This is clever, though imperfect. The calendar frame slides to properly portray the current month. There are no labels for days of the week (like a watch with no numbers), and every month has 31 days, so you have to say the little rhyme (30 days hath September…) to remind yourself when the next month starts.

Still, very clever.

This is fascinating.

Brain researchers say that for the first time one person has remotely triggered another person’s movement, a flicking finger, through a signal sent to him by thought.

Though this particular experiment is simplistic in nature, the implications are a bit staggering. Imagine someone hacking into the system and controlling people’s actions, all over the net. Yikes!

Everyone knows about Seinfeld. And maybe most people are aware that, more recently, Jerry made a web series called Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. But did you know how incredibly successful that series is?

Comedians’ first season, which featured interviews with Larry David, Carl Reiner and Ricky Gervais, has been streamed 10 million times, and early installments of season two already have clocked more than 4 million streams. More impressive, viewers spend 19 minutes on average watching his interviews, which vary in length (between eight and 17 minutes) and tone (Michael Richards discussed his N-word saga; Chris Rock joked about Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show stint).

If you haven’t seen Comedians in Cars, you might want to take a look before you read the interview. Here’s a link to the David Letterman episode, though I think they are all equally entertaining. Enjoy.

Jeff Bezos made this speech back in 1998. Amazon first opened its doors in 1995, so this was still very early in its life. Still, enough time had passed that a lot of lessons were learned, business strategies evolved.

There’s a lot of discussion on the value of frugality. For example, what do you do when your customer orders one book, but the wholesaler has a 10-book minimum?

The problem was, the wholesalers had 10-book minimum orders. I tried to negotiate with them and said, “Let us just pay a small fee, and you waive the 10-book order,” and so on. But they wouldn’t go for it. So we figured out a loophole. It turned out that you just had to place an order for 10 books; you didn’t actually have to get 10 books. We found an obscure book on lichens that none of our wholesalers actually carried.

So whenever we wanted to order one book, we ordered the book we wanted, and then nine copies of this lichen book. They would deliver the one that we wanted, along with a very sincere apology about not having been able to fulfill the nine copies of the lichen book order. That worked very well for exercising our systems. I’ve since talked and joked at length with the people at these companies about this. They actually think it’s very funny.

And this on the value of honest reviews:

Often, publishers are surprised to find out that we allow negative reviews to appear on our website. You should read the reviews for the book Tenth Justice, which is a new beach book. Our customers have just destroyed that poor book. If you were thinking of buying it and you came to our website, you’d think, “Well, maybe I’ll look for something else.” On the other hand, there’s a book called Endurance; it’s a book about a guy named Shackleton, whose boat, while on an Arctic expedition, got crushed in an ice flow. He had to spend six months with his men, 28 men, hiking out of Antarctica, and they made it. Not a single man was lost.

It’s one of the greatest stories of all time of endurance and human spirit. There are dozens and dozens of customer reviews about it; this is an old book, originally published in 1956. For months, this book has been on the top 100 best-selling books on Amazon.com, strictly fed by these customer reviews. I challenge you to read the customer reviews on that book and see if you can resist buying it.

Terrific read.

When Apple released the original Macintosh in 1984, it was looked at as a triumph of design — one of the more minimalist and user-friendly computer designs to hit the market. Old Macs have long since become obsolete, leading fans to come up with creative ways to hack them into a useful second life (like the MacQuarium), but John Leake took a different approach for his tribute to Apple’s most enduring product. Using Sintra foamboard and a Raspberry Pi, Leake has successfully created a working scale model of the original Mac that’s one-third the size of the original.

Absolutely love this.

Matt Gemmell has some solid tips that you can try the next time you sit down to write. Two tips in particular that I’ve done for a long time are:

I have a habit of adding a bullet-point right after I stop, briefly outlining the very next thing that happens. The following day, I just transform it into a sentence or two, and I feel that I’ve at least started.

