and (I think) Andy Ihnatko lip-syncing this song.
Written by Shawn King
Re/code:
Apple confirmed to Re/code that it has bought SnappyLabs, but declined to comment further on the deal. SnappyLabs had sold the SnappyCam app — which allows the internal iPhone camera to take high-resolution images rapidly — in the Apple Store. It was founded by John Papandriopoulos.
Best part of this story was the snotty last line.
Written by Dave Mark
This incredibly fascinating article digs into the process Netflix used to build its massive database. Great read.
Using large teams of people specially trained to watch movies, Netflix deconstructed Hollywood. They paid people to watch films and tag them with all kinds of metadata. This process is so sophisticated and precise that taggers receive a 36-page training document that teaches them how to rate movies on their sexually suggestive content, goriness, romance levels, and even narrative elements like plot conclusiveness.
They capture dozens of different movie attributes. They even rate the moral status of characters. When these tags are combined with millions of users viewing habits, they become Netflix’s competitive advantage. The company’s main goal as a business is to gain and retain subscribers. And the genres that it displays to people are a key part of that strategy. “Members connect with these [genre] rows so well that we measure an increase in member retention by placing the most tailored rows higher on the page instead of lower,” the company revealed in a 2012 blog post. The better Netflix shows that it knows you, the likelier you are to stick around.
Written by Dave Mark
Was trying to do a little tune-up on my wi-fi network, ran across this helpful article. I did not know there was a built-in wi-fi diagnostic tool. To launch it, hold down the option key, click the wi-fi menu bar icon, select the last option, Open Wireless Diagnostics.
The linked article will walk you through the process. Good stuff.
January 4, 2014
Written by Dave Mark
You can find the Fox Sports Go app here. The caveat is that you need to be logged in to your cable/satellite provider in order to access the stream. One notable provider not yet signed up is Verizon. I expect that’s just a matter of time. Not clear on availability of the stream outside the US.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
My thanks to Focus for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. Focus is a beautiful and easy to use pomodoro timer. Built exclusively for iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, Focus is the best way to focus on a single task for a period of time.
What is the Pomodoro Technique?
The Pomodoro Technique is a time management philosophy that aims to provide the user with maximum focus and creative freshness, thereby allowing them to complete projects faster with less mental fatigue.
The process is simple. For every project throughout the day, you budget your time into short increments and take breaks periodically. You work for 25 minutes, then take break for five minutes.
Each 25-minute work period is called a “pomodoro”, named after the Italian word for tomato. Francesco Cirillo used a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato as his personal timer, and thus the method’s name.
After four “pomodoros” have passed, (100 minutes of work time with 15 minutes of break time) you then take a 15-20 minute break.
Focus lets you enter and manage your task, work with customizable session length, see you completed tasks and incorporates the latest technologies. It helps you to focus on your tasks and stay productive all the time.
Focus is available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch with iOS 7 and also for OS X Mavericks.
Written by Dave Mark
Ever since it was discovered that the new Mac Pro uses a socketed CPU, there has been some debate as to whether that meant a user could upgrade the CPU on their own. Other World Computing rolled up their sleeves and put any contention to rest.
We got our hands on an Intel E5-2667 V2 8-core 3.30GHz with 25MB Cache processor, installed it in the new Mac Pro and have done some benchmarking to get an early look at the performance vs. the stock Apple / Intel E5-1650 V2 6-core 3.50GHz with 12MB Cache model. The testing was done with 64GB of OWC memory installed. Our benchmarking showed a significant 30 percent multi-processor performance bump with the upgraded processor.
This is exactly as it should be. Yet another reason to appreciate the design of the new Mac Pro.
Written by Dave Mark
Steven Salter has made it his mission in life to find unmarked graves of blues musicians and mark them with a headstone. You can follow the headline link to read about Steven and the project, watch the video below, and make a donation through his web site.
Written by Dave Mark
Last November, voters in Colorado passed Amendment 64, which approved limited growth, distribution and regulated sale of pot in the state.
On the first day the new amendment went into effect, January 2nd, the Daily Currant, a spoof newspaper, ran this story, claiming that 37 people died as a direct result of this law.
From the linked story reporting the hoax:
The story quoted a fake “Dr. Jack Shepard,” claiming he was “chief of surgery at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Denver.” “It’s complete chaos here,” the fake doctor ranted. “I’ve put five college students in body bags since breakfast and more are arriving every minute.” “We are seeing cardiac arrests, hypospadias, acquired trimethylaminuria and multiple organ failures,” the doctor raved. “By next week the death toll could go as high as 200, maybe 300. Someone needs to step in and stop this madness. My god, why did we legalize marijuana? What were we thinking?”
“Dr. Jack Shepard” was a character on the TV show “Lost.” The spoof story forced the real Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center to issue a news release clarifying that “there is no such doctor as ‘Jack Shepard’ on our medical staff and that there have been no deaths due to marijuana, which may be similar to a CBD Flower, at our hospital. The article is a completely fabricated work of fiction created by ‘The Daily Currant.'”
