Deadspin:

Hello. My name is Chris Kluwe, and for eight years I was the punter for the Minnesota Vikings. In May 2013, the Vikings released me from the team.

I honestly don’t know if my activism was the reason I got fired.

However, I’m pretty confident it was.

Kluwe became famous off the football field back in September of 2012 when his letter to a politician went viral. It’s a sad end to his NFL career.

Vocativ:

The truffle. It’s the hallmark of haute cuisine. Sorry, caviar, but you’re no match for the truffle’s earthy-flavored tastiness, beloved by chefs and epicures alike. The specialty comes in several varieties, including black and burgundy, but Italian white truffles are the most revered, and in turn, the most valuable. Alba, a hilly area in the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy, is especially famous for its culinary gems, and it’s the place to look if you are hoping to find some.

I had never had real truffle (I thought it was a chocolate treat) until I went to Italy and was blown away by how even a little bit thinly shaved over a simple pasta dish could create such an explosion of flavour.

Incandescent light bulbs are on the way out. But not right this second. A US law, passed in 2007, has made it illegal to manufacture or import incandescent bulbs that do not meet the new efficiency standards.

The old style 75- and 100-watt incandescent bulbs were phased out earlier this year. And this week the law hits 60- and 40-watt incandescent bulbs, as well. New incandescents that meet the new standards and generate almost the same brightness, however, have already hit the market.

People like my parents are preparing for the worst, just in case. The 2007 federal law that triggered such bulb collections actually does not favor one energy-saving technology over another; rather, it requires that all light sources such as compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and next-generation incandescent bulbs (like the GE 43W bulb designed to replace the 60-watt incandescent) meet a higher standard of energy efficiency, requiring less power to emit roughly the same amount of light.

One important point made by the linked article is the hazardous nature of fluorescent bulbs (CFLs).

Each CFL contains about five milligrams of mercury (less than one one-hundreth of the amount of mercury present in a mercury thermometer), essential to producing its light. Whirling the substance into smaller bits would send mercury vapor into the air, a bad idea because mercury is toxic and can cause neurological damage that is especially harmful to children and fetuses.

Point being, don’t throw CFLs in the trash. Recycle them at your closest hazardous waste recycling facility.

CBC News:

In terms of astonishing weather facts, it doesn’t get much more impressive than being as cold as a distant planet for a day.

The Manitoba Museum is reporting Winnipeg’s temperatures on Tuesday were actually as cold as the surface of Mars.

According to the Curiosity Rover, Mars reached a maximum temperature of -29 C on Tuesday, a temperature Winnipeg only reached shortly before 3 p.m.

If asked the question, “Why will you never live in Winnipeg?”, I will simply point to this.

Jim travels to Austin, Texas to join Dan in person for this very special episode. Along with 5by5 Producer Haddie Cooke, they discuss the new Mac Pro, Bitcoin, iPad keyboards, the iA Writer patent controversy, Tim Cook’s thank you to Apple employees, and more.

Sponsored by HostGator (coupon DANSENTME), SquareSpace (coupon DANSENTME1213) and Shutterstock (coupon DANSENTME12).

Good writeup on these 4 legal challenges, moving forward in 2014:

NSA spying litigation:

The Snowden leaks made public a great deal of information about government surveillance, both at home and abroad. Arguably, the most stunning and controversial program was the first that was revealed: the dragnet collection of every phone number called. That bulk data collection program inspired at least two lawsuits against the government and changed the nature of a third case.

The two lawsuits have had starkly different results; with both now sure to rise to appeals courts, it seems likely that the issue will ultimately reach the US Supreme Court. Certainly, the court as currently composed hasn’t been shy about weighing in on the most controversial and politically charged issues in recent years.

Megaupload:

2014 could prove to be a pivotal year for one of the United States’ most bizarre criminal suspects, Kim Dotcom. In July 2014, the German-born Dotcom is finally set to have his extradition hearing, which will decide whether he will be forced to decamp from New Zealand to the US to face criminal charges of copyright infringement. Further, he’s awaiting a decision from the Supreme Court of New Zealand to determine whether he should be allowed to have all the evidence that American authorities gathered against him. And to top it off, he’s suing the New Zealand government for millions for illegal surveillance and search, and those allegations will progress in 2014 as well.

