Category: Free

Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon, Mark Udall of Colorado and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico:

> Our first priority is to keep Americans safe from the threat of terrorism. If government agencies identify a suspected terrorist, they should absolutely go to the relevant phone companies to get that person’s phone records. But this can be done without collecting the records of millions of law-abiding Americans. We recall Benjamin Franklin’s famous admonition that those who would give up essential liberty in the pursuit of temporary safety will lose both and deserve neither.

Looks fantastic. I ordered one, but was tempted to order three.

For your weekend reading list.

Ed Rodriguez:

> In other words, totally unlike incandescent and substantially unlike a CFL, reliability and life expectancy go down hill sharply as soon as you install it anywhere that air is restricted. Guess what? A large percentage of places for LED best value is in those place where access is difficult and air is restricted. LEDs do not target a “table-lamp-only” marketplace.

When Kyle and I decided to make Begin free, the app wasn’t really designed to be free. So Kyle spent a lot of time re-working Begin so that it was better suited as a free+IAP app.

Instead of the IAP just being themes, we added a ton of stuff and reworded the IAP to “Extend”. I don’t like “pro” labeling, especially for Begin as it is not, and never will be, *by design* a “pro” app. So if you want to pay us $0.99 you get to extend the feature set of Begin.

Either way, the app is still damned useful. I use it everyday.

Really though, the app is free and the icon is fantastic — no reason not to download it and check it out.

Matthew Panzarino on the new Apple Store for iPad app:

> Though Apple has had an Apple Store app for the iPhone for some time, it has long neglected the bigger devices in its iOS arsenal. The iPad version of the store has been heavily customized for the iPad and features several flourishes that I think will be replicated heavily by other shopping apps in the future. More importantly, it’s incredibly well designed, and exhibits a balanced tension between the clean lines of iOS 7 and just being ‘sparse’.

It’s fantastic to look at and use, truly.

Interesting post from Brian Hall. Love this bit:

> That Google continues to develop and support services optimized for iPhone is all you need to know about those who scream that IPHONE IS DOOMED. They are either ignorant or they are lying to you. Why do you continue to reward them with your attention?

Marissa Mayer:

> There is nothing more important to us than protecting our users’ privacy. To that end, we recently announced that we will make Yahoo Mail even more secure by introducing https (SSL – Secure Sockets Layer) encryption with a 2048-bit key across our network by January 8, 2014.
Today we are announcing that we will extend that effort across all Yahoo products.

There’s zero reason for me to feel this way, but I am really liking Yahoo under Mayer so far. I’d consider using their email, but I just don’t want to email in all caps like their current users do.

Simply fantastic kids game. Our daughter loves playing it and figured it out really quickly.

Two things:

1. This is awesome of Microsoft.
2. This webpage design is really well done, and it is a Microsoft webpage. Wow.

Great guide if you are new to web servers. I run a very similar setup personally, but I use a remote Mac mini server instead of a Ubuntu server. Either way it works exceedingly well.

There is one caveat that wasn’t mentioned: latency.

When you pop open Dropbox on iOS it’s effectively ready to go, and pretty fast too. With the BitTorrent Sync app there is a *long* delay. On my iPhone 5s, over WiFi, it took 11.5 seconds before I could tap on any folder in the BT Sync app. That’s a long time if you are trying to be speedy.

That said, for privacy minded people, this is a worthwhile trade off.

I previously [talked about the Japanese waterstones](https://brooksreview.net/2012/04/wet-stone-amazon/) that are my preferred knife sharpening method — but it is hard to overlook the Spyrderco Sharpmaker as it is universally loved.

What sets the Sharpmaker apart from all other sharpening systems is two things:

– It is almost foolproof.
– It works extremely well and extremely fast.

I hadn’t tried it before, but I ordered one to test out and I am blown away. I don’t think the edge is as fine as I can get with waterstones, but it is impressively — shave your hair — sharp. It’s a dead simple system, so if you own a knife this is something you should absolutely get, and it truly doesn’t take much time to keep a knife sharp with this.

I actually used it to sharpen our kitchens knives and was blown away by how well it worked on them. It’s a great system, priced well, and easy to use. If you can hold your knife blade perpendicular to the table, then you can use this sharpener.

Also, [you can pick up a set of ultra-fine stones](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0019JTNDQ/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20) to get even sharper edges (I just saw them and ordered them).

Fantastic post from Watts Martin:

> The problem here isn’t how Google (or Facebook or anyone else) handles our privacy; the problem is that Google shouldn’t be managing our privacy.

*No* way to have predicted the speed like this. Ugh.

[Yesterday](https://brooksreview.net/2013/11/no-one-was-waiting-to-read-this/) I mentioned that one of the things I thought I still couldn’t do on my iPad was to edit RAW photo files. Turns out I was wrong — I hadn’t looked in a while. This morning I came across Filterstorm Neue that has a plethora of photo editing abilities, but importantly can import and edit RAW photo files.

I’ve been playing with it all morning, and while it will take some getting used to it is definitely a very good app.

The biggest issues that I have are:

1. No native export to anything but camera roll and FTP.
2. The noise reduction abilities are far behind Photoshop/Lightroom/Aperture.

Other than that it is a pretty solid editor. If you like snapping lots of RAW pictures, but maybe don’t like to drag a computer with you, this is a good option (iPad and iPhone app) as it is touch driven (no sliders) and has decent masking abilities.

I just updated the sale page, and posted my Hard Graft Flat Pack. It’s a good deal for a really great bag.

Ten dollars nets you the full pack 100 parallax ready iOS wallpapers for both iPad and iPhone. John Carey’s site is my one stop shop for *all* my wallpaper needs, so I am really happy to be able to pay him for his fantastic work.

Gave Weatherhead goes through how to setup server-side mail rules. I too use a lot of Mail.app rules, and that works for me since I have a Mac mini server in a data center, but server side rules are a lot better. Weatherhead has a nice view of how you get started here.

(I had been using OS X Server to filter the SPAM, but I don’t like the way it filters. It is simply ineffective for some types. I recently added [SpamSieve](http://c-command.com/spamsieve/) to the mix. I am still training it, but just a week into trying it and I am much happier with the performance.)