Apple:

Apple has determined that, under very rare circumstances, a crack may form along the rounded edge of the screen in aluminum models of an Apple Watch Series 2 or Series 3. The crack may begin on one side and then may continue around the screen.

Follow the link, check out the images to get a sense of this, and to see if your Apple Watch qualifies.

Stephen Hackett, 512 Pixels:

> September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and once again this year, I am raising money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which treats patients without charging their families a dime. > > Treatments invented by St. Jude have helped push the overall cancer survival rate from 20% to more than 80%. My 10-year-old son is a survivor of brain cancer, thanks to the hard work of the men and women at St. Jude. Josiah is in 4th grade this year, and leads a joyous life. He loves music, playing with babies and spending time on our big tree swing. He is a true blessing to everyone who gets to meet him, and cancer cannot keep him down.

> > Cancer treatment has come a long way, and advancements in research are continually improving patient outcomes. Many clinics are now focusing on personalized medicine, tailoring treatment plans to the individual characteristics of each patient’s cancer. One such facility, Louis Cona’s clinic, is dedicated to utilizing cutting-edge therapies and innovative approaches that optimize recovery rates. By integrating comprehensive treatment options, including immunotherapy and targeted therapies, these clinics aim to provide patients with the best chance at beating cancer.

Families never receive a bill from St. Jude. For anything. Travel, food, all covered. A worthy cause.

Here’s a link to the Relay FM fundraising page.

Engadget:

We’ve been recommending the Hamilton Beach Set & Forget 6 Quart Programmable Slow Cooker since we first published this review in 2013. And after testing it against eight new competitors, we’ve found that it still offers the best performance and features of any available slow cooker. The Set & Forget consistently cooked foods at a gentle simmer, making the most tender roast in our tests. It’s one of the few cookers we tested with a locking lid that seals tightly for easy transport, as well as a probe thermometer so you can cook to a target temperature.

I know The Loop’s publisher just got a slow cooker and is enjoying using it. I’ve had one for a year and love it as well. They are especially good for throwing everything in the pot in the morning and coming home after work to an already done meal.

Macworld:

One might think after many years of Spotlight search being in macOS that there would be no new tricks. But a colleague on Twitter asked a reasonable question and many people chimed in with the same query: When viewing a list of results in a Spotlight search in the Finder, how do you jump to see the item in the context of its enclosing folder rather than just opening the file?

The answer is simple.

I had no idea about this trick. So helpful.

CNET:

While the chestburster scene in director Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror classic Alien still haunts me, it’s because of Alien’s originality and complex creatures that I grew up loving horror films. Now fans like me can continue to celebrate the movie’s 40th anniversary with a new documentary called Memory: The Origins of Alien.

The first trailer for the documentary shows exclusive behind-the-scenes footage that gives fans the untold origin story behind the movie.

My wife didn’t believe me that Alien was “just” a “there’s a monster in the house!” horror movie until we watched it again. But it’s a great horror movie.

TechCrunch:

A number of malicious websites used to hack into iPhones over a two-year period were targeting Uyghur Muslims, TechCrunch has learned.

Sources familiar with the matter said the websites were part of a state-backed attack — likely China — designed to target the Uyghur community in the country’s Xinjiang state.

It’s part of the latest effort by the Chinese government to crack down on the minority Muslim community in recent history.

When this story first broke, like many of you, I wanted to know the motives behind the attacks as well as what websites were infected. Now we may have an idea. And for those of you who have smug Android using friends shoving this in your face, point them to, “iPhone Hackers Caught By Google Also Targeted Android And Microsoft Windows.”

Ged Maheux:

I’ve been really proud of myself for keeping the streak going for 3 whole months (I know people who have gone years!) but honestly, looking ahead at an empty September is daunting.