The Silk Road:

2014 could also see the conclusion of the saga of Ross Ulbricht, the 29-year-old Texan accused of being the mastermind behind the notorious Silk Road site. If he doesn’t reach some kind of agreement with the government, Ulbricht’s case will head to trial next year.

Here’s a link to the Silk Road Wikipedia page.

Lavabit:

Just days after it was revealed that NSA leaker Edward Snowden had been using a secure e-mail service called Lavabit, it abruptly shut down. The service’s founder, Ladar Levison, made cryptic statements about how he had been forced to abandon the company he’d put ten years of hard work into, lest he become complicit in “crimes against the American people.”

Levison built e-mail “by geeks, for geeks”—and then turned off 410,000 accounts. Since then, much of the story has been made public. The FBI showed up at Levison’s door seeking to tap into his e-mail service to pursue a target, widely believed to be Snowden. Because of the way Lavabit was constructed, there was no way to tap into the e-mail of one particular Lavabit user. Once they learned that, federal agents demanded Lavabit’s private SSL key, which would effectively give them the “keys to the kingdom”—the ability to monitor every Lavabit user, in real time.

While Levison has said he’s always been willing to help law enforcement go after their specific target, he balked at handing over the private key. Once he was slapped with an order to hand over the key or pay $5,000 per day, he shut down the service, deleting the e-mails belonging to about 400,000 users, including his own.

Now, Levison is appealing the order at the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. It’s impossible to miss the fact that Levison’s appeal treads over some of the same grounds that the NSA litigation rests on, because the FBI agents are arguing that what they want to install on his e-mail service is basically a “pen register.” Thus, their legal grounds are similar to the justification for widespread NSA spying—the “metadata” simply isn’t constitutionally protected. Lavabit is arguing that the “pen register” statute can’t possibly be broad enough to justify the handover of private SSL keys, which would enable the collection of private data on hundreds of thousands of users.

Reddit user DeepWoods got a new AppleTV for Christmas and started a thread asking for cool tips. As always, Reddit replied. If you’ve got an AppleTV, follow the headline link and dig in.

Gizmodo:

Behold the first self-propelled ice sculpture ever—a truck made of ice that actually works! It’s a real truck, using 11,000 pounds of ice over a regular truck chassis complete with engine and electrical system. Check out the videos to see how they built it—and how it melted.

This commercial is in heavy rotation here in Canada.

Great list of iOS and Mac apps.

I absolutely love stuff like this. Wish I could have been a French-speaking fly on the wall as they dug through the apartment.

Back in 2010 a Parisian apartment on the Right Bank, near the Opéra Garnier, left unoccupied since 1942 was discovered. It was owned by Madame de Florian – a socialite and an actress – who fled to the South of France during the second world war, leaving everything behind. She never came back to Paris but kept on paying her rent until the day she died when she was 91.

It’s only after she died that someone – a Commissaire Priseur – Auctioneer – re-enter her apartment for the first time in over 70 years.

This is the review I’ve been waiting for. When I am in the market for a new camera, I always make my way to dpreview.com. Anand Lal Shimpi brings the same level of detailed, geeky goodness to his reviews.

This is a long, thoughtful review. A few highlights from Anand’s conclusions (but no substitute for reading the entire thing).

On taking advantage of multi-threaded software:

The new Mac Pro offers an option for those users whose workloads can benefit from having more cores, memory and GPU performance. The latest version of Final Cut Pro as well as the rest of Apple’s professional apps do a great job of splitting their work across multiple CPU cores. Even simple tasks like importing photos into iPhoto or Lightroom is extremely well threaded these days. It’s in these workloads where a 6, 8 or 12-core Mac Pro can offer a healthy performance advantage.

