David Strom:
For the past 27 years, I have owned a class C block of IPv4 addresses. I don’t recall what prompted me back then to apply to Jon Postel for my block: I didn’t really have any way to run a network online, and back then the Internet was just catching on.
Apparently, there’s a mature market for buying and selling IP addresses and even a rental market. Read the post for specifics on the marketplace and on price.
Apple:
Inspired by true events, “The Banker” centers on revolutionary businessmen Bernard Garrett (Anthony Mackie) and Joe Morris (Samuel L. Jackson), who devise an audacious and risky plan to take on the racist establishment of the 1960s by helping other African Americans pursue the American dream.
Follow the headline link for more details on the plot and some pretty great pictures of the cast along with some Apple folks you might recognize.
The Banker is in theaters this Friday, and on Apple TV+ starting March 20th.
[VIDEO] The video embedded in the main Loop post was from a few months ago, but just came across it on Michael Tsai’s excellent blog.
Great chance to get to know Apple’s Senior VP of Software Engineering, also known as Hair Force One. If nothing else, jump to about 2:35 in for Craig’s entertaining whoami.
Eryk Bagshaw, The Sydney Morning Herald:
Nike, Apple and a major manufacturer building trains in Australia are among the dozens of global brands implicated in a new report on forced labour in China, amid growing international concern over the treatment of the Uighur people.
The report, by the US State Department-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute, alleges some factories that supply the brands appear to be using Uighur workers sent directly from re-education camps.
The Washington Post ran a more detailed, first-hand account of the said forced-labor in this chilling article.
From The Post:
When their shifts end, the Uighur workers — almost all women in their 20s or younger — use hand gestures and rudimentary Mandarin to buy dried fruit, socks and sanitary pads at the stalls. Then they walk around the corner, past the factory’s police station — adorned with Uighur writing telling them to “stay loyal to the party” and “have clear-cut discipline” — to dormitories where they live under constant supervision.
The Uighur workers are afraid or unable to interact with anyone in this town, north of Qingdao, beyond the most superficial of transactions at the stalls or in local stores, vendors say. But the catalyst for their arrival here is well understood.
“Everyone knows they didn’t come here of their own free will. They were brought here,” said one fruit-seller as she set up her stall. “The Uighurs had to come because they didn’t have an option. The government sent them here,” another vendor told The Washington Post.
And:
The researchers found 27 factories in nine Chinese provinces that have used Uighur workers hired through labor transfer programs from Xinjiang since 2017. The factories are owned by firms that feed into the supply chain of some of the world’s best-known companies, including Apple, Dell and Volkswagen, the report finds.
BOE Technology Group, which supplies screens to Apple, and O-Film, which makes iPhone cameras, both use Uighur labor, either directly or through contractors, the report found. Apple lists both companies on its latest supplier list.
From Apple:
“Apple is dedicated to ensuring that everyone in our supply chain is treated with the dignity and respect they deserve,” said spokesman Josh Rosenstock. “We have not seen this report but we work closely with all our suppliers to ensure our high standards are upheld.”
More on this story sure to follow.
[VIDEO] If you’ve followed the last few episodes of The Dalrymple Report, you know I am a big fan of Apple TV+’s Mythic Quest. I’m a comedy nerd, a fan of silly, over-the-top humor that still has both intelligence and bite and, to me, Mythic Quest hits all the right notes.
Not for everyone, I do get that, but if you are at all a gamer, do check out the show.
And if you are a fan of the show, check out the video embedded in the main Loop post, a bit of marketing fluff where the show’s actors and creators share their favorite video games.
And follow it up with this, more serious interview with the show’s creators, talking about the real world of video game creation and how that inspired Mythic Quest.
I’m so looking forward to season two. My favorite Apple TV+ show.
New York Times:
As China encourages people to return to work despite the coronavirus outbreak, it has begun a bold mass experiment in using data to regulate citizens’ lives — by requiring them to use software on their smartphones that dictates whether they should be quarantined or allowed into subways, malls and other public spaces.
And:
People in China sign up through Ant’s popular wallet app, Alipay, and are assigned a color code — green, yellow or red — that indicates their health status.
And:
The Times’s analysis found that as soon as a user grants the software access to personal data, a piece of the program labeled “reportInfoAndLocationToPolice” sends the person’s location, city name and an identifying code number to a server. The software does not make clear to users its connection to the police. But according to China’s state-run Xinhua news agency and an official police social media account, law enforcement authorities were a crucial partner in the system’s development.