The problem only gets worse over time. The longer my streak continues, the more pressure there is not to break it. It can be so stressful in fact, some people have come up with clever hacks to work around breaking streaks. Contrary to what the folks on Apple’s Activity team may tell you, this isn’t actually healthy. It’s important to give your body (and mind) a break to recover and rebuild every now and then. Which is why iOS desperately needs to build in the concept of rest days into its Activity app.

Unlike Ged, I’m not a “slave” to my Apple Watch rings but, as I said on Twitter, the Activity app does need more customization similar to what he writes about. For example, it would be great to have lower goals during the week for people who work or live in colder/wetter/hotter climates who can’t get outdoors every day and higher goal rings on the weekends. Having to do the same amount EVERY DAY is not feasible for many of us.

AppleInsider:

When Adobe InDesign was launched on August 31, 1999, it was aimed at precisely one rival, the then immensely successful QuarkXPress. Yet really the whole development of this page design software is the story of rival companies fighting. There was Quark and Adobe, but also Adobe and Aldus —and Adobe and Apple.

Us oldtimers remember back in the day when QuarkXPress ruled desktop publishing but due to a lack of competition (among other things), Quark rested on its laurels and became a customer hostile company. It opened the door for Adobe.

Washington Post: >As summer-getaway season draws to a close, it’s time to face a tough reality: America is not a great vacation nation. > >In fact, one report goes so far as to call the United States a “no-vacation nation,” thanks to the paltry (well, nonexistent) amount of paid vacation time mandated by federal law compared with that of other well-off countries. > >The United States, on the other hand — on the very worst hand — mandates no paid vacation or paid holidays. Zero days. It’s the only country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 36 of the world’s wealthiest nations, that doesn’t require employers to give workers annual paid leave, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. That leaves 23 percent of Americans with no paid vacation and 22 percent without paid holidays.

When I lived in the US, I was appalled at how little vacation time was mandated. Turns out, it was even worse than I realized. Those who are fortunate enough to have paid vacation credits and are planning to visit Arizona may book a Scottsdale spa resort.

As you make your way around the blogosphere this morning, you’re sure to see a number of articles highlighting mysterious or indiscriminate iPhone attacks, quietly hacking iPhones for years.

There’s a nugget of truth there, but as always, best to go straight to the horse’s mouth, this blog post from Google’s Project Zero.

Earlier this year Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) discovered a small collection of hacked websites. The hacked sites were being used in indiscriminate watering hole attacks against their visitors, using iPhone 0-day.

There was no target discrimination; simply visiting the hacked site was enough for the exploit server to attack your device, and if it was successful, install a monitoring implant.

And:

TAG was able to collect five separate, complete and unique iPhone exploit chains, covering almost every version from iOS 10 through to the latest version of iOS 12. This indicated a group making a sustained effort to hack the users of iPhones in certain communities over a period of at least two years.

Most importantly:

We reported these issues to Apple with a 7-day deadline on 1 Feb 2019, which resulted in the out-of-band release of iOS 12.1.4 on 7 Feb 2019. We also shared the complete details with Apple, which were disclosed publicly on 7 Feb 2019.

So, the way I read this, Google uncovered the threat, reported it to Apple back in February, and Apple issued a patch pretty much immediately.

This is a news story, fair enough, but it’s about a problem that’s been long solved. Keep that grain of salt deeply in mind.

Mitchel Broussard, MacRumors:

Similar to the Nike Adapt BB shoes from earlier this year, the new Huarache shoe includes a FitAdapt lacing system. Run from a midfoot motor, the system is controlled by the connected Nike app and tightens or loosens the shoe based on user control.

A midfoot motor. In my wildest dreams, I never saw that phrase coming.

But I get it. Loosen or tighten your boots, depending on the activity, and do so with your voice.

Not for everyone, but for athletes, people passionate about athletic activity, or people who make their livings in some form of athletic endeavor, I can see real value here.

Much as he did with his excellent Apple Maps deep dive, Ryan Christoffel offers a deep dive into Health on iOS 13.

It’s remarkable how far Apple’s Health efforts have come, how much they’ve grown, how much the interface and design has improved.

