The word “shrubbery” is dead. I’m not sure how often it was used before 1975, when the British comedy troupe Monty Python released Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but hence, a not insignificant number of people couldn’t say it without the urge to raise their voice a pitch. There are people who can’t see a coconut without yammering on about swallows. Who can’t be injured without hollering, “It’s just a flesh wound.” Who, out of nowhere, will yell “ni!” As adults, they’re insufferable, but as kids…well, I was one of many.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which is now streaming on Netflix, remains a funny film by a group of English comedians that’s become shorthand for a postwar, absurd, self-deprecating kind of humor.
Asking around, it seems that Monty Python and the Holy Grail is not dead yet.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail was meme-worthy before that was even a word. I saw it when it first came out and I’ll still quote its silliness on a weekly basis.
While in-ear headphones can create head-thumping bass by sealing your ears off from the world, they also isolate you from the sound of cars, bikes, and other people, which can be dangerous.
While most headphones transmit music through the air, entering your ear canal and vibrating your eardrum, bone conduction headphones are different. They sit outside your ear, vibrating the bones of your head until the sound reaches the cochlea—the same place the eardrum sends sounds to be converted for your brain. That means your ear canal is free to listen to the sounds around you.
This technology has been around for a lot of years but I’ve never used them. Many people who hate sticking earbuds into their ears may benefit from them though.
Ancient peoples knew none of this biology, but they were certain of blood’s importance and fascinated by its mystery. For them, blood was something hidden—visible only when flowing from a wound, or during childbirth, miscarriage, and menstruation—so it became a symbol both of life and of death.
To control blood was to master mortality, so it is unsurprising that blood features prominently in many religious traditions, and that, though our understanding of its functions is more sophisticated than ever, we remain in thrall to its primal mystique.
Along with water, blood is the most important liquid in the world. I still remember the first time I realized its power. I banged my head on the ground playing as a kid and it caused a huge cut that bled profusely. It didn’t really hurt much so I walked home, blood streaming down my face. I got in the house and said, “Mommy, I cut myself.” My mom turned around and saw me and immediately freaked the hell out.
According to its Feature Availability page, Apple today introduced a number of new features for Apple Maps. Several new Flyover locations have been added, and available maps for indoor malls have expanded.
Speed limits in Canada, new flyover locations, and indoor maps are among the changes in the latest updates.
Apple today published its annual meeting of shareholders notice and proxy statement. Filed with the SEC, the document confirms that Apple will hold its annual meeting of shareholders on March 1st, 2019 at Steve Jobs Theater.
Due to limited seating at Steve Jobs Theater, Apple is asking shareholders to register in advance if they plan to attend the meeting. The record date for the annual shareholder meeting is January 2nd, 2019. This means you must have held AAPL shares by this date in order attend.
The questions from shareholders should be particularly heated this year.
There are many ways to tell the story of Jackie Chan. He is the heir to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the comic grace of his movements leaving audiences in laughing wonder. He’s also the heir to Bruce Lee: If Lee broke old stereotypes about the Asian man being frail and craven, then Chan reinvented him once more, offering across dozens of movies a consistent character who was almost childlike in his cheerfulness, known as much for his winking smile as for the fury of his fists.
These aspects of the Chan legend are all present in his new memoir, Never Grow Up, as the threads of an unlikely rags-to-riches story.
Never Grow Up, in mostly inadvertent ways, thus offers another way of telling Jackie Chan’s story. It’s about colonialism, capitalism, and the myths we construct to justify living under both.
I’ve always been a huge fan of Jackie Chan. Even when his movies were awful, you never took your eyes off of him during stunts and fight scenes.
You’ve no doubt been walking in the park or on a trail and have seen a banana peel or orange rind lying on the ground. The outdoorsy person who tossed them no doubt thought the fruit remains would biodegrade eventually.
Sure they will. But it won’t happen overnight.
After watching hikers toss a sandwich on a trail, Marjorie “Slim” Woodruff, who hikes and works in the Grand Canyon, set up a small experiment. She put an apple core, a banana peel, orange peels, chewing gum and tissue paper in a cage of chicken wire, wide enough to allow small animals to go in and out. After six months, the orange peels had dried out, the banana peel had turned black, the chewing gum was the same and the tissue had become a blob. Nothing had been eaten or had rotted.
She buried the same items in sand and soil and six months later everything was still recognizable.
Interesting. While I don’t go for walks in the woods very often being a City Kid, I always assumed it was OK to toss organics into the woods “for the animals”. Looks like that might not be such a good idea after all.
Rostislav Blaha created gridzzly, a simple single-page website where you pick the type of grid you want (lines, square, triangle, hex, dotted), set the size of the grid units and the weight of the line, then hit print. Voila! Custom gridded paper.
I so could have used this website in high school and college for my D&D games.