On the dual GPU design:

Apple’s big bet with the new Mac Pro however is on GPU computing becoming even more relevant in the future. Relying on CPU scaling alone the Mac Pro is doomed to moderate speed increases going forward. By leveraging a pair of high-end GPUs, including one more or less dedicated for compute work, Apple hopes to realize the sort of huge performance gains it has enjoyed in its phones/tablets over the years. The modern Apple is a company that values GPU performance, investing heavily in the GPUs used in all of its products. Even those that leverage Intel’s integrated graphics are pushed as far as possible within thermal constraints. It makes total sense that Apple would choose to outfit its highest end Mac with two GPUs.

It’s actually shocking how poorly Final Cut Pro 10.1 runs on older Mac Pros without an upgraded GPU (or even newer Macs with integrated graphics). It’s not uncommon to see an 8-core Mac Pro have the vast majority of its cores remain idle, waiting for effects to finish rendering on the GPU in some of these older configurations. If you haven’t upgraded the GPU in your Mac Pro you’ll likely see a tremendous performance increase when going to the new Pro.

On the thermal core design:

The new Mac Pro’s thermal core works extremely well in practice. The single, shared heatsink and large fan keep the system cool and quiet. Real world workloads that I threw at the machine weren’t enough to throttle any of the processors (CPU or GPU). Despite its compact proportions, the Mac Pro’s cooling solution is appropriately sized for the silicon it serves. I don’t see much room for Apple to move to more powerful GPUs though. If the next generation of GPUs aren’t significantly more power efficient, Apple may have to wait for 14/16nm FinFET based silicon before it can substantially upgrade the graphics power of the Mac Pro.

On 4K display support:

As the first Mac with proper 4K support (meaning not only resolution but 60Hz refresh rate as well), the Mac Pro does a reasonable job – assuming you pick the right monitor. It turns out there’s a very good reason Apple only offers the Sharp PN-K321 via the Apple Store: 4K display compatibility under OS X is still a bit like the wild west at this point. I do expect that Apple will quickly fix things (and likely offer their own 3840 x 2160 and/or 5120 x 2880 panels) in the near future, but early adopters beware.

I am disappointed that Apple didn’t enable any HiDPI modes on the 32” Sharp display. While I found 3840 x 2160 a great resolution for video work, for everything else it made on-screen menus and text a bit too small. I would love to see a 2560 x 1440 HiDPI option (rendering offscreen at 5120 x 2880 and but scaling down to 3840 x 2160 for display) but it looks like I may have to wait for Apple’s own display before I get something like that.

The final, final word:

All in all the new Mac Pro is a good update to its aging predecessor. Apple did a great job with the new chassis and build a desktop that’s extremely dense with compute. When I had to dust off the old Mac Pros to prepare them for this comparison I quickly remembered many of the reasons that frustrated me about the platform. The old Mac Pro was big, bulky, a pain to work on and was substantially behind the consumer Macs in single threaded performance. The new Mac Pro fixes literally all of that. If you have a workload that justifies it and prefer OS X, the Mac Pro is thankfully no longer just your only solution, it’s a great solution.

The new Mac Pro is built to be taken apart. This well-executed teardown from iFixit shows off the engineering excellence behind the Mac Pro design.

The teardown starts by removing the cover. Slide the lock-switch, pull off the cover. So easy. Truly a thing of beauty.

This leaves us with two upright graphics cards, forming the two legs of an isosceles triangle. One of the cards has an SSD mounted on it. The i/o panel, with its RAM slots forms the short leg of the triangle. The RAM cards are easily removable. Undo a single Torx 8 screw to remove the SSD. The two cards and the i/o panel are all attached to a giant triangular heat sink, the core of the entire operation.

While this stacks up fairly well for current Apple GPU offerings, the proprietary nature, and lack of an elegant external GPU option, may age this device before its time.

This is a fair point. Tough to replace these GPUs as they age.

Mac Pro Late 2013 Repairability Score: 8 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair)

That’s an excellent score.

While it will require a bit of digging, the CPU is user-replaceable—meaning intrepid fixers should be able to save considerably by upgrading from the base-level processor configuration.

I’ve done a fair amount of disassembly, repair, and upgrade on Macs over the years. This one seems much more accessible than most. That said, there clearly are limits to what you can do yourself. Upgrading from a base CPU to a higher-core CPU may be within reach for the handy, but there doesn’t appear to be any way to add additional storage or upgrade GPUs.

