For a while now I have been bouncing back and forth between using Dark Sky and Hello Weather as my tools of choice. Then a few months ago, after seeing some new features (at the time) of CARROT Weather, I decided to give the quirky app a try. The thing about CARROT is that the entire aesthetic and tone of the app makes it seem like it’s not a serious app.
However, I’ve found that it is perhaps the best weather app. Allow me to explain why.
Taylor Lorenz reporting:
She said that the company’s focus on growth has crippled its ability to understand the deep problems within the communities the platform has created. “When you work in growth products for so long, you just kind of don’t learn to understand community concerns,” she said.
Terrible. Perhaps it’s also that people making these decisions are, like me, white men who don’t get harassed in this way.
This is a shorter post this week, but I wanted to share a few thoughts about cloud infrastructures and the transformation with all of them.
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For most of the summer I wore my Gravitymaster G-SHOCK the GPW-2000 — and it’s a great watch. However, as the weather cooled and I got back into the swing of wearing something more substantial than shorts and a T-shirt it became clear the the GPW-2000 was simply not going to work. It was too big. However, I really like the G-SHOCK line so I looked for a new watch, which lead me to the hard to find GSTS-130C. I’ve now been wearing that watch for a few weeks, so it’s time to talk about it.
This week is all about Siri Shortcuts, and the new Shortcuts app. I don’t think people quite realize how powerful these new features are, and how easy they are to get to work on. One such shortcut made the news rounds as a shortcut to use when you are pulled over, it does a series of actions which culminate to letting someone know where you are and what is happening and silently recording the event. It’s neat (and sad it is needed), and really only scratching the surface of what is possible.
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Fantastic post and analysis by Halide on what really is going on with the iPhone XS camera system. This post also explains how to override, and work with this new method. If you have an iPhone XS, you should probably at least skim through this post.
Matthew Green has this excellent bit in his article about Chrome’s auto-login bullshit:
This pattern of behavior by tech companies is so routine that we take it for granted. Let’s call it “pulling a Facebook” in honor of the many times that Facebook has “accidentally” relaxed the privacy settings for user profile data, and then—following a bout of bad press coverage—apologized and quietly reversed course. A key feature of these episodes is that management rarely takes the blame: It’s usually laid at the feet of some anonymous engineer moving fast and breaking things. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that these changes consistently err in the direction of increasing “user engagement” and never make your experience more private.
Henry Cowles:
Unfettered access to our inner lives begins as a choice, a decision to sign up for a product because we ‘feel the need of it’. When acting on our desires in the marketplace means signing over our data to corporate entities, the erosion of choice is revealed to be the consequence of choice – or at least, the consequence of celebrating choice.
Good article.
Back in spring of 2016 I started writing about traveling light, and chronicling what I had found and tried as better clothing for traveling. I’ve moved to wearing most of this type of clothing full time now, and write about it often at Everyday Wear with my pal Steve. But there’s more to packing light than just buying the right stuff, there’s three particular tips I’ve learned over the past couple of years of doing this.
I’ve got three watches I am looking to sell, click through to see the details. I’m selling my Gravitymaster, Tissot, and Series 0.
Facebook recently saw themselves hacked, again, but that’s not what I am here to talk about today — because that’s going to be par for the course with any big tech company now. Instead, we need to talk about something else which seems like a ‘so what’ but is really much more nefarious than it first seems.
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I’ve been impatiently waiting for the day GORUCK released a new kid backpack, so much so I picked up an Echo for my youngest as I couldn’t wait any longer. So when GORUCK brought out the KR1 I jumped at the opportunity to snag one for my oldest daughter. However, it’s expensive at $155, so you won’t likely want to buy it.
But should you?
Yes, I mean clearly, but you already knew that.
I ran another round of content blocker testing for Mobile Safari in order to take a look at which ones are the ‘best’ right now. To be fair: it’s really hard to find these content blockers on the App Store now, so I grabbed the ones which looked the most popular to me (top lists, and top search results) and then did the testing to see which was the best.
During the summer, while I had iOS 12 betas on my devices, I never downloaded the beta of Shortcuts, Apple’s revamp of Workflow. I also rarely use Siri unless I am driving in general. But last week I was playing around with Shortcuts and with Siri settings for Shortcuts and found that I wanted to record some voice triggers.
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I really like smaller backpacks (sub-18L) for a couple of reasons:
My pal Shawn has a new course out all about mobile photography. I’ve taken a look at it and it is stellar. My wife contributed to the course as well and has some awesome videos on there. If you ever wonder “how do people take great photos with their phone?” start here.
This. All of this.
Picture for a moment the three leading tablets on a desk. On the left you have an iPad Pro with Smart Keyboard and a Pencil beside it, next you have a Surface Go, or Pro doesn’t matter, with a Type Cover and Pen, then at the right a Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 with the SPen and associated keyboard cover. They represent the state of the art of tablets made to replace laptops, or more generally “the future of computers”.
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Among the Everyday Carry (EDC) community there’s one stand out of multi-tools which everyone seems to own: Gerber’s Dime. Now, before you read any further we need to talk about the price of this little multi-tool because it is an absurd $16 on Amazon at the time of writing. So when it comes to things I talk about on this site, it would be hard to say this is not among the most affordable.
But the Gerber Dime is also a very odd multi-tool. For one, it’s not super high quality, it’s not a piece of shit, but it’s not going to last a life time. It’s also tiny, to the point where it will be smaller than anything you think when you get it — taking up about as much volume as AirPods will.
The GuardianApp team has discovered that a growing number of iOS apps have been used to covertly collect precise location histories from tens of millions of mobile devices, using packaged code provided by data monetization firms. In many cases, the packaged tracking code may run at all times, constantly sending user GPS coordinates and other information.
Many of these are extreme weather tracking apps. The kind you immediately allow location sharing to, and need to help stay safe when severe weather is incoming. Shameful.