Apple today announced that iPhone 5s, the most forward-thinking smartphone in the world and iPhone 5c, the most colorful iPhone yet, will be available to customers on Friday, September 20 at 8:00 a.m. local time at Apple retail stores and at 12:01 a.m. PDT at the Apple Online Store. iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c will be available in the US, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Puerto Rico, Singapore and the UK.

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Interesting article from Ross Rubin on how focusing can help a company more than throwing features into your product.

John Gruber:

One interesting note: the 5C and 5S have a price overlap at $199. At that price, you can get either a 32 GB 5C or a 16 GB 5S. For those who don’t care about technical specs, I think the $199 5C is going to win.

I agree with John on this. Generally, I feel the people that would have purchased a new iPhone anyway will get the 5s, but at this price point, you may see some people switch for the colors.

Very cool.

When you plug your smart phone into a USB cable, your device will try to pair with the device on the other end of the cable. If the only thing on the other end of the line is your personally owned USB charger, no worries. But if you plug into a public charging station or a stranger’s USB charger, you are opening yourself up to malware. The device on the other end can pair with your phone and cause all sorts of mischief.

The soon-to-be-released USB condom is a dongle that sits on the end of your USB cable and prevents data transfer, meaning you can safely charge your device without fear of contracting malware.

I like the idea of the device, though I think a better answer is a USB cable with a switch built in, to toggle between data and charge-only modes.

Have you ever wanted to learn web development or just refine your webdev skills? Dungeons and Developers gives your quest for knowledge a role playing twist. When you get to the page, click the Open the talent tree button to get started.

Today is a big day for the Italian cruise ship that ran aground and tipped over in January 2012. The so-called Parbuckling Project, with the goal of tipping the Concordia upright and refloating it, is now underway. The engineering involved is massive and fascinating. Should take about two days.

Because the constitutional protection of the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees that “no person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” may not apply when it comes to biometric-based fingerprints (things that reflect who we are) as opposed to memory-based passwords and PINs (things we need to know and remember).

While IANAL, Marcia Hoffman certainly is. She has her own law practice, was senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and is an adjunct professor at U.C. Hastings College of the Law.

Netflix is a fantastic story. They started by shipping physical DVDs about 15 years ago, then moved heavily into streaming. Over the past few years, Netflix has moved into more than 40 countries, sometimes building custom content for a specific region (Norway’s Lilyhammer is a good example). How do they make the decision on what content to purchase?

This week Netflix rolled out its service in the Netherlands and the company’s Vice President of Content Acquisition, Kelly Merryman, says that their offering is partly based on what shows do well on BitTorrent networks and other pirate sites.

“With the purchase of series, we look at what does well on piracy sites,” Merryman told Tweakers.

One of the shows that Netflix acquired the rights to in the Netherlands is Prison Break, since it is heavily pirated locally. “Prison Break is exceptionally popular on piracy sites,” Merryman says.

Here’s an interview with Reed Hastings. It’s from a Dutch site, but the interview is in English. To skip the intro, jump to :30.

Cleese digs into the creative process as only he can. What a brilliant mind.

Silly rabbit.

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Richard Feynman is the master of all explainers. He takes incredibly complex concepts and break them down to make them more easily digested. Professor Feynman gave a series of seminal lectures at Caltech in the early 1960s that were transcribed and edited, evolving into a book that became the definitive introduction to physics. Now those lectures are available online, for free. Here’s an example:

To illustrate the power of the atomic idea, suppose that we have a drop of water a quarter of an inch on the side. If we look at it very closely we see nothing but water—smooth, continuous water. Even if we magnify it with the best optical microscope available—roughly two thousand times—then the water drop will be roughly forty feet across, about as big as a large room, and if we looked rather closely, we would still see relatively smooth water—but here and there small football-shaped things swimming back and forth. Very interesting. These are paramecia. You may stop at this point and get so curious about the paramecia with their wiggling cilia and twisting bodies that you go no further, except perhaps to magnify the paramecia still more and see inside.

This is an incredible gift to the world.

Click the image for a full size version. Scorching.

Jim and Dan discuss the Apple event, and Jim’s hands-on experience with the iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s.

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There is nothing better to read your RSS feeds than Reeder. I love this app.

James Thomson updated his calculator apps, adding a lot of new iOS 7 support.

