The Verge:

enator Elizabeth Warren proposed breaking up Amazon, Google, and Facebook yesterday in a post published on Medium. Her plan, which comes as the Democratic presidential primary contest continues to heat up, would classify any company that runs a marketplace and makes more than $25 billion a year in revenue as a “platform utility” and prohibit those companies from using those platforms from selling their own products.

But Warren’s proposal didn’t mention Apple, which clearly matches the same set of criteria: the company makes far more than $25 billion a year in revenue, and it operates the iOS App Store, in which it distributes its own apps.

This is just electioneering and won’t amount to anything but I thought it odd that, when asked why she didn’t include Apple in her original post, the senator said, “No reason.” Apple is larger than all of the other companies she originally mentioned.

TechRepublic:

Photo-editing applications are plentiful, and many simplify the previously challenging task of applying filters, adjusting hues, and improving photo finish quality, whether the images are for personal use, blogs, commercial websites, marketing materials, ads, or other professional pursuits. Luminar and sister app Aurora HDR have gained popularity by simplifying the process to just a few clicks for busy professionals, while still retaining customization options for users with more image-editing knowledge and experience. Skylum, which manufactures both applications, has loaded performance and integration improvements within Luminar 3 for Mac.

I’m a big fan of Skylum (formerly Macphun) and am testing out their AirMagic software for drone pilots. I like Luminar 2 and the “performance improvements” will be very welcome. It can be slow on my Mac.

Kotaku:

Across the globe, Gary Gygax was eulogized everywhere from the New York Times to the Guardian, and in essays by pop fantasy titans like Wil Wheaton and Neil Gaiman. In his obituaries, Gygax was celebrated as the world’s first and greatest dungeon master, the father of role-playing and founder of a tradition that would feed the rise of blockbuster role-playing video game series like Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft and Skyrim.

Eleven years after the death of Gary Gygax, there are still battles over who will control his legacy—the rights to his name, his biography, his memorial, his intellectual property, and the future of countless other priceless artifacts, among them Gary Gygax’s original dungeon, the maps to an 11-level magical castle where he prototyped a fantasy role-playing game that 8 million people play every year.

Such a bizarre, sad story about something many of knew and loved as kids and many still love as adults.

Ars Technica:

Ask a record-collecting audiophile why vinyl is back and you may hear a common refrain: “Of course vinyl’s back! It’s a more accurate reproduction of the original! It just sounds better than digital!”

To this I reply, “Does it really, though? Or is it just EQ’d better? And since when did we start caring so much about the perfect fidelity of our recordings? I grew up—as did many of you—listening to cassette tapes on a boom box. They sounded horrible, and we loved them.”

I think the real reason for vinyl’s return goes much deeper than questions of sound quality.

I loved vinyl and, if I had the space, I might even have a record player with some old albums lying around to play every now and then.

FastCompany:

Making an ad with an in-your-face social point of view isn’t something many corporations are willing to bet on. There was a certain amount of doubt at Nike when the advertising department showed the Kaepernick “Just Do It” 30th anniversary TV ad to CEO Mark Parker and Knight. “Parker looked at it and went, ‘Gulp.’ And they said, ‘Well, here’s the deal. If we’re going to get this in time for the campaign, you’ve got 24 hours,’” Knight recalls.

It’s a shame this had to be “controversial” in the first place.

Gizmodo:

Automation is often presented as an inexorably advancing force, whether it’s ushering in a threat to jobs or a promise of increased leisure or larger profits. We’re made to imagine the robots rising, increasingly mechanized systems of production, more streamlined modes of everyday living. But the truth is that automation technology and automated systems very often fail. And even when they do, they nonetheless frequently wind up stranded in our lives.

For every automated appliance or system that actually makes performing a task easier—dishwashers, ATMs, robotic factory arms, say—there seems to be another one—self-checkout kiosks, automated phone menus, mass email marketing—that actively makes our lives worse.