I actually do this throughout my stories. As the story evolves, I think of things that need to be added or points that need to be made. The problem is, if I stop and add it in, I lose my momentum and I don’t like that. Sometimes a single word will be enough to jog my memory and by the time I’m finished, all of the relevant points have been made in the article.

Just trust yourself. Something will emerge. Unplanned structure.

For me, it’s not necessarily lack of planning, but lack of putting it on paper. I formulate my ideas in my head—sometimes for days or even weeks—before I ever write anything. When I do sit down to start writing, I have a flow that gets me through the toughest part of the article.

Great tip, if you didn’t already know how to do it.

[Via John Moltz]

Jim and Dan discuss the Chromecast app being blocked by Google, the New York Times getting hacked, and Apple TVs getting more and more channels.

Sponsored by Mailchimp and Shutterstock (use code DANSENTME8 for 25% off).

After being hit with 171 lawsuits from non-practicing intellectual property owning entities in the last five years, Apple has further solidified its place as the No. 1 target for so-called patent “trolls.”

No company should be sued by patent trolls. Something has to be done.

Hesitation Marks was mastered in two different ways – the standard, “loud” mastering (which is what you’ll find on the CD, on iTunes, and everywhere else), and also an alternate “audiophile” mastering, which we’re offering as a free download option for anyone who purchases the album through nin.com. For the majority of people, the standard version will be preferable and differences will be difficult to detect. Audiophiles with high-end equipment and an understanding of the mastering process might prefer the alternate version.

It’s great to see bands getting away from the “louder is best” mentality or at least giving us an alternative.

AlgoTrim has been around since 2005, and its flagship product, the Code Compression Library (designed to reduce the size of mobile device firmware) has been in use on mobile devices since 2006.

Interesting that Apple is pursuing smaller, more focused companies. In this case, AlgoTrim will help improve performance of algorithms for lossless compression, which will bring obvious benefits to the camera and other image processing applications, but will also bring more subtle benefits, such as improved battery life.

Also interesting is this little nugget from the original Swedish report:

In February of 2013, all of AlgoTrims shares were acquired by the anonymous Delaware-based holding company Wedgwood Industries LCC. But according to solid information revealed to Rapidus, Apple is the real buyer behind the deal.

Back in 1985, Apple created an internal network for managing support for dealers and developers. It was called AppleLink.

It was run by GE’s online service, and Apple was paying GE to run the backend, while Apple managed the actual services. At its peak, AppleLink had had 50,000 registered users, 38,000 of which were external to Apple. Looking to phase this out, mostly to save money, Apple wanted to purchase or build its own online service.

Soon after, Apple created AppleLink Personal Edition, a similar tech-support system for consumers, with Quantum Computer Services running the backend. Quantum Computer Services soon became America Online, or AOL, with a young Steve Case at the helm. 1987 saw Quantum running AppleLink PE, with Apple getting a percentage of the fees Quantum was charging users of the service.

This is the story of how AppleLink evolved into eWorld. My favorite bit:

“What we didn’t know is that AOL had already prepared it’s bankruptcy papers – this deal ultimately saved them. Steve Case had a great poker face,” said Peter Friedman, then vice president and general manager of Apple Online Services, now CEO of LiveWorld.

Good read.

Here’s one critic’s takes on new shows worth a watch. Somehow I doubt that all of these are worth watching, but I have to say I will definitely be checking out The Michael J Fox Show (so hoping this is good) as well as The Crazy Ones (Robin Williams as the head of an advertising agency). Curious if the latter gets its title from the brilliant Apple campaign.

Over the past week or so, we’ve posted links to slowed down versions of songs by Frank Zappa and Dolly Parton that have been making their way around the net. This post on kottke.org walks you through the process of slowing down your own music.

