Recent Articles

Speaking of Editorial, Viticci has an epic review of the latest update (which is bigger than the version number would suggest). I haven’t read through this post yet, I am saving it for when I can really read it in-depth.

With the release of Editorial 1.1, we get an iPhone version. I use Editorial for posting links and quotes to this site when on iOS, so this update is very welcome. However I was stumped on how to move my workflows to the iPhone. Turns out there is a workflow for doing that (but you need Dropbox, so I had to sign up for a free account again). Works well.

Also there is a workflow that does the same thing for Snippets.

Thanks to Chase McCoy.

I store a lot of stuff in Truecrypt volumes so this is particularly troubling. Cory Doctorow:

The response to the Truecrypt news is mostly frank bafflement. The software is licensed under an obscure “open source” license that makes it unclear whether third parties can support the now (apparently) orphaned codebase.

No one really knows how secure the software was, but a security audit had recently been funded and was getting set to start. Then, boom, the software developers kill the software and claim: “Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues.”

Ominous to say the least.

For now I guess I will use OS X encrypted images. Man, what a bummer.

I added a great comment from a reader, so be sure to check out the updated bit at the end of the post. (Update made on May 28, 2014 at 1544 PT.)

Emily Parkhurst:

So, what should Microsoft buy to help it along? Spotify? Pandora? I suspect RealNetworks could be acquired on the cheap.

Uhhh, I, umm, hmmm…

I know RealNetworks is still around, you see their logo in Seattle on their headquarters, but I actually don’t know what they do anymore.

(Looks it up.)

Ok, I’m back, it looks like they have four main products:

1. GameHouse.com, which by all accounts looks like a service offering shitty games for PCs, Macs, and ‘mobile’. And I mean shitty games. They are promoting free versions of Sudoku and Mahjong…
2. Helix, which is simply a device for encoding media for streaming. Getting closer to Beats — what with it being a physical good and one that touches ‘streaming’.
3. RealPlayer Cloud. Now we are talking, they bill this as “like Dropbox for your videos” — not even a “but better” in there. Which then leads me to wondering what is wrong with using Dropbox for your videos… A ‘review’ on the iOS App Store from ‘Maka Bee’ rates the app at 5 stars, saying: “Regular app!” So, yeah… you can’t make that shit up.
4. Lastly they list “Mobile Entertainment”, which lists Mobile Music as a service! Now we are talking: “Some of the world’s largest mobile operators work with us to deliver music to their subscribers.” Oh, so just a backbone then?

Buying Spotify, Pandora, or RDIO, I guess would make sense as a competitive move, but RealNetworks? That’s just silly talk.

No matter what, Microsoft would be idiotic to buy any company to ‘compete’, instead they should focus on trying to compete with the crap they already are trying to ‘compete’ with: Surface, Skype, Windows, Office, or anything else…

Brian X Chen:

The Beats brand will remain separate from Apple’s, and Apple will offer both Beats’s streaming music service and premium headphones.

That’s the only thing I was wondering about. From the sound of the article Beats will remain it’s own brand, but very much will be a part of Apple instead of “independent from”. Also interesting is that Iovine and Dr. Dre don’t get a seat near Cook in the ranking, as they both report to Cue.

There will likely be even more words spilled about this, but I think this was one of those “it’s only a matter of time” situations. The Apple brand is, and likely always will be, one thing in consumer minds. To that end the only way for Apple to keep growing is to have sub brands.

Amy Kraft:

Some researchers speculate that during novel situations, time feels slower because the brain pays more attention. To assess this, in 2004, Dartmouth College neuroscientist Peter Tse performed a computer-based experiment in which a repetitive image flashed on the screen followed by a unique one. All of the images were shown for the same duration of time, but participants mistakenly believed that the unique image appeared on the screen for longer. Neuroscientists refer to this as the “oddball effect,” which occurs when the brain pays less attention to the mundane and more attention to novel stimuli.

Interesting, although it does nothing to explain why my kids always wake up before 7am no matter what time they go to bed. ((I don’t need to sleep past 7am, but I’d sure appreciate the option of sleeping in.))

Robert McGinley Myers writing for The Sweet Setup, about the Dispatch 2.0 update:

There are a number of other smaller new features added to the app, and my favorite is that if you take action on an email, such as sending it to Evernote, you get a little check mark next to it to let you know that an action has been taken.

He’s got a better rundown than Beautiful Pixels. Really fantastic update.

So happy about this update. This is hands down the best email client out there — Mac or iOS. I'm linking to the Beautiful Pixels write up because they have updated screenshots and the official site doesn't (at time of writing) If you don't have it, go buy it.

Ken Rockwell on Amazon's rather controversial new patent related to photography:

Amazon was just granted US patent 8,676,045 for a very clever and particular way to arrange a raised Plexiglas platform, lights and backdrop to give instant in-camera images with a 100% white background and a slight reflection below the subject, all with no postprocessing (like Photoshop) needed to make the platform blend into the background.

Clever, and it's funny to see how many other sites reported this wrong.

Fantastic new iOS photo editor which can correct for distortions. Must have for photos of things with straight lines where you care about keep those lines straight.

Dylan Matthews pulls no punches here:

It's worth remembering that the inconvenience and injustice of the TSA's activities exists for literally no reason. If the agency's privacy violations and annoying carry-on regulations were merely the price we paid for reducing the incidence of terrorist attacks, that'd be one thing. But, as security expert Bruce Schneier likes to note, there's no evidence that the TSA has ever prevented a terrorist attack, and there's some research suggesting it could serve to increase non-airborne terrorist attacks. Airline security is, so far as we can tell, totally useless.

Matthew Ingram on why big companies are dangerous:

Google, Facebook and Amazon have shown us again this week why the combination of a quasi-monopoly, vested interests and an inscrutable algorithm can be a dangerous thing for internet users, since it allows them to influence what we see, know and buy

Good post.

Derek Thompson, refuting the aforelinked New Yorker article:

There is little evidence that America, as a country, is working more. Many of us—perhaps most of us—enjoy downtime that would look luxurious to a mid-century time-traveler.