Collision of worlds here. The battle to contain coronavirus. Government requiring its citizens to use software that is said to share personal data with police.
The words iPhone and Apple do not appear in the article. Wondering if this software exists for iPhone and, if so, the route it took to get approved for distribution.
[VIDEO] Big fan of anime, and love this cut-together commercial from Apple Japan (video embedded in main Loop post). Check out all the different Apple logo homages in the different scenes. Whimsy. Nice.
Courtesy of Google Translate, this is the English translation of the video description:
Beyond the Mac, new stories are born one after another. A story that is not yet in this world. Come on, you too.
Me too!
Do you ever edit photos on your iPhone? Perhaps to crop them for posting on social media? Or to add circles and arrows to highlight a funny bit?
The linked article takes this one step further and shows you how to add text to your annotations.
Dan Moren, Macworld:
At the end of last year, rumors began to circulate that Apple was investigating the possibility of developing an iPhone with no ports at all, which could see the light of day as early as 2021.
And:
But going portless entirely? The company has already done so on devices like the Apple Watch or the HomePod. Surely, though, the iPhone will always need a port. Or will it? More recently, it’s started to seem as though this speculation isn’t as far-fetched as some have initially thought.
I would bet against this, but Dan does make some solid points. Past as precedent, the Apple Watch does indeed survive without a visible port. To be fair, though, there is a secret port under the bottom band.
So maybe the middle ground is a future iPhone with a hidden, diagnostic port, usable by Apple to avoid having to crack the iPhone case to diagnose a phone gone wrong.
[VIDEO] Terrific work. Great set, costumes, colors, movement and, of course, great music from the creative mind of Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta. Video embedded in main Loop post.
First things first, this from a paywalled article from The Information that’s been making a lot of noise:
Apple is planning to release an iPad keyboard accessory later this year that will include a built-in trackpad, the latest step in its effort to position the tablet device as an alternative to laptop computers, according to a person familiar with the matter. The company will likely release the accessory alongside the next version of the iPad Pro expected later this year, the person added.
And this, from the headline linked article by Jason Snell:
I’m excited. For a long time I’ve been an advocate for iPad keyboards and pointing devices, and this potential product would offer a way for Apple to differentiate the iPad Pro from its increasingly capable lower-end iPads.
But I’ve got a lot of questions, too.
Follow the link. These are some thoughtful questions.
A few thoughts of my own:
Is there a need for a pointing device? Are we approaching an uncanny valley with a device that looks an awful lot like a MacBook with a touchscreen, but without the unifying elements like the Finder and window-management system that make a MacBook so intuitive to use?
From this article by The Verge’s Dieter Bohn:
I don’t want Apple to fall back on the crutch of just using desktop OS paradigms to solve the iPad’s user interface intuitiveness problem. The last thing we should want is for the iPad to turn into a Mac. It’s on a different path and it would be a shame to have those ideas tossed out the window just so we can have more traditional windows on the iPad.
I’m in the same camp as Dieter. I’d hate to see the lines between the MacBook and iPad get blurry. As is, I know when to reach for my iPad, my iPhone and my Mac. Different tools for different jobs.
If the report is true, it will be interesting to see what Apple has in mind.
[VIDEO] The first time through the race, the iPhone is the clear winner. The second time through, the Galaxy S20 takes over.
What changed? RAM.
The Galaxy S20 has 12 GB of DDR5 RAM, the iPhone 11 Pro Max, only 4 GB of DDR4x RAM. Watch the speed test (video embedded in main Loop post), keep that more/faster RAM in mind.
The so-called “Steve Jobs auction” opens for bidding on March 5th and includes a fully functional Apple-1 computer, a Steve Jobs signed Macintosh PowerBook, some signed contracts, and a bunch of other interesting items.
Take a look, treat yourself.
Kurt Schlosser, GeekWire:
Two years after launching a chain of convenience stores without cashiers or checkout lines, Amazon is opening its first “Amazon Go Grocery” store in Seattle on Tuesday morning, enlarging the footprint for surveillance-style shopping and signaling a larger challenge to the broader world of brick-and-mortar retail.
Surveillance-style shopping! Gotta remember that one.