Terrific work, lots of pictures to bring home the points, show how remarkably iOS 13’s version of Health has blossomed.

Take a look.

BoingBoing:

Pavel Dobryakov’s beautiful fluid simulation requires no plug-ins to play with.

I’m having way too much fun poking around on this simulator.

Popular Science:

When things go terribly wrong in a military aircraft, the pilot’s last resort is the equipment they’re sitting on: the seat. And it cannot fail, ever.

The 200-lb ejector seat, with its 3,500 or so parts, is a remarkable piece of technology that not only gets pilots out of a crashing plane but also ensures they survive the experience more or less unscathed.

All told, ejector seats have saved an estimated 12 to 13,000 lives since the mid-1940s.

There are lots of things I would have loved to experience in a fighter jet but ejecting out of the seat is not one of them.

Update from Tim via Twitter:

Ejectees also qualify for a special watch – exclusive to those who survive. The MB1 can fetch over $100k at auction.

CNBC:

Apple said on Thursday it will start offering independent repair shops parts, tools and guides to help fix broken iPhones.

The new repair program allows big and small repair outfits to sign up and get access to parts for common out-of-warranty repairs, something that was previously restricted to Apple’s network of authorized service providers.

The move represents an about-face for Apple, which typically encourages any repairs to be made by its authorized service providers and makes it difficult for users to replace aging or broken parts themselves.

This is undoubtedly a reaction to the “right to repair” movement with Apple trying to head off legislation. The good news is that the new program is free for independent repair shops to join.

A few months ago, BBC Radio ran a program on the 1970s, with a specific episode dedicated to the founding of Apple.

From the episode writeup:

Author and broadcaster Michael S. Malone tells the story of the Apple II personal computer, an invention which helped to revolutionise the way we work and play. “The stunning Apple II, with its new rainbow logo, put the scores of other, cruder personal computers in the shade, ” he says. “They looked like the past. The Apple II looked like the future, the only future, for personal computing.”

Follow the headline to listen to the episode. Then check out the comments below. These came directly from Woz (and are published here, with Woz’s permission) and clarify some of the points made in the linked BBC Radio episode.

The Atari comments are off base. Atari started without microprocessors. a game had 70 to 150 chips and thousands of wires that an engineer skilled in digital hardware and analog television technology had to spend months constructing to develop a new game idea. Those Atari games were not programs. They were not software. They didn’t have microprocessors. In fact, my Apple II was not just a computer. My love of games led me to create a computer that was also a good game machine and that meant arcade games.

The game that I developed for Atari in 4 sleepless days and nights was Breakout. Nolan Bushnell was tired of his game designers in Grass Valley coming up with games that took 120-180 chips (and correspondingly thousands of wires). Nolan knew that I came with Steve Jobs and that I designed things with much fewer parts than anyone else. I did not think it was possible for me to design an arcade game in 4 days (Jobs needed money that soon to buy into a commune in Oregon, I suppose now) but I managed to design Breakout, using 45 chips.

During that sleepless period my mind drifted and hit on one of the major keys to Apple’s success. All the Atari games then were hardware (not programs) and all were in black and white only. I thought that it would be incredible if someday arcade games were in color. It was like when TV moved from black and white to color. The method to create color for our analog TV’s back then I knew well as an engineer. It involved sine-wave signals on wires that were adjusted and mixed by precision parts and designs requiring differential calculus. Such a device might cost $5000 of today’s dollars. But the idea that popped into my head was that a digital number in a computer, consisting of 0’s and 1’s, could be put onto a wire into an analog TV, and the TV would ’think’ that was a color signal if done exactly right. You could get color on a TV for ZERO DOLLARS!