I’ve taken to calling this second category, simply, shitty automation.

While I don’t loathe it as much as the writer, I certainly never look forward to any kind of self-checkout.

Bloomberg:

According to the company’s annual Supplier Responsibility Report, just two cases of bonded labor were found last year, involving 287 employees. That’s too many, to be sure, but it’s incredible progress compared with two years ago, when 10 violations were uncovered. By employee numbers, it’s an 82 percent improvement from last year alone.

Honest question — is any other company, especially in tech, as transparent as Apple with regards to its Asian supply chain?

This really takes me back. Clarus was one of the elements that really showed the difference between Apple and the rest of the gray, gray world. I miss that particular brand of quirkiness.

Stephen Hackett does a nice job bringing this history to life in the video embedded below.

Moof!

Marketplace:

All the bad press about Facebook might be catching up to the company. New numbers from Edison Research show an an estimated 15 million fewer users in the United States compared to 2017.

15 million. Wow. That’s a big drop and, for Facebook, a worrying trend.

Interesting timing. This data follows hot on the heels of Mark Zuckerberg’s A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking.

Too little, too late? It certainly is for me.

Variety:

Spotify, Google, Pandora and Amazon have teamed up to appeal a controversial ruling by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board that, if it goes through, would increase payouts to songwriters by 44%, Variety has learned.

Note one big name missing from that list. Apple.

Sources say that Apple Music is alone among the major streaming services in not planning to appeal — as confirmed by songwriters’ orgs rushing to heap praise on Apple while condemning the seemingly unified front of the other digital companies.

And:

Bart Herbison, executive director of the Nashville Songwriters Association International: “It is unfortunate that Amazon and Spotify decided to file an appeal on the CRB’s decision to pay American songwriters higher digital mechanical royalties,” he said in a statement. “Many songwriters have found it difficult to stay in the profession in the era of streaming music. You cannot feed a family when you earn hundreds of dollars for millions of streams.”

And:

Israelite did single out Apple for praise for not participating in an appeal. “We thank Apple Music for accepting the CRB decision and continuing to be a friend to songwriters,” he said. “While Spotify and Amazon surely hope this will play out in a quiet appellate courtroom, every songwriter and every fan of music should stand up and take notice.

Indeed.

If you’ve never taken the time to play with Shortcuts, dig into this archive. It’s a terrific resource for interesting shortcuts, but the process of downloading and running a shortcut is also a good learning experience.

To get started, first be sure you’ve got the Shortcuts app downloaded from the iOS App Store. Run it once, just to get the on boarding out of the way, then exit.

Next, follow the headline link on your iOS device, scroll down, pick a category, and pick a shortcut. One I particularly love is Music > Apple Music Wrapped, which creates a detailed report for the music you’ve listened to in any particular year.

Tap the “Get the shortcut here” link, which will bring you into the Shortcuts app, then tap the Get Shortcut button.

Lots of choices to make, interface to make your way through, all of which gives you a sense of what you can do with Shortcuts. It also shows the immense amount of work that Federico and the MacStories team put into this effort.

Once you jump through all the hoops, return to Shortcuts and tap the Library tab at the bottom of the screen. That’s where you’ll find the Apple Music Wrapped shortcut. Tap the ellipsis (…) to see all the steps that went into the shortcut.

And, apropos of nothing, my favorite artist of 2018 was Kevin Penkin. I listen to an awful lot of anime soundtracks.

New York Times:

> The second-to-last Blockbuster, a squat blue-and-yellow slab wedged next to a real estate agency in Western Australia, will stop renting videos on Thursday and shut down for good at the end of the month. Two stores in Alaska, part of the final group of Blockbuster outlets in the United States, closed in July. > > That will make the Blockbuster in Bend, Ore., one of a kind: a corporate remnant, just off the highway, near a cannabis retailer where you get high quality CBD joints.

And:

> The store has several years left on its lease and a license agreement that its owners sign annually with Dish Network, which bought Blockbuster for $320 million in 2011.