Dig in to the teardown for all the gory details.

Personally, I think the Mac Pro is a home run. I get the limitations, but the elegance of this design, the sheer power that the new Mac Pro brings to the table is plenty enough for me. As I said, a real thing of beauty.

Today I Found Out:

This tradition is mostly thanks to Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadian Band. While their work is largely unknown to those born in the last few decades, the band has sold over 300 million records to date. Guy Lombardo himself has three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and he was once the “Dick Clark” of New Years before Clark and his “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” attempting to appeal to younger audiences, started supplanting “Mr. New Year’s Eve,” Guy Lombardo.

“Auld Lang Syne” is another one of those songs most of us don’t know the words to – like the Canadian National Anthem.

Death and Taxes:

A Reddit sleuth posted this list of movies and TV shows that will be purged from Netflix in January, 2014. If you have time off from work between now and January 1, it might not be a bad use of your time to binge-watch some blockbusters (“Braveheart,” “Top Gun,” “Platoon”), art house flicks (“Being John Malkovich”) and the entire series run of “The Kids in the Hall.”

I wonder if it’s less a “purge” as is being reported (it really doesn’t make any sense for Netflix to remove movies) or rather, Netflix’s contracts/agreements for those films are expiring.

Regardless, some of you may have some Netflix binge-watching to do New Year’s Day!

Pew Research Center shares some trends revealed by US public opinion surveys.

In the course of conducting public opinion surveys and demographic analyses, the Pew Research Center found a wide range of data milestones, breakthroughs, peaks and valleys in 2013, including record support for same-sex marriage and the legalization of marijuana; record levels of distrust of the federal government; record numbers of mothers who were the primary breadwinners for their families; and record numbers of Millennials living with their parents.

Always interesting to see successful companies experiment with new methods of organization. As companies grow in size, the lines of communication grow more complex. The hierarchical tree structure is the most commonly adopted solution, but it brings in a host of problems of its own.

During the 4-hour meeting, Hsieh talked about how Zappos’ traditional organizational structure is being replaced with Holacracy, a radical “self-governing” operating system where there are no job titles and no managers. The term Holacracy is derived from the Greek word holon, which means a whole that’s part of a greater whole. Instead of a top-down hierarchy, there’s a flatter “holarchy” that distributes power more evenly. The company will be made up of different circles—there will be around 400 circles at Zappos once the rollout is complete in December 2014—and employees can have any number of roles within those circles. This way, there’s no hiding under titles; radical transparency is the goal.

Looking forward to watching this play out.

Last Friday, we posted a link to a graphic that detailed the process HTC goes through to vet new versions of Android. The multi-company hoops that need leaping, as well as the incredible number of devices that need to be tested, are both barriers to adoption of new Android revs and contributors to fragmentation.

Apple has announced their latest adoption rates for iOS 7. 78% is a huge number. Compare that to the KitKat adoption rates:

In contrast, though Google has not updated its own official developer statistics since Dec. 2, its most recent data showed that just 1.1 percent of Android devices were running that mobile operating system’s latest version, known as Android 4.4 “KitKat.”

And then compare to the percentage of users who are not even at Jelly Bean:

The largest share of Android users are running some form of “Jelly Bean,” which ranges from 4.1.x to 4.3. But a significant 24.1 percent of Android users are still running versions 2.3.3 to 2.3.7, also known as “Gingerbread” — an operating system version that was last updated in September of 2011.

To me, this is the biggest hurdle to developing for Android. Modern apps are built for iOS 7. They may be written for iPhone or for iPad, or for both. That’s the vast majority. Pretty simple, right?

If you want to build for Android, you have a much more complex tree to explore. Which translates to either a smaller market for you or a much bigger budget.

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.

Tag the sharks with shore proximity sensors so the sharks tweet when they get too close to shore. Such a great idea.

In an innovative move to curb shark attacks, more than 300 sharks in Australia have been tagged with transmitters so that an automatic tweet warning is sent when they are dangerously close to the shore.