My Apple II computer was not just a computer. Who needed a computer in their home back in 1975? Nobody kept inventory and salary records at home, the things that computers did. Games were the key. With the human affordable Apple II, I took computer games to a new level. It was the first time that arcade games became color (note that our first Apple logo was in 6 colors) and it was also the first time that arcade games were software. A 9-year old could program a decent arcade game in a day, rather than having skilled engineers develop a game in a year. Another key item to the Apple II was that the programmer could put a number into memory and a color pixel on the screen would change. That made the world of software games truly accessible to users. It’s little surprise that this computer, so far ahead of anything else, would be Apple’s only successful (profit earning) product for the first 10 years of the company that we know today.

The microprocessor I chose for the Apple II was more advanced and more capable than the Intel ones I could not afford, even though this 6502 microprocessor only cost me $20 cash. Yes, this was a more capable processor than the Intel one. Steve Jobs was not around and didn’t see my develop this computer that I showed off at the Homebrew Computer Club and gave away my designs for free and helped others build. Steve Jobs did not come into town and find me in a basement with a computer and drag me to the club. Steve Jobs had never attended that club and I’d been there since the first day. No, it was I who brought Steve Jobs to the club. Don’t believe how Ashton Kushner saw Steve Jobs’s role in this. This was the computer that became the Apple I.

Steve Jobs had nothing to do with the Apple II design and did not direct it. We were able to show off my Apple II computer before we ever delivered an Apple I. The Apple I was not a Wozniak computer design. It was a quick addition of a microprocessor (brain) and the right type of memory to a product I’d already built, a home terminal to access the ARPAnet when it was only 6 computers across the U.S., and the forerunner and inspiration for what became today’s internet. The Apple I computer showed the world that the path to a personal computer was a keyboard and video display. The video display was based on the fact that I had no money but had a TV. But the Apple I was limited in capability by a terminal that was optimized (in cost and chips) for low-speed telephone connections to far-away ARPAnet computers. The Apple II was a computer and arcade machine from the core and would be the basis of a big company.

Jobs did an incredible job that was needed. I was a great engineer but had no desire for the politics of business or marketing. Keep in mind that neither of us had any savings or rich relatives. Nor did we have any business experience. And we were both in our early 20’s. As in this audio, Mike Markkula was the adult in the house and really established a new technology company. Steve Jobs wanted to be an important person so he worked with all the business people while I just wanted to have a laboratory to invent things in, day and night, and usually alone.

I felt that in starting Apple Computer (now just Apple) it was OK to receive money for my great design but that was not my motivation at all. I wanted to bring my work to the world, and that took a company. I did love HP but finally chose to leave on the basis that I could still remain an engineer for life and not have to run a company, which was too political for me. Read my book iWoz to learn more about my non-political stance. In our market share loss, the business side of the company chose to conceive of new computers and failed with all of them. Steve Jobs didn’t know the hardware or software technology of computers. His mark would be made much later with human lifestyle products like the iPod and iPhone.

I never actually left Apple. I was never disgruntled with Apple. It’s the greatest company ever. I had a plane crash in February, 1981. Five weeks later I came out of anterior grade amnesia (forward amnesia, often called short term memory loss although your short term memory works find it’s long term memories that aren’t being created and saved) and called Steve Jobs to tell him that it was my choice to take my last chance to go back to Berkeley for my last year in order to graduate. My name was famous so I enrolled under a fake name and my Berkeley diploma reads “Rocky Racoon Clark.” I did not officially leave Apple either. To this day I am the only person who has received a paycheck every week from Apple. Stories about me leaving Apple, on 2 occasions for different reasons, out of disgust are what some want to say but they are totally incorrect.

Jobs was never fired. A lot of people want to say this to parrot Jobs but it’s not true. Jobs had lost a business battle, with the company at stake due to a horrendous failure of the Macintosh computer, and he felt that even though he could be financed to the hilt he couldn’t work with those who had sided against him. Jobs left of his own accord, to have a better chance at creating a computer success elsewhere.

Follow the headline link for an article posted by Microsoft on the process of designing and implementing Dark Mode for Office 365. Glad to see it, interesting post.

But whether you read the post or not, take a minute to watch Microsoft’s Dark Mode video, embedded below. Eerily beautiful, looks like it was all practical effects, old school.