I hope it never closes. A throwback to another time, when Back to the Future was still in the future.

But also, what an investment decision by Dish. $320 million, at just the wrong moment in time. Wow!

Two things I drew from this post (which came via this Cult of Mac post):

• The Samsung Galaxy S9 is a pretty horrible investment, dropping about 60% in nine months, as compared to the iPhone X, which dropped about 30% in the same span.

• The worst time to trade in your iPhone is in the 3 months following the September iPhone event. This from the headline linked article:

A massive 68.86% of the iPhone X and 8’s total yearly depreciation was seen in Q4 following the Sept 2018 Apple Keynote (31.14% of their value between Q1-Q3). The months after the keynote is a trade-in black hole consumers should avoid.

iPhone values trend upwards every January. Lots more info in the article. Interesting.

LA Times:

…consumer prices for frames and lenses are so astronomically high, with markups often approaching 1,000%.

if you wear designer glasses, there’s a very good chance you’re wearing Luxottica frames.

The company’s owned and licensed brands include Armani, Brooks Brothers, Burberry, Chanel, Coach, DKNY, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Kors, Oakley, Oliver Peoples, Persol, Polo Ralph Lauren, Ray-Ban, Tiffany, Valentino, Vogue and Versace.

Along with LensCrafters, Luxottica also runs Pearle Vision, Sears Optical, Sunglass Hut and Target Optical, as well as the insurer EyeMed Vision Care.

The monopoly EssilorLuxottica holds on the eyewear industry is obscene. In our small town, we’ve only got two places we can buy prescription glasses or sunglasses. Both carry the same product and both charge about the same prices and those prices are often hundreds of dollars. If you’re poor and/or don’t have a health care plan that covers you, you simply can’t afford to wear glasses. Even if you do have a plan, glasses are still going to cost a minimum of $400 that someone has to pay.

Motherboard:

Dev-fused devices are sometimes called prototypes in the security research industry. They are essentially phones that have not finished the production process, or have been reverted to a development state.

These rare iPhones have many security features disabled, allowing researchers to probe them much more easily than the iPhones you can buy at a store. Since the Black Hat talk, dev-fused iPhones have become a tool that security researchers around the world use to find previously unknown iPhone vulnerabilities (known as zero days), Motherboard has learned.

Fascinating look at a world few of us know about.

The Daily Beast:

One of the most fiercely debated new developments is the question of how the wood is “seasoned” before being made into barrels. Seasoning takes into account the time between when the tree is cut down, inspected, rough-milled into staves and then made into barrels. While it sounds straightforward, the wood needs to be dried between milling and becoming a barrel—anywhere from four to about 48 months of air drying, and/or kiln drying.

With proper seasoning, along with the toasting and charring that creates sweeter flavors, oak becomes a major partner in the creation of whiskey flavor. That’s why seasoning has become a selling point for the higher end of the barrel and bourbon market.

Until I moved to Tennessee, I had no idea how important the physical barrel was to various whiskeys and bourbons.

This is part of an ad campaign for Halo Top ice cream. The ads are uniformly bleak. But I kind of love them. Not sure why.

Here’s one (embedded below), follow the headline link for more.

Think about handling a phone call on your iPhone. Imagine the process of changing audio sources (switch from your car or AirPods to the speaker or handset, for example). Imagine switching to some other app to look something up while you are on the call, with that call status bar taking up the top of the screen.

Now take a look at this tweet, watch the embedded video:

CallBar XS – new concept UI implemented… coming soon! pic.twitter.com/wWk6g3iDwM

— Elias Limneos (@limneos) March 4, 2019

I love this concept. I believe it is a jailbreak app, not something a third party could ship on mainstream iOS. But there’s a tremendous amount of flexibility being shown here.

Follow the headline link and scroll down about halfway to that animated GIF showing a piece of glass, folded over and being repeatedly squished and released. To me, that is the future of foldables.

That is super-thin glass, 75µm thin. That’s ballpark the thickness of a human hair. And that curve gets down to a 5mm radius.

Fold it over and over again, and there’s no crease. Plastics crease when folded, glass like this doesn’t.

My instinct is that Apple will hold out for glass like this if and when they ever release any sort of foldable iPhone. Details are all in the article.

Benjamin Mayo, on the promise of Siri Shortcuts:

This means Siri can now be smarter by drawing on the capabilities of many more apps. You can order coffee. Control third party audio apps like Overcast or Pandora. Plan travel itineraries with Kayak. All with your voice talking to your intelligent personal assistant.

Except that’s not really true. That is how Apple likes to market the feature but it’s a twisted form of reality. Shortcuts are not making Siri smarter, in fact they are dumber than pretty much anything Siri has done to date. Shortcuts put the burden on the user to do the legwork of synthesising data sources and integrating the apps into the voice service.

That’s the “puts the burden on the user” part. Benjamin continues:

Shortcuts require registration and administration to do anything at all with Siri. The user has to pre-emptively search out every command available in a certain app and then add each in turn to Siri. Registration requires the user to think up the phrase they want to use to trigger the command on the spot. Siri can then trigger these actions when that same phrase is said back to it at a later date.

There is no intelligence here. Siri transcribes the user’s voice and looks for an exact text match of that phrase in the database of voice shortcut phrases that the user has generated off their own back. If a match is found, it proceeds. Otherwise, failure.

And that’s the “no intelligence” part. If I trigger Siri, I can say “what’s today’s weather” or “what’s it like out today” and get the same response. Siri maps lots of things to “tell me the weather”. But with shortcuts, the user does the core creation. There’s no way for Siri to suss out other phrases that mean the same thing.

I think this is an excellent essay, worth reading.

I would add this though. Lots of apps ship with useful shortcuts, and there is a vibrant community building and sharing shortcuts with the world. Spend some time browsing those shortcuts, find one you like, and it’s pretty easy to bring the shortcut onto your own iPhone, even customize it. Definitely a power user move, but one with tremendous value.

Also, take a minute, fire up Siri and say:

“Open Siri Settings”

Siri will jump to the Siri Settings page and, there at the top, you’ll see a list of shortcuts that were created for you, based on recent behavior. To me, those shortcuts are a sign of intelligence at work. And easy to use, too. Press the plus sign to the right of a shortcut, give it a name, and you’re off to the races.

MacRumors:

iPhones with aftermarket batteries installed by third-party repair shops are now eligible for service at Genius Bars and Apple Authorized Service Providers, according to an internal Apple document obtained by MacRumors from three reliable sources.

And:

The updated guidelines went into effect Thursday and should apply worldwide. Apple will still decline service for iPhones with third-party logic boards, enclosures, microphones, Lightning connectors, headphone jacks, volume and sleep/wake buttons, TrueDepth sensor arrays, and certain other components.

Good news and a small step towards right to repair.

Book Riot:

The great thing about books? You can never get enough of them. But if you find your book collection becoming unmanageable, there are plenty of home library apps to help you get it under control. Take stock of the tomes on your increasingly crowded shelves with these eight top-rated cataloging home library apps for iPhone and Android. Then you can carry your personal library right in your pocket for easy reference.

Because I’ve moved so often (13 times in 17 years!), I no longer have a large book collection. But, when I did, I used and loved the original Delicious Library app.

If you care about the Activity badges, this does a nice job laying out all the Activity badge possibilities.

Gotta catch ’em all!

SlashGear:

Arriving alongside the Samsung Galaxy S10, the Galaxy Buds promise the convenience of AirPods but with the sort of customization Android fans love. With a $129 price tag, though, is this all too good to be true?

The review is surprisingly good. Lots of customization, Qi-charging, ear-tips (to customize the fit, included) and equalizer controls.

I hope the next generation AirPods includes all these features.