You enter the store and scan a QR-code, which is tied to your account, lets you pay for your groceries. Once you’re in:
Hundreds of cameras in the ceiling overhead make up the key technological component of the just-walk-out concept.
And:
The cameras are keeping track of those “interactions” with the product and know exactly what is being taken off shelves and put back. Allowing people to do this type of “considered shopping” plays into the Go Grocery concept of making sure that customers don’t have to do anything unnatural when it comes to how they shop.
This is an incredibly difficult problem to solve. Not to mention the ethical problems involved in eliminating certain jobs from the chain. Great for Amazon’s financials, not so great for the humans involved.
Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.
John Nosta, Fortune:
A 2019 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) examined this detection by smartwatches of “irregular pulses” in almost 420,000 people over eight months. In this study, which was funded by Apple, the authors concluded that the Apple Watch was effective in detecting AFib, stating that 84% of the smartwatch notifications were accurate in alerting for atrial fibrillation.
And:
But what the study didn’t find—or perhaps more accurately, didn’t even examine—is that the Apple Watch will largely not detect or categorize AFib at a heart rate greater than 120 beats per minute, according to information supplied to the FDA by Apple for the feature’s approval.
And:
In 2015, a study published in the Annals of Medicine found that in a cohort of 2,821 patients with new-onset AFib, the mean heart rate was 109 bpm. But, according to the study, roughly one-third of patients had a heart rate of over 120.
The point being made here is that Apple Watch will miss a significant number of AFib cases.
While this is true (assuming the studies are correct), consider the alternative. Without an Apple Watch, odds on catching AFib drop considerably.
The headline is a bit of a troll, though the article is interesting.
How about, “Apple Watch does a lot for your health, you should get one, but be aware Apple Watch will not detect AFib when your heart beats more than 200 times a sec. Mmmkay?”
John Gruber:
Last week Marco Arment tweeted this screenshot of a glitch/bug in the Finder on Catalina: he selected a folder full of multi-hundred megabyte files and the Inspector panel showed the folder size as “Zero KB”.
Clearly that’s wrong. I know from talking to Arment privately that about 30 seconds after he took the screenshot, the Inspector updated to show the actual folder size. But that’s still very wrong. The Finder should never show inaccurate information regarding the state of the file system. Never.
This a one-off? No.
Moltz mentioned a similar problem I’ve seen too: you put some large files in the Trash, then empty the Trash, and the available space shown in Finder windows (View → Show Status Bar) doesn’t change at all for an indeterminate amount of time.
In my Catalina life, I’ve got no shortage of similar examples. Is this about Catalina? About APFS? Or (and this is the answer I favor) is this about the current state of my Mac’s dependence on iCloud?
If the move to iCloud is contributing to latency in Finder reporting (speculation on my part), what path should Apple follow? If you launch an app that automatically opens a file that’s been offloaded to the cloud, what else can the app do but wait for the file to be returned to earth? Does the Finder depend on some iCloud reporting to paint an accurate picture of the file’s size?
Read the rest of Gruber’s post. Accuracy in life is important, more so with your computer.
Read the post, then read the comments for more. The level of detail that goes into Apple Store design is astonishing.
[VIDEO] Director Rian Johnson digs through a scene in the movie Knives Out, for which he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Watch the whole thing, if you are into moviemaking (video embedded in main Loop post). But if you are just here for the headline quote, jump to 2:50. Interesting.
[VIDEO] This is not your typical Mac Pro walkthrough. It’s full of focus on the, what some might say is, over-engineering that makes the new Mac Pro a beautiful piece of gear.
Two things to watch for: The coordination of the fan frequencies to make them, essentially, silent, and the lack of cables in the interior. Fascinating. Video embedded in main Loop post.
Samantha Cole, Motherboard:
Two programmer-musicians wrote every possible MIDI melody in existence to a hard drive, copyrighted the whole thing, and then released it all to the public in an attempt to stop musicians from getting sued.
And:
To determine the finite nature of melodies, Riehl and Rubin developed an algorithm that recorded every possible 8-note, 12-beat melody combo. This used the same basic tactic some hackers use to guess passwords: Churning through every possible combination of notes until none remained. Riehl says this algorithm works at a rate of 300,000 melodies per second.
Once a work is committed to a tangible format, it’s considered copyrighted. And in MIDI format, notes are just numbers.
This won’t stop musicians from getting sued for copyright infringement, at least until this is used, successfully, in a lawsuit defense.
