Jared Cosulich:
> For the last 45 years Sudbury Valley schools (and before that Summerhill) have provided students with a K-12 educational environment where the students can do what ever they want, when ever they want all day long.
Those students attend college at a higher rate than the national average too. Wow.
Shawn Blanc on working from his iPad:
> Never once have those limitations hindered me from doing some great work from my iPad. In fact, oftentimes it is the limitations of iOS which empower me to do better work. Because constraint breeds creativity.
He lists out the apps he is using on his iPad, but the preamble leading up to that list is really worth the read.
Holy fantastic post. Some choice quotes from Robert Evans, Rafi Sela’s post:
> The TSA treats each traveler the same because of some stupid idea that everything needs to be fair. Security needs to be done due to risk — and risk means that in Israel we don’t check luggage, we check people. And I’m not talking about racial profiling here; that’s a product of poor training. Regardless of race or creed, people with bombs strapped to their body behave in similar ways.
And:
> But thanks to the layout of modern American airports, he doesn’t even have to get through security. The TSA conveniently packs hundreds of travelers together in cramped security lines. Terrorists love crowds because they can inflict the most harm that way. Anyone who watches the news knows that. So what does American airport security do? It gathers folks together in long lines BEFORE they’ve been scanned at all.
Worth reading the entire post to understand just how woefully inept the TSA is.
At this point I wonder if even the President believes their tactics are anything more than ass covering.
Joseph Menn:
> As a key part of a campaign to embed encryption software that it could crack into widely used computer products, the U.S. National Security Agency arranged a secret $10 million contract with RSA, one of the most influential firms in the computer security industry, Reuters has learned.
Well it was a good run RSA, hopefully you didn’t spend all $10 million yet — seems like you will need to hand it over to lawyers soon.
Ken Segall has the best take I’ve seen on Apple’s holiday ad:
> This ad is a holiday card from Cupertino. It lines up perfectly with the values Apple has communicated for years. It’s not about technology — it’s about quality of life.
I don’t think it is the world’s best ad, or even Apple’s best ad, I think it is a good ad — but let’s leave the hype at “good”.
Sara Morrison:
> While the data brokers say the information is used to put people in very general profiles such as “sports enthusiast” or “avid traveler,” the World Privacy Forum found a list of rape victims for sale at one data broker (the link now goes to an “updating” page. Maybe it’s a coincidence! Or maybe MEDbase200 decided it would be best to take its services offline for a while until this all blows over).
Senator Rockefeller thinks this is maybe more worrisome than the NSA spying. I’d agree.
> Dropbox-like Sync and Backup using only SFTP or Amazon S3
Looks like a neat solution, but I haven’t tried it because they don’t have iOS apps.
Sid O’Neill, responding to [my post](https://brooksreview.net/2013/12/podcasts-worries) about podcasts:
> It seems some people see podcasts as a medium solely for Conveying Information in an Efficient Manner. Cool. I think that if you’re looking for that, maybe written materials (or jacking into the Matrix training program) would be better and faster.
Great points in his post.
Jared Sinclair:
> App playlists should be rigorously simple: just a list of apps. Not all the apps ever downloaded, but the apps that a given user currently has installed on their device. The assumption is that if somebody has an app on their device, they probably like it. App playlists should be given top-level priority via their own tab in the App Store.
This is a fantastic idea. I love it.
The Soulmen released Daedalus Touch 1.7 today(isn) and while I still am not in love with the app it has a really awesome feature: custom fonts.
No, not custom fonts built into the app — you can add your own fonts.
I’ll say that again: you can add *your* own fonts.
So how do you do that? Well according to the app: “You can add custom fonts by opening an OTF or TTF file in Daedalus.”
So I tried it with Meta by grabbing the file from the BitTorrent Sync app and opening in Daedalus. And it worked, as stated.
*Awesome.*
I hope more iOS apps do this, this is fantastic.
Justin Williams:
> From the moment NewsGator announced it was looking to give Glassboard a new home, we were jumping at the opportunity to bring some fresh ideas to one of our favorite apps. We couldn’t wait to let you in on our first steps toward modernizing Glassboard…
This is great news. I love Glassboard, but it has been a bit long in the tooth for a while now. Kyle and I used Glassboard almost entirely while collaborating on Begin, and it was a savior for me. Can’t wait to see the updates.
I wrote up an iPad PDF roundup for The Sweet Setup. Go find out why PDF Expert is the best you can buy.
Joseph George:
> On the software end they created a platform that allowed the data recorded by the counters to be uploaded via safecast.org to online maps where the readings could be viewable by all. The Safecast iOS app also allows people to find out what the radiation level is at their current position, based on the 12 million + unique data points they have collected so far.
What a great program for keeping the government accountable.
Justin Williams:
> This has been one of the hardest projects I’ve ever worked on. Simultaneously, it’s also the project I am most proud of. My partner in crime Jake Desaulniers and I set out to create a better photo browser for the iPhone, and I think we hit a home run.
I downloaded it this morning, and now I am trying to find out how to make my Lightroom library sync with my iPhone. Nice little app.
Steve Wildstrom:
> Microsoft desperately needs people to want Microsoft products (other than Xboxes.) This is not a problem that marketing can solve–better products have to come first–but ads that drip aggression and hostility are only going to make things worse.
Excellent.
Nancy Shute:
> Three studies published Monday add to multivitamins’ bad rap. One review found no benefit in preventing early death, heart disease or cancer. Another found that taking multivitamins did nothing to stave off cognitive decline with aging. A third found that high-dose multivitamins didn’t help people who had had one heart attack avoid another.
The acoustics effects of Snowfall is one of my favorite parts of, well, snow.
Digital Era’s step one:
> Don’t use Windows. Just don’t. This also means don’t use the Tor Browser Bundle on Windows. Vulnerabilities in the software in TBB figure prominently in both the NSA slides and FBI’s recent takedown of Freedom Hosting.
To be fair to Windows, the recommendation is *not* OS X — Macs aren’t even mentioned.