Monthly Archives: June 2018

My Photography (46) — A Trip Down Romarshelmsfjorden, Norway, 2015

June 12, 2018 · 16:23

Our trip to Norway in 2015 started in Bergen, where we took a one-day cruise down the surrounding fjords, where I took this shot. The towering magnificence of the fjord’s wall dwarfed the ship we were on and I was so awed, that I almost missed the sleek waterfall — just look at how tall the trees on top are. While it was fun and took half a day, do make sure to reserve a full day for the Norway in a Nutshell trip, which is even better.

Shot with Fuji X100T: f/8, 1/90 s, ISO 400.

The Earth Is Flat Because YouTube Videos Say It Is →

June 12, 2018 · 11:10

Alan Burdick, for The New York Times:

If you are only just waking up to the twenty-first century, you should know that, according to a growing number of people, much of what you’ve been taught about our planet is a lie: Earth really is flat. We know this because dozens, if not hundreds, of YouTube videos describe the coverup […]

The modern case for a flat Earth derives largely from “Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe,” a book published, in 1865, by a smooth-talking English inventor and religious fundamentalist named Samuel Rowbotham. I found a copy at a bookseller’s table in the corridor just outside the conference ballroom, alongside books about the Revelations and New Testament apocrypha. The vender, a friendly woman who looked to be in her late sixties, offered her thoughts on Earth’s flatness and the enshrouding secrecy; I moved on when she got to “the Jews.”

John Gruber comments:

[…] before the internet, kooks were forced to exist on the fringe. There’ve always been flat-earther-types denying science and John Birch Society political fringers, but they had no means to amplify their message or bond into large movements.

Thom Holwerda had a few words to say too:

The internet is one of the greatest inventions of mankind, but it’s also having dark, unsettling effects on our society that we need to address. I don’t have any solutions, but we better start doing a better job of arming ourselves against the constant barrage of attacks on science, or we risk our society descending into chaos.

I have been thinking about this issue over the past few days and have begun to imagine how quickly we could wake up in a world where these sort of ideas are the new norm and round-Earthers become the group of people who are considered “kooks”, to use Gruber’s words. Politics are a great example of how quickly a certain point of view can take over the minds of a country or continent and we don’t have to look far — these are all things that are happening today in multiple countries around the world. I love the internet but I can’t help but wonder if humans, as a species growing up in many contrasting environments, won’t be able to handle our cultural and psychological differences.

My Photography (45) — Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, UAE, 2017

June 11, 2018 · 15:33

The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque was completed in 2007 and can hold over 41 thousand people at the same time. It truly is an amazing architectural sight to behold, so if you’re in or around Abu Dhabi (a layover perhaps — you’ll need at least 4 hours to get there and back in time for your next flight) make sure to visit it. This shot (here’s another) was taken on our way back from our trip to the Seychelles, and since we had close to 7 hours at our disposal…

One more photo below →

Locked Out of My FastMail Account (Sort Of)

June 9, 2018 · 19:43

I finally got around to setting up 2FA for my FastMail account on Wednesday, preferring to switch over to 1Password, to an authenticator instead of SMS. I forgot I would need to create an app password for my iPhone to continue receiving emails on it. FastMail was nice enough to notify me of this via email, as a reminder, but I did not receive this email, because I was locked out, because I didn’t create an app password, because I completely forgot about it.

Yeah, my bad.

The upside was that I was happy for two days because I barely got any email (a few slipped by on my other accounts). The downside? It’s the weekend and I am calling email bankruptcy.

AirPods to Get Live Listen Feature in iOS 12 →

June 8, 2018 · 14:30

Steven Aquino, for TechCrunch:

In iOS 12, users will be able to use Live Listen, a special feature previously reserved for hearing aids certified through Apple’s Made for iPhone hearing aid program, with their AirPods.

After enabling the feature in the iPhone’s settings, users will be able to use their phones effectively as a directional mic. This means you can have AirPods in at a noisy restaurant with your iPhone on the table, for example, and the voice of whomever is speaking will be routed to your AirPods.

Live Listen is a feature Apple developed and eventually launched in 2014 that allows iPhone users with hearing aids to hear people in noisy environments or from across a room, such as a crowded restaurant or lecture hall. If a compatible hearing aid is paired to a user’s phone, there are options to turn Live Listen on and off, adjust volume and even set it as their preferred Accessibility Shortcut.