Here’s the formula for slowing or speeding up a recording to shift the pitch but generally stay in tune:

(2 ^ (semitones change/12) – 1) *100 = Percent Change

If you want to drop two semitones, you shift the speed down by 12.2462 percent; drop three, you shift by 18.9207 percent, which significantly changes the track. To imitate a 45 RPM record played at 33 1/3, that’s about 25.926, but very few records still sound like something a person actually made at this speed.

There are a series of examples that show off the results. All the examples were created using Audacity. Well done.

According to a new report, Android was the subject of 79 percent of malware attacks on mobile devices. Symbian devices got 19 percent of attacks. iOS devices? Less than 1 percent.

The New York Times’ website is down from what appears to be a “malicious external attack,” according to an official Times statement posted to its Facebook page. The Atlantic Wire reports that the paper’s domain has reportedly been in and out of service since 3PM EST, when it first became unavailable. The attack seems to the work of the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a group of hackers that claims to be promoting the Assad regime. The Times has been reporting on the recent Syrian chemical attacks, which may have attracted the SEA’s attention.

This article appeared on the front page of the Times web site shortly after the site came back up.

Gizmodo has some interesting images that give a sense of how this all evolved.

It’s a good question. And the answer is pretty simple. It was an attempt to get you to click on CNN.com so that we could drive up our web traffic, which in turn would allow us to increase our advertising revenue.

Great answer. It also explains the shitty tech stories we read everyday.

I like it, especially Vevo and Smithsonian.

Des Traynor:

Once a company succumbs to it, bloat seeps through its veins. A round of layoffs becomes a “Strategic Talent Re-Architecture”, sharing a link becomes “Internal Socialising”, or “Knowledge Cross Pollination”. You no longer “think about things” any more you “incubate them internally”. If you’re thinking about them really hard, you’re now “deep diving to disambiguate”.

Wonderful article. Bloat is everywhere.

Those that listened to Amplified last week may remember I mentioned wanting a nice dark purple iPhone will The Loop logo on the back. Maybe this is the place I can get it done.

Seriously Canada, it’s like you want the world to laugh at you.

Fantastic take on the First Amendment and the evolution of censorship.

Because of the ironclad protection of the First Amendment, it has proved very difficult for government to control what we can read, listen to or see. A few curbs have been put up, though, notably by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the regulations of which largely determine what kind of material is bleeped out of radio and television broadcasts.

There’s discussion of the 1873 Comstock Laws, the first radio censorship, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin (and his 7 words), Madonna on Letterman, Arrested Development, and much more. Brilliant.

Famed Apollo 11 moonwalker Neil Armstrong died one year ago today and NASA is remembering the iconic astronaut with a touching music video tribute.

He truly inspired a generation.

A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent. He has no poppied or honeyed cakes through which to give the monster sleep or sustenance. He leaves that to the popular novelist.

Software isn’t an industry where the monster company selling the last generation’s product gets to stay being the monster for the next generation. It’s the industry where a thousand hungry small companies are waiting for a shift in the market that will allow them to slay the monster, carve it up and eat it for breakfast.

Very interesting article.

[Via Rian van der Merwe]

In the future, nothing is impossible. FutureStack 2013 is an opportunity for disruptive Developers, innovative Technologists and world-changing Creatives to imagine, build and help craft the future of Modern Software. Big ideas aren’t just welcome — they’re required.

I’ll be speaking at the FutureStack conference, which will be held in San Francisco in October. There are a lot of very smart people on the speakers list and some great sessions. If you’re interested in going to the conference, you can get 50% off the registration fee because you know me.

First, it takes three months to understand a new job. Until those 90 days are over, you don’t really know what hand you’ve been dealt. Second, it takes approximately three years before you’ll become bored with your current gig. While I can’t point you to the definitive research paper that confirms this hypothesis, I have been stumbling around Silicon Valley for a couple of decades and my advice hasn’t changed: 90 days to understand the new gig, three years before you’re bored with it.

Interesting article from Michael Lopp. I never really thought about it like that before, but maybe that’s because I’ve been doing the same job for 20 years.