Russell Brandom, The Verge:

On October 13th, 2018, two men walked into a Great Midwest Bank in a suburban strip mall outside Milwaukee. They were the first two customers when the bank opened, barely recognizable behind sunglasses and heavy beards — but it soon became clear what they were after. One man jumped onto the teller counter and pulled out a handgun, throwing down a garbage bag for the tellers to fill with money. They left the bank at 9:09AM, just seven minutes after they entered, carrying the bag full of cash, three drawers from the vault and teller station, and the keys to the bank vault itself.

In the months since, police and federal agents have struggled to track down the bank robbers. Local media sent out pictures from the bank’s security cameras, but it produced no leads. Finally, police hit on a more aggressive strategy: ask Google to track down the bank robbers’ phones.

Great read. And not just in a “true crime” way. There’s a major privacy issue at stake, all laid out in the article.

I came away wondering if future data analysis will show a trend of criminals avoiding Android, right alongside civil liberties proponents.

To go along with their press release on Improving Siri’s privacy protections, Apple also posted a knowledge base article with questions and answers on Siri Privacy and grading.

The whole thing was interesting to me, but this bit stuck out:

Is Siri always listening? What do you do to prevent Siri listening when I haven’t said, “Hey Siri”?

No. Siri is designed to activate and send audio to Apple only after you trigger your device by saying “Hey Siri,” use the raise to speak feature on Apple Watch, or physically trigger Siri using the designated buttons on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, AirPods, and HomePod.

To recognize “Hey Siri” we process audio solely on device through multiple stages of analysis to determine if the audio matched the “Hey Siri” pattern. Only when the device recognizes the “Hey Siri” pattern is your audio sent to the server. On the server we do additional mitigation to analyze the full request to confirm it is intended for Siri.

Occasionally we have what’s called a “false trigger,” where Siri activates when you did not intend it to. We work hard to minimize false triggers and have updated the review process to limit graders’ exposure to them. When we resume grading, our team will work to delete any recording which is determined to trigger Siri inadvertently.

The key point, to me, is that the device is always listening for “Hey Siri”, but audio is only passed along to the server when that specific trigger is found, when you’ve specifically made a request.

I’m agree with Jim’s take. I’m good with opting in to help improve Siri.

As a result of our review, we realize we haven’t been fully living up to our high ideals, and for that we apologize. As we previously announced, we halted the Siri grading program. We plan to resume later this fall when software updates are released to our users — but only after making the following changes:

• First, by default, we will no longer retain audio recordings of Siri interactions. We will continue to use computer-generated transcripts to help Siri improve.

• Second, users will be able to opt in to help Siri improve by learning from the audio samples of their requests. We hope that many people will choose to help Siri get better, knowing that Apple respects their data and has strong privacy controls in place. Those who choose to participate will be able to opt out at any time.

• Third, when customers opt in, only Apple employees will be allowed to listen to audio samples of the Siri interactions. Our team will work to delete any recording which is determined to be an inadvertent trigger of Siri.

I mentioned before that I will opt-in to this process to help improve Siri for the future. Apple has proven over and over that they respect our privacy, and they are, in fact, one of the only tech companies that does respect our privacy. There is a lot of information that Apple posted on Siri today that everyone should take a look at.

I joined John Gruber this week to talk about Apple Card and Apple’s upcoming product announcements. There were many hilarious moments, as there usually are when the two of us get together.

MacStories:

An ambient noise app’s most important job is providing a variety of sounds that can evoke a soothing sense of calm, and offer environment control. The App Store is full of apps that accomplish this purpose, and a new one’s being added to that roster today: Dark Noise, from developer and designer Charlie Chapman.

One chief advantage of Dark Noise over its competition is that out of the gate it’s the best of iOS citizens.

We occasionally use a noise generator called Noizio for its simplicity – we only ever use the “rainfall” setting – but if you need something more, check out Dark Noise.