This could be a fascinating feature, especially for people with hearing problems, but also “for the rest of us”, when we’re placed in extremely loud environments.

Removed in macOS 10.14 Mojave →

June 8, 2018 · 14:15

Michael Tsai listed everything that’ll be disappearing with the release of macOS 10.14 Mojave (that we know of) and there are a few surprises in there. Firstly, I’m disappointed that subpixel antialiasing will not be around anymore, since a lot of people still don’t use Retina screens (especially when using external displays connected to their Macs). I’m also quite concerned about Safari Extensions getting deprecated, especially in regard to content blockers — I wonder if they have some soft of replacement planned. Oh — unsigned Safari Extensions are already completely axed.

Update on Safari Extensions

Support for .safariextz-style Safari Extensions installed from the Safari Extensions Gallery is deprecated with Safari 12 on macOS. Submissions to the Safari Extensions Gallery will no longer be accepted after December 2018. Developers are encouraged to transition to Safari App Extensions.

2018 Apple Design Awards Winners

June 8, 2018 · 14:09

WWDC wouldn’t be the same without the Apple Design Awards and they’re back this year with some great finalists:

I especially recommend getting Alto’s Odyssey if you haven’t played it yet — it’s an aural and visual masterpiece.

Apple’s Craig Federighi Talks About iOS Apps Running on macOS and Touchscreens on Macs →

June 5, 2018 · 23:34

Lauren Goode, interviewing Craig Federighi for Wired:

When addressing my question about whether iOS apps moving to macOS is a natural precursor to touchscreen Macs, Federighi told me he’s “not into touchscreens” on PCs and doesn’t anticipate he ever will be. “We really feel that the ergonomics of using a Mac are that your hands are rested on a surface, and that lifting your arm up to poke a screen is a pretty fatiguing thing to do,” he said.

Federighi added that he doesn’t think the touchscreen laptops out there today—which he referred to as “experiments”—have been compelling. “I don’t think we’ve looked at any of the other guys to date and said, how fast can we get there?” (It’s worth noting that Microsoft’s Surface laptop, which has a touchscreen and is considered a top MacBook rival, has received largely positive reviews.)

The Surface Pro’s and Surface Book’s weakest link is that they are poor tablets for users like me, but I can easily imagine a scenario where iOS (iPad) apps on a detached MacBook Pro screen would allow me to replace my iPad, while simultaneously allowing me to run full desktop software, such as Lightroom, should I need it.

Tim Cook Says Apple Requested “Zero” Personal Data From Facebook →

June 5, 2018 · 08:58

Laura Sydell, for NPR:

“We’ve never been in the data business,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told NPR on Monday, responding to a report that Facebook struck agreements giving Apple and other device makers access to Facebook users’ personal information […]

“The things mentioned in the Times article about relationship statuses and all these kinds of stuff, this is so foreign to us, and not data that we have ever received at all or requested — zero,” Cook told NPR’s Steve Inskeep and Laura Sydell during the company’s annual conference for developers in San Jose, Calif.

Glad Tim cleared that up.

Facebook Had Data Deal With Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Others →

June 5, 2018 · 08:53

Gabriel Dance, Nicholas Confessore, and Michael Laforgia, for The New York Times:

Facebook has reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers — including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung — over the last decade, starting before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones, company officials said. The deals allowed Facebook to expand its reach and let device makers offer customers popular features of the social network, such as messaging, “like” buttons and address books […]

An Apple spokesman said the company relied on private access to Facebook data for features that enabled users to post photos to the social network without opening the Facebook app, among other things. Apple said its phones no longer had such access to Facebook as of last September.

The article makes it sound as if Apple pulled or had access to private user data from Facebook.

macOS Has a Future →

June 5, 2018 · 01:04

Steven Troughton-Smith:

Apple ticked a whole lot of my macOS boxes this WWDC; now, finally, it’s clear that macOS has a future — not as a dead platform, but as a pro-focused extension of iOS. The two OSes can grow together, as one, without iOS sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

I’m more hopeful about macOS’ future than I was for the last two years or so. Apple still has a long way to go but the signs we saw today are positive.

watchOS 5 Compatibility →

June 5, 2018 · 00:50

From Apple’s watchOS 5 preview:

watchOS 5 requires iPhone 5s or later with iOS 12 or later, and one of the following Apple Watch models:

  • Apple Watch Series 1
  • Apple Watch Series 2
  • Apple Watch Series 3

watchOS 5 is not compatible with the first-generation Apple Watch.