And if it is successful, are all bets off? Will wholesale copyright theft follow?
Brooks Barnes, NYTimes:
Mr. Iger, who has run Disney for nearly 15 years, would be replaced as chief executive by Bob Chapek, a 27-year veteran of the entertainment conglomerate who has most recently served as chairman of Disney’s theme parks and consumer products businesses.
And:
“In thinking about what I want to accomplish before I leave the company at the end of ’21, getting everything right creatively would be my No. 1 goal. I could not do that if I were running the company on a day-to-day basis.”
And:
Mr. Chapek, who has limited creative experience, became the seventh chief executive in Disney’s nearly 100-year history. He can come across as a bit stiff in comparison to the magnetic Mr. Iger, whose celebrated run at the company has made him a corporate celebrity.
From a public point of view, this was absolutely an abrupt move, timed unfortunately to a stock market correction.
Gonna be hard to replace Iger, though Chapek seems a reasonable choice. Chapek oversaw construction of the Disney theme park’s massively successful Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge and Rise of the Resistance ride. No small thing.
This is one of those tips that’s worth going through, just to understand the mechanics of how calendars and reminders are stored in iCloud. Worth tucking away for a day you hope will never come, when your calendars or reminders come up missing or accidentally deleted.
Looking for a wall or desk mounted arm for a new display? Or just a stand? Follow the headline link, a couple of taps and you’re there.
Michael Potuck, 9to5Mac:
It’s great to see Apple’s Pro Display XDR on the market but it’s likely not the best fit for the majority of users with a starting price of $5,000 without a stand. Let’s take a look at some of the best USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 displays available for MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and iPad Pro in the $400-$1,300 range.
Thinking about buying a display for your Mac? This review is worth a look.
Apple posted two white papers, technology overviews of the Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR:
Easy reads, lots of great detail and images.
Netflix blog:
Whether you love books, music, films or TV, top 10 lists are a great way to find out what’s popular. So today we’re rolling out a new Top 10 feature on Netflix.
This new row – complete with its own special design – will enable you to see what is most popular on Netflix in your country. It will be updated every day and the position of the row will vary depending on how relevant the shows and films are to you.
Couple of things leap to mind here. First, there’s that headline. One Netflix row that’s been around a long, long time is called Popular on Netflix. So no, that headline is just plain wrong.
But that aside, this new top 10 list strikes me as yet another slice through Netflix that is more adding to the mess than useful. How about making all these rows optional so I can limit what shows up to the rows that I find useful.
And how about adding IMDb ratings (or your rating system of choice) to the mix? And maybe give me some sorting options so I can look at movies sorted by said ratings, perhaps with a subsort by year?
Lastly, it’ll be interesting when a top 10 list makes sense for Apple TV+.
[VIDEO] Another in the WILL IT WORK series. Might be my favorite one. If nothing else, be sure to jump to about :24 and see what Siri thinks about all this. Heh.
Can this possibly succeed? Video embedded in main Loop post.
Imagine a heads up display on the windscreen of your car, one that alerted you to pedestrians on the periphery of your vision.
Watch the video embedded here:
https://twitter.com/perceptive_auto/status/1227611099186581506
I get that this is about software for self-driving cars, but I’d love to benefit from a display like this, especially at night.
Alison Herman, The Ringer:
Apple TV+ was always bound to be a fraught enterprise, bringing a computer manufacturer into an industry outside its core skill set and awash with other well-funded bids for viewers’ attention. Its history to date has borne that difficulty out, culminating in the recently reported suspension of sprawling page-to-screen project Shantaram. This is a guide to Apple’s bumps in the road, which began well before TV+ actually made it to our living rooms.
This is not an article trolling Apple TV+ shows. Instead, it’s a look at some of the setbacks Apple has faced rolling into this new market.
Is this sort of thing par-for-the-course in the TV/movie/streaming industry? Typical for a rookie in this space? Or has Apple had it rougher than most?
[VIDEO] Apple:
See how iPhone 11 Pro captured the otherworldly 4K video using the Ultra Wide camera in this deep dive into the Valley of Fire.
Truly beautiful footage (embedded in main Loop post), showing off the iPhone 11 Pro’s Ultra Wide camera. But because of licensing issues, you won’t see this footage in 4K in macOS Safari. For that, you’ll need to fire up Google Chrome.
This is not new. But it is strange, having to turn to Google to show off an Apple feature.