Enthusiasm for aviation-related education programs in Purdue Polytechnic’s School of Aviation and Transportation Technology (SATT) continues to soar with the arrival of iPad and Apple Pencil for each of the nearly one thousand students and faculty. Undergraduate programs in SATT include professional flight, aeronautical engineering technology, aviation management and unmanned aerial systems.
Dubbed an Electronic Purdue Bag (EPB) — a nod to the Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) that replaced pilots’ paper-based flight information in the cockpit during in the 1990s — the new 9.7-inch cellular iPad, Apple Pencil and Logitech keyboard and case provide Purdue’s aviation students with a competitive advantage by preparing them for the technologically advanced aviation industry where most major airlines use iPad in the cockpit. Students now have access to the latest technical documents, including operating manuals and navigational charts, can generate multimedia safety reports on the spot, and will leverage the latest virtual and augmented reality (AR) tools on iPad. Eventually, students will develop their own apps and customize their learning experience.
This is great for Purdue students, but also a necessary move for the school. Since pilots are already using iPads, Purdue needs to be on the cutting edge and they clearly are. According to Purdue, they plan to upgrade all of the iPads every two years.
Whether you’re hungry for perfect chickpeas from dried beans, succulent roasts in a fraction of the time, or a comforting soup ready when you walk in the door, a multicooker, which can act as electric pressure cooker, slow cooker, rice cooker, steamer and even yogurt-maker, can help. The Instant Pot is the best known of the multicookers now on the market, though other manufacturers, like Breville and Fagor, make models. We’ll show you how to master them, with valuable techniques for getting the most out of the machine.
I got one of these a few months ago and I love it. I make rice, steam/roast vegetables, sear meat, make stews and pot roasts, and even cheesecake in it.
Smartphone shipments in China fell between 12-15.5 percent last year, market data indicated, suggesting a bleak outlook for the sector at a time when behemoths Apple and Samsung Electronics have already issued dour forecasts.
China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), a research institute under the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said shipments dropped 15.5 percent to roughly 390 million units for the year, with a 17 percent slump in December.
Market research firm Canalys estimates shipments fell 12 percent in China last year and expects smartphone shipments in 2019 to dip below 400 million for the first time since 2014.
Starting later this year, Sony’s new 2019 Z9G Series 8K LCDs, A9G Series OLED 4K TVs, and X950G 4K LCD TVs will support Airplay 2 and HomeKit protocols from Apple.
Other TV manufacturers, including Samsung, Vizio, and LG have also announced support for HomeKit and AirPlay 2 for their 2019 smart TV lineups. All of the major TV brands will support both, with the exception of Samsung. Samsung TVs support AirPlay 2 and will have an exclusive app for accessing iTunes content, but won’t work with HomeKit.
With AirPlay 2 support, compatible Sony television sets will be able to stream videos, music, photos, and more right from an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, and multi-room audio across multiple AirPlay 2 devices will also be available.
Slowly but steadily, Apple is building out its base and support of AirPlay 2 and HomeKit.
Apple’s growing ecosystem of devices and services is “probably underappreciated” by naysayers on Wall Street, CEO Tim Cook told CNBC in an interview Tuesday.
“In terms of the naysayer, I’ve heard this over and over again,” Cook said in an exclusive interview with Jim Cramer. “I’ve heard it in 2001, I’ve heard it in 2005, in ‘7, in ‘8, in ’10, in ’12 and ’13. You can probably find the same quotes from the same people over and over again.”
“I’m not defensive on it. This is America and you can say what you want,” Cook continued. “But … my honest opinion is that there is a culture of innovation in Apple and that culture of innovation combined with these incredible, loyal customers, happy customers, this ecosystem, this virtuous ecosystem, is something that is probably underappreciated.”
Many will, understandably, blow this off as Cook simply doing damage control – and he very well might be. But he’s also not wrong.
Apple Music Wrapped generates a personalized music report that, by default, collects your 100 most-played songs added to your library in any given year since Apple Music was launched in 2015, sorting them from largest to smallest play count. The shortcut takes less than 30 seconds1 to run and the final report is opened in Safari as a custom webpage.
I don’t use Apple Music but I’m sure many of you are like me and like seeing this kind of data. Shame Apple doesn’t make it easy to create.
Samsung Electronics Co Ltd is set to post its first drop in quarterly operating profit in two years as slowing economic growth in China, a key market for the South Korean tech giant, erodes demand for its products.
[…]
“Depressed demand in China will further drive down Samsung’s chip sales there. And China’s overall smartphone market is stalled and declining, which will affect not only Apple but Samsung,” Song Myung-sup, a senior analyst at HI Investment & Securities, told Reuters.
A new phone-based phishing scam that spoofs Apple Inc. is likely to fool quite a few people. It starts with an automated call that display’s Apple’s logo, address and real phone number, warning about a data breach at the company. The scary part is that if the recipient is an iPhone user who then requests a call back from Apple’s legitimate customer support Web page, the fake call gets