The unique project in Western Australia means beach goers can make an informed decision about whether to go in the water knowing a shark is nearby.

To give you a sense of the value of this project, check out this picture of some surfers in southern California (Manhattan Beach) with a photobombing shark. Yikes.

Interesting take on the economics behind Bitcoin. At the heart is a quote from this article:

Underpinning the value of gold is that if all else fails you can use it to make pretty things. Underpinning the value of the dollar is a combination of (a) the fact that you can use them to pay your taxes to the U.S. government, and (b) that the Federal Reserve is a potential dollar sink and has promised to buy them back and extinguish them if their real value starts to sink at (much) more than 2%/year (yes, I know).

Placing a ceiling on the value of gold is mining technology, and the prospect that if its price gets out of whack for long on the upside a great deal more of it will be created. Placing a ceiling on the value of the dollar is the Federal Reserve’s role as actual dollar source, and its commitment not to allow deflation to happen.

Placing a ceiling on the value of bitcoins is computer technology and the form of the hash function… until the limit of 21 million bitcoins is reached. Placing a floor on the value of bitcoins is… what, exactly?

If you are at all interested in Bitcoin, start at the Krugman piece, then dig in to the linked pieces. Thoughtful reads all.

This is so awesome!

Hidden among the racks of servers and disks in the CERN Computing Centre, you’ll find Hawaiian dancers, space aliens, gorillas… all LEGO® figurines! These characters were placed about the Centre for the arrival of Google’s Street View team for the world to discover.

We’re pleased to announce our first global scavenger hunt! Spot three LEGO® figurines using Google’s Street View and you’ll be entered to win a gift of your choice from our CERN Gift Guide.

Go. Enter. Find those Lego figures. Win a prize.

Each question in the quiz presents some dialect options. You pick the option that feels most comfortable to you.

Most of the questions used in this quiz are based on those in the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. Vaux’s current website.

The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 by Josh Katz, a graphics editor for the New York Times who developed this quiz. The colors on the large heat map correspond to the probability that a randomly selected person in that location would respond to a randomly selected survey question the same way that you did. The three smaller maps show which answer most contributed to those cities being named the most (or least) similar to you.

With each answer you provide, the quiz shows a map showing what your choice says about where you are from via a distribution map. I took the quiz and it did an excellent job picking up the place where I grew up.

Just watched The Fugitive with the fam, then saw this.

Chef Eduardo Garcia lost his left hand after being electrocuted in a hunting accident in 2011, but has since gotten a Bluetooth-activated bionic hand. Though he’s still getting used to its 25 different functions, Garcia says the prosthetic comes with a few benefits to his trade — he can now pick up hot things without getting burned, and doesn’t have to worry about accidentally slicing his fingers.

Interesting the way he smashes a garlic bulb with his prosthesis. He’s clearly lost a lot of dexterity, but if you have to lose a hand, glad that science is there to add in some new capabilities. Prosthetics has made some great strides, but there’s so much more we can do as our mastery of robotics becomes more refined.

Here’s a link to the prosthetic hand’s product page.

Fantastic news for anyone with a place in their heart for the Atari 2600, Atari 7800 Pro System, ColecoVision, Magnavox Odyssey², or the Astrocade. The Internet Archive has posted playable emulations of all five of these old consoles on their site.

To play a game, pick a console, then pick a game (there are hundreds), then click the “Run” link on the right side of the page. Finally, read the instructions, then press the space bar to start.

Some of the games work well, others not so much. Clearly, this is a work in progress. If you run into problems with one browser, try switching to another.

Big wave of nostalgia for me.

Wow.

Robert W. Wilson, a retired New York hedge-fund founder who committed his life to giving the fortune he made from investing to charities, has died. He was 87.

He died Dec. 23 after leaping from his 16th-floor residence at the San Remo apartment building on Manhattan’s Central Park West, according to a person with knowledge of the incident who asked not to be identified because family members hadn’t been notified. Police said an 87-year-old man was found in a courtyard at the rear of the building and pronounced dead from an apparent suicide. He suffered a stroke in June, Gary Castle, his accountant, said yesterday in a telephone interview.