In case you’re curious about the medical conditions cited by the fictional doctor: “Hypospadias” is a birth defect affecting the penis; “Trimethylaminuria” is a genetic disease formerly known as “Fish Odor Syndrome,” because it is causes an offensive body odor that some compare to the “smell of rotting fish,” according to MedicineNet.com.
Crazy.
Written by Dave Mark
If you are not familiar with the Everly brothers, you are certainly familiar with the bands and singers upon whom they’ve had a profound influence, bands like the Beatles and Beach Boys. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.
Here’s a very young Phil and Don Everly singing Bye, Bye, Love.
January 3, 2014
Written by Jim Dalrymple
They say it’s coming January 23, which would be at NAMM.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Speaking of Fender, they just announced their 2014 line-up.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
A new amp in Fender’s Pawn Shop Series. I bet this sounds great.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Ben Bajarin:
Folks claim that because Apple’s competition is doing something that Apple should also or they will lose. Yet what I love about Apple’s strategy is that it is never around what the competition is doing. Apple marches to beat of their own drum. This is fundamentally mis-understood by so many.
I agree with Ben. Companies will release products that may be in a category Apple is interested in, but Apple is not going to change its strategy to release something before it’s ready. The so-called experts fail to realize that many of the products introduced are guesses by companies to try to beat Apple to a market. Often times, these products are not thought out very well and eventually fail. Apple enters a market because it feels it can dominate that market. It makes products for its customers, with the expectation that the money will follow—exactly the opposite of how most other companies operate.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
As Michael Mulvey points out, it’s not just fragmentation, but Google’s lack of attention to design.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
Blackberry has today filed a lawsuit against startup Typo Keyboards, which is backed by Ryan Seacrest. The company alleges that Typo copied BlackBerry’s patented ‘iconic’ keyboard design.
I actually agree with BlackBerry.
As technology evolves, it frequently faces a fork in the road, a choice between becoming open or closed. We’re used to this choice with software. There are shades of grey with software licenses, but to me, if I can access the source code, modify it, rebuild it, then pitch the whole thing back into the public pile, that’s open.
Art can be open or closed. Most of the books you read are protected by copyright. Some have moved into the public domain. A recent lawsuit moved the characters Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson into the public domain.
Leslie Klinger, a Sherlock Holmes expert, had sued the Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. in February 2013, claiming that it has no copyright on the Holmes and Watson characters or the world of Baker Street, as the key elements of that fictional world, including 46 of the 56 Sherlock Holmes stories, are in the public domain.
The choice to be open or closed is becoming a critical issue in the world of robotics. A great deal of excellent work is being done using open source platforms such as the Arduino microcontroller. A universe of open source software has emerged based on the Arduino. Other computers used in robotics or in computer science have emerged. Some are not open hardware (manufacturing is done under license), but support an open source community of operating systems and software.
On the flip side are robotics efforts by the military, or by corporations like Sony (The AIBO mechanical pet) or iRobot (The Roomba vacuum robot). Their efforts are clearly either secure or closed (at least they started that way).
As was the case for software and for the arts, a strong case can be made for opening up robotics, as much as possible. This article does a good job on laying all this out.
The trouble with open platforms is that they open the manufacturer to a universe of potential lawsuits. If a robot is built to do anything, it can do something bad. If it can run any software, it can run buggy or malicious software. The next killer app could, well, kill someone.
Liability in a closed world is fairly straightforward. A Roomba is supposed to do one thing and do it safely. Say a Roomba causes an injury in the course of vacuuming the floor. Then iRobot generally will be held liable as it built the hardware and wrote or licensed the software. If someone hacks the Roomba and uses it to reenact the video game Frogger on the streets of Austin, Texas (this really happened), or used the Roomba for a baby rodeo (it’s a thing), then iRobot can argue product misuse.
In some sense, there’s a battle between liability and the evolution of robotics. There’s also the battle between education and profits. This is a critical time. Robotics is still in its infancy, but its character is being formed. Interesting stuff. Lots to think about here.
Written by Dave Mark
This is worth looking through, even if you already are a savvy Mac user. Know any Mac newbies? Pass this along.
Written by Shawn King
Reservoir Dogs on Twitter:
Eight men dressed in BLACK SUITS, sit around a table at a breakfast cafe.
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, “Reservoir Dogs” is a great movie. This Twitter account recreates the movie in 140 character chunks. Interesting experiment in what Twitter can do.
January 2, 2014
Written by Jim Dalrymple
I had no idea you could use the Mac Pro on its side, but according to this Apple support document, you can.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
In this issue Wil Shipley talks about why developers ask you to rate their apps; Darren Murph wonders why American companies don’t give employees more time off; Jonathan Rhyne looks at some steps developers should take to legally protect themselves and their business; Matt Dusenbury tells of a sad story between a mother and daughter; and Doyle Armbrust talks about the new classical music scene.
Written by Jim Dalrymple
I don’t even know why I posted this. Just for a chuckle I guess.