There is a bit of a misconception out there regarding 64-bit processors. This is from the linked BBC News article:

However, bearing in mind there will remain many iOS and Android handsets on the market that still rely on 32-bit chips, this may deter developers from taking advantage of the switch in the short-term.

“People who have the old 32-bit processors will not be able to run software that is built specifically for the 64-bit processors because the latter uses a different instruction set,” explained Prof Alan Woodward, from the University of Surrey’s computing department.

“However, if people write in 32-bit, it will run on many of the 64-bit processors because they still support the old instruction set.

“So, you can get the whole market by writing the app in 32-bits, but you can only get a very small part of the market if you write specifically for 64-bits.”

This is a bit misleading. Apple’s developer tools make it reasonably easy to create a build that supports multiple architectures, say a 64-bit iPhone 5S as well as a 32-bit iPhone 5. If the app is built properly, it will work on both architectures.

In other words, it just works.

Currently, pre-orders are scheduled for delivery one week from today. Will be interesting to see the pre-order numbers.

Lots of interesting numbers from a recent ComputerWorld survey on IT-related jobs. One thing that sticks out:

The new report shows that currently employed IT professionals see application-development, support, security, and analysis as the important skills to acquire. According to the report, the top five skills that hiring managers are expected to seek are:

— App Development: 49% — Support/Help Desk: 37% — Security: 29% — Network Administration: 28% — Business Intel: 24%

NASA built this thing thirty-six years ago (in 1977) and it still works. Amazing.

Thirty-six years after it rocketed away from Earth, the plutonium-powered spacecraft has escaped the sun’s influence and is now cruising 11 1/2 billion miles away in interstellar space, or the vast, cold emptiness between the stars, NASA said Thursday.

And just in case it encounters intelligent life out there, it is carrying a gold-plated, 1970s-era phonograph record with multicultural greetings from Earth, photos and songs, including Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” along with Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Louis Armstrong.

At this point in its journey, it takes seventeen hours for the Voyager signal to get back to Earth. My (very) rough math:

11,500,000,000 m / 186,000 mps = 61,827 seconds = 1,030 minutes = 17.17 hours

Cool.

In this issue, Jim Dalrymple talks about his experience with the iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s at Apple’s event; Jim also discusses the iTunes Festival being held in London, England this month; Christopher Russell looks at how iPads help in education; Matt Gemmell remembers retro gaming consoles; and Tom Ellis gives you some tips on what you need to make music on your Mac.

Learned a lot from this piece.

Capacitance readers are more complex, instead creating an image of your fingerprint by measuring the differences in capacitance between the ridges and valleys of your fingerprint. They leverage the electrical conductivity of your sub-dermal skin layer, and the electrical insulation of your dermal layer (the one where your fingerprint is). Your fingerprint is effectively a non-conductive layer between two conductive plates, which is the very definition of a capacitor. The fingerprint reader senses the electrical differences caused by the varied thickness of your dermis, and can reconstruct your fingerprint.

The Touch ID sensor in the iPhone 5s is a capacitive reader, embedded in the home button. That was a good choice on Apple’s part, since capacitive scanners are more accurate and less prone to smudgy fingers, and can’t be faked out with a photocopy of a fingerprint.

The question I have is, are capacitance readers susceptible to Play-doh copies of your fingerprints. This is a technique used to defeat some fingerprint technologies.

UPDATE: And the answer is, a resounding no. Need a live finger for capacitance to work.

Not quite a new Harry Potter story, but I’ll take it.

Although it will be set in the worldwide community of witches and wizards where I was so happy for seventeen years, ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ is neither a prequel nor a sequel to the Harry Potter series, but an extension of the wizarding world. The laws and customs of the hidden magical society will be familiar to anyone who has read the Harry Potter books or seen the films, but Newt’s story will start in New York, seventy years before Harry’s gets underway.

I predict big box office here.

Here’s a quote from Samsung Mobile boss Shin Jong-kyun:

“Not in the shortest time. But yes, our next smartphones will have 64-bit processing functionality,” Shin said, adding he followed the media coverage of Apple’s new iPhone.

I’m sure, in context, this is a reasonable response to a reasonable question. But as soon as I read this quote, in my mind I heard the followup, “and fingerprint scanning, too, we’ll have that, too.”

Just me?