I hope the Series 4 will be a worthy upgrade over my Space Black steel Series 0.

“I’m Sal Soghoian, and you’re wrong. My technology is better than Windows.” →

June 3, 2018 · 10:20

Jordan McMahon, for Wired:

When Jobs took over, he went on a campaign to salvage Apple’s remaining resources by hacking and slashing under-performing departments. The problem, Jobs said, was that Apple had lost its focus. The company was making too many products that people didn’t want to buy. After years of leading innovation in the PC industry, the Macintosh’s operating system had fallen behind its biggest competitor. “It used to be easy when we were 100 times better than Windows. But now that we’re not, you don’t know what to do,” Jobs told the room. This was a big slap in the face—just two years earlier, Jobs had quipped that Microsoft “had no taste.”

Soghoian didn’t like that. As Apple’s product manager of automation, he was tasked with finding new and clever ways to for users take tedious and repetitive tasks on the Mac—like organizing a bunch of files at once or resizing massive groups of photos—and write small bits of code to complete those tasks quickly.

“No, you’re wrong,” Soghoian told the notoriously brutal CEO. Jobs fired back: “And you are?”

“I’m Sal Soghoian, and you’re wrong. My technology is better than Windows.”

From AppleScript, through Automator, to Workflow for iOS, and Sal’s future in The Omni Group — the path of automation over the years is definitely interesting, but I still cannot fathom why Apple let Sal go.

Anyway, I rely on automating my tasks on Mac and iOS every single day, so I can’t help but wonder what its future will be. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Tesla Model 3 Gets CR Recommendation After Braking Update →

June 1, 2018 · 11:31

Patrick Olsen, for Consumer Reports:

The software update came a week after Consumer Reports published test results that showed stopping distances for the Model 3 that were significantly longer than any other contemporary car. That braking performance, along with issues with the Model 3’s controls and ride comfort, initially prevented the car from getting a CR recommendation.

Last week, after CR’s road test was published, Tesla CEO Elon Musk vowed that the automaker would get a fix out within days.

Until now, that type of remote improvement to a car’s basic functionality had been unheard of. “I’ve been at CR for 19 years and tested more than 1,000 cars,” says Jake Fisher, director of auto testing at Consumer Reports, “and I’ve never seen a car that could improve its track performance with an over-the-air update.”

Remote firmware updates for a car, which can directly impact key features such as braking systems is one thing which Tesla excels at. Other automakers rely on software updates when a car comes in for service, which is roughly once a year, or when you buy a new one.

I test drove a Tesla Model S P90D (my article in Polish) in Poland in 2016. There are a few Teslas in Poland but since we don’t have a dealership, service centres, or a wide Supercharger network, their Autopilot barely knew any of the roads here. The guys from Tesla Berlin came down a day or two early and rode up and down the country roads, we would be using for the day. Since this was their second trip, I assume the Teslas had already previously gathered a lot of data along the way. When it was my turn, I turned on Autopilot and it acted as if it knew these its surroundings perfectly, even on 2nd tier twisty side streets with barely any markings on them. This “learning” capability is amazing in theory and practice — just imagine what we could accomplish if every single car in the world, whatever their manufacturer, had access to a database of this sort.

Most Important Meal 36 With James Thomson — This Was Not a Podcast I Was Expecting to Hear →

June 1, 2018 · 10:55

James Thomson, the creator of PCalc, joins Truj and Brian to talk about the Full Scottish Breakfast! Of course, they are immediately sidetracked by sobering facts about the death of the banana, #TeamCrunchy versus #TeamSoggy, cannibalism thought experiments, and black pudding. Brian read all the Twilight books. Truj interrupts Overwatch. James couldn’t leave the table.

A surprisingly excellent episode with some blasphemy regarding food, which I’ll let slide because I was immensely entertained!

Regarding black pudding… We have something similar in Poland — it’s called kaszanka. Tried it once, hated it, consider it disgusting.

And in response to the banana thread — try the ones which can be found in the Caribbean, India, and many other places in the world, where they are grown. Since our trip to Martinique, I consider the bananas that we get here in Europe to be close to inedible.