Good piece from Emojipedia.

The more emoji that join the list, the more we need a re-roll of the emoji interface in iOS. At the very least, I’d love for iOS to steal the customizable Favorites list from macOS, allowing me a favorites pane that I control, in addition to the dynamic pane populated with the most recently used emoji.

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

Security researcher Linuz Henze has shared a video demonstration of what is claimed to be a macOS Mojave exploit to access passwords stored in the Keychain. However, he has said he is not sharing his findings with Apple out of protest.

Henze has publicly shared legitimate iOS vulnerabilities in the past, so he has a track record of credibility.

However, Henze is frustrated that Apple’s bug bounty program only applies to iOS, not macOS, and has decided not to release more information about his latest Keychain invasion.

As Apple explores changes to its bug reporting process, this should join the FaceTime eavesdropping bug as case studies for how information like this flows back to Apple.

Raising the Roof:

We are a national leader in long-term solutions to ending homelessness. Each year, we support more than 50 community agencies across the country, and work together with partners in all sectors to address the issue. We bring awareness and attention to the challenges of homelessness, engaging Canadians through public education.

Buy a toque to support long-term solutions to homelessness. Proceeds go to agencies working directly with people experiencing homelessness.

I’m a big fan of this organization and the work they do. Toques can be considered uniquely Canadian but even if you’re not from the Great White North, buy one and give a damn.

Apple today announced that Deirdre O’Brien is taking on new responsibilities for Apple’s retail and online stores in an expanded role as senior vice president of Retail + People, reporting to CEO Tim Cook. After five transformative years leading the company’s retail and online stores, Angela Ahrendts plans to depart Apple in April for new personal and professional pursuits.

In her expanded role, Deirdre will bring her three decades of Apple experience to lead the company’s global retail reach, focused on the connection between the customer and the people and processes that serve them. She will continue to lead the People team, overseeing all People-related functions, including talent development and Apple University, recruiting, employee relations and experience, business partnership, benefits, compensation, and inclusion and diversity.

Wow.

Watch the video embedded in the tweet below. It’s short. And incredible.

This piece of art from Thomas Deininger is one of the most incredible things I’ve seen. pic.twitter.com/fJmKg9wpD2

— Martin Montague (@MartinM_Media) February 4, 2019

I struggle to wrap my head around the fact that the artist sees the zoomed out image in the collection of materials they used.

Thomas Deininger, I salute you.

CNBC:

Grant Thompson, the 14-year-old who found Apple’s FaceTime flaw, may get a bounty for his discovery.

“I kind of found this one on accident, which is pretty surprising to me that like Apple didn’t get this and a 14-year-old kid found it by accident,” Thompson told CNBC.

And:

[Grant’s mother] said a high-level Apple executive flew to Tucson, Arizona, on Friday afternoon to meet with Grant. The executive, whom she declined to name, “thanked us in person and also asked for our feedback, asked us how they could improve their reporting process.”

“They also indicated that Grant would be eligible for the bug bounty program. And we would hear from their security team the following week in terms of what that meant.

I do hope Apple finds ways to improve their reporting process. Ideally, the new process would help egregious, widely reported bugs quickly find their way to the appropriate team at Apple, perhaps with a more publicly exposed status system that makes it clear the reported bug is valid, with a fix in the works.

The idea of tons of iPhone owners duplicating the work of others by reporting a known bug, all in an attempt to get it to rise to the right team at Apple seems incredibly wasteful to me. No easy fix here, glad Apple is working on this.

Apple sells HomePod for $349. That BestBuy deal is a significant savings.

[Via 9to5Toys]

Entertainment Weekly:

In 1991, aspiring animator Mike Judge was a touring musician and grad student living outside of Dallas, Texas, when he channeled his past cubicle-life angst – from his former life as an engineer – into a 16mm short film called Office Space, featuring Milton. The vignette about a mumbling office worker and his condescending boss – which Judge drew, voiced and scored –would air on Comedy Central. It was a low-key launch for one of Hollywood’s most singular comedic voices who brought us the generation-defining MTV cartoon Beavis and Butt-Head, the eerily prescient 2006 satirical feature Idiocracy, and HBO’s Emmy-winning tech-nerd lampoon Silicon Valley among others.

The short film also inspired Judge’s live-action feature debut, Office Space: a box-office-flop-turned-cult-classic that ultimately became one of the most relatable workplace comedies of all time.

I generally hate “workplace comedies” but I saw this in theaters when my date and I were late getting to the movie we actually wanted to see. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard in a movie theater.

Washington Post:

In an age where we LOL and ROFL, where we transmit through Siri and Alexa instead of typing, where auto-correct both fixes and generates errors in our written work, we have to wonder: Can anyone spell anymore, and does it even matter?

First, it’s hard to tell whether spelling abilities have declined, partly because it’s not usually tested anymore in a way we can isolate and track.

We certainly aren’t teaching spelling in schools the way we once were, partly because of national Common Core standards released in 2010.

I think this is a fascinating question. My wife and I disagree on whether or not spelling should matter to our 13-year-old. What do you think?

MacRumors:

Target last month announced that it would begin accepting Apple Pay at all of its stores in the coming weeks. That rollout has now begun.

MacRumors readers have shared photos of NFC-enabled payment terminals at select Target stores in the Northeast and Midwest, including the White Plains, New York location below. The updated interface indicates that Apple Pay is accepted along with Google Pay, Samsung Pay, and contactless credit cards.

This is one of the last shovelfuls of dirt thrown onto the coffin of the ill-fated CurrentC platform.

9to5Mac:

Warby Parker is out with an update to its iOS app that brings a useful new feature to its collection of spectacles: Virtual Try-On. With Apple’s ARKit and TrueDepth camera tech, the company’s new software lets users see “the realistic color, texture, and size of each style— using just your iPhone X [and later]” while shopping for new glasses with its app.

Virtual Try-On is available today in the free Glasses by Warby Parker app for iPhone X, XS, XS Max, and XR users. There’s also a share option to send your Virtual Try-On results with others.

I haven’t tried the app yet but, as someone who went glasses shopping a few months ago for the first time, I can appreciate the idea behind the app and the relief from some of the tedium and frustration of trying to find the “right” pair of glasses.

ZDNet:

Over the last few months I’ve bought and tested a couple dozen USB-to-Lightning cables in the sub-$10 price bracket, and all in all, they’re pretty gnarly.

So what’s wrong with them?

Well, first off, every cable I bought that claimed to be a “genuine” Apple cable was a counterfeit. And poor quality counterfeits at that.

It’s frustrating that Apple charges so much for a “simple” cable but trying to save money may actually do more harm in the long run. Stick to “name brand” cables.

Charger tech is changing, moving from silicon to gallium nitride. And that means smaller/lighter form factors and, eventually, more power for less money.

The Verge takes a look at the first generation. Wondering when Apple will make the switch.

No Starch Press is a longtime publisher of books for developers. Over the weekend, they posted this tweet, calling out Amazon for selling a fake version of one of its books (H/T Robert Walter).

The book had the same title, same author, and a similar cover. But it was not printed by No Starch Press and, presumably, none of the money will make its way to No Starch or the author.

Book fakes have been around forever. Pretty early in my book writing career, I found out the ugly truth. When a book with any kind of demand appeared in print, the fake machinery kicked in. Someone (for me, it usually started in China) would buy a copy of the book, use a saw to cut off the spine/binding, then feed the pages into an optical character reader, creating a PDF of the book.

Once they had the fake book in hand, they could print a fake and sell it, or add the fake PDF to a torrent web site. Happened to me with every book I ever wrote.

But this particular fake appears to be surfaced by Amazon, the number one bookseller in the world. Here’s a link to what appears to be the fake. If I had not seen the original, I would never have known.

Amazon, you going to do anything about this?

The Verge:

In the early 2000s, simple images of text were enough to stump most spambots. In 2014, Google pitted one of its machine learning algorithms against humans in solving the most distorted text CAPTCHAs: the computer got the test right 99.8 percent of the time, while the humans got a mere 33 percent.

Google then moved to NoCaptcha ReCaptcha, which observes user data and behavior to let some humans pass through with a click of the “I’m not a robot” button, and presents others with the image labeling we see today. But the machines are once again catching up. All those awnings that may or may not be storefronts? They’re the endgame in humanity’s arms race with the machines.

Sadly, CAPTCHA’s seem like a necessary evil of today’s internet.

Ars Technica:

A team of Boston doctors tell the woebegone tale of an unnamed, 18-year-old professional athlete who unknowingly swallowed a wooden toothpick. After weeks of abdominal pain, multiple visits to emergency rooms, bloody poops, and a life-threatening infection, doctors finally discovered it—lodged in his colon, piercing through his intestinal wall and into a neighboring, large artery. Then there was the harrowing effort to remove it and patch him up.

I love these medial mystery stories but fair warning, don’t look at the photos unless you’ve got a strong stomach.

NBC News:

The rules were clear when she was growing up: Women were not allowed to fly U.S. military aircraft. But that was not going to stop Rosemary Bryant Mariner. The daughter of a Navy nurse and an Air Force pilot who had died in a plane crash when she was 3, Mariner made it her goal to be as qualified as possible to fly in the armed services. She got her private pilot’s license at 17. Then she got her aeronautics degree from Purdue University in 1972 when she was 19.

A year later, as a growing feminist movement took hold amid a push for the Equal Rights Amendment, the Navy lifted its restrictions and opened up its flight program to women — setting Mariner on a path to becoming a pioneer in the military.

Capt. Mariner died at 65 last Thursday, Jan. 24, of ovarian cancer, nearly five years after she had been diagnosed. At her funeral service on Saturday, the Navy plans to honor her with a “missing man flyover” — a tribute honoring aviators who have died — that will consist of all women. It will be the first all-female flyover ever, the Navy said.

What an incredible woman and I hope there’s video posted of this flyover tribute.

The New Yorker:

Six years ago, the James Beard Foundation gave the restaurant its America’s Classics award, which honors “timeless” establishments serving “quality food that reflects the character of its community.”

Ira Kaplan, of the indie band Yo La Tengo, heard about Prince’s from Richard Baluyut, of the band Versus. Kaplan has recalled, “We were told it came in ‘mild,’ ‘medium,’ ‘hot,’ and ‘extra-hot,’ but if we’d never been there before we would not be allowed to have extra-hot. We asked if we could at least taste ‘extra-hot sauce.’ What rubes we were—we were informed that there is no sauce.” Kaplan found Prince’s hot chicken “simultaneously delicious and practically inedible.”

People eat at Prince’s because of the chicken but also because of the story behind it.

I had never even heard of, let alone tasted “Hot Chicken” until I moved to Nashville in the early 2000s. A date took me to the “sketchy side” of town and we waited in line for our chicken. After the first bite, this poor little Nova Scotia boy thought his head was going to explode and my tongue melted. Tears streamed down my face.

I’d had the mild version.

I also ate it almost monthly for the entire time I lived in Nashville.

Forbes:

Events like the lunar eclipse, 4th of July or the Oscars bring millions of people to the same moment for the same reason. This Sunday, it will be the Super Bowl that draws eyeballs, sports fans and partiers together to take part in one shared event.

Advertisers want us to feel. Specifically, they want us to feel something about their product. Based on the Super Bowl ads released early, here’s the real feels for this year’s crop of spots.

As usual, half the fun of watching the Super Bowl is watching the ads. But, in the internet age, we no longer even have to watch the game to see the ads.

The Outline:

There’s a reason why these trackers and apps are designed to be so fun, and it’s not just because it’ll make it easier to lose weight or walk more.

Every minute spent hooked up to a health device or app is a moment providing it with some very valuable data. What those companies do with that data varies wildly, but most of them are siphoning it off our wrists and selling it to the highest bidder. As a result, annoying, invasive ads might start popping up on our screens, but the consequences of this data being out there could be considerably more serious.

This tracking is exactly why I don’t use any of the apps mentioned to track whatever fitness goals I may have.

Ars Technica:

One of the biggest buzzes at this year’s Rolex 24 at Daytona was the presence of one Alex Zanardi, racing in one of the two BMW M8 GTEs. Racing fans will remember Zanardi from his time in single-seaters.

In 2001, after returning to CART, he lost both his legs in a horrific crash at the Lausitzring in Germany in 2001. Ars was fortunate enough to get some time with Zanardi before the race to find out a bit more about how a double amputee is able to compete at the same level as his able-bodied rivals.

What an amazing story of a man with incredible determination.

During Heart Month, Apple will offer an Activity Challenge on Apple Watch and heart health events in Apple Stores in San Francisco, Chicago and New York to educate consumers on their heart health and encourage them to get active and live a better day.

[…]

In recognition of Heart Month, Apple will host special Today at Apple sessions, “Heart Health with Apple,” in stores in New York, Chicago and San Francisco with celebrity fitness trainer Jeanette Jenkins, Sumbul Desai, MD, Apple’s vice president of Health, Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association, Jay Blahnik, senior director of fitness for health technologies, and Julz Arney and Craig Bolton from the Apple Fitness Technologies team. Attendees will hear a discussion about heart health and participate in a new Health & Fitness Walk, which was co-created with Jeanette for participants to take a brisk walk with Apple Watch around their community.

This is an awesome way for Apple to recognize heart month.

Mel Magazine:

The ad, titled “Whassup?,” debuted on Monday Night Football in December 1999 and aired during Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000. It won countless advertising awards, including a Cannes Grand Prix, and entered the pantheon of iconic American ads — becoming arguably one of the most well known Super Bowl commercials in history.

But what of its humble beginnings? How did an ad go viral before going viral was even a thing?

I hated this ad from the moment I saw it. 20 years later, I still hate it just as much if not more.

Wired:

I guess it’s a mixture of boredom from staying home in the super-cold weather and access to the internet that causes this problem. What problem, you ask? The countless videos of people throwing boiling water out into the Arctic cold air during the polar vortex. OK, I’ll admit—it also looks really cool.

People have been doing this for years and it’s a lot of fun. But do you know the science behind it?

Ever want to wrap your head around CSS? This guide from Ali Spittel is well written, with lots of images to help bring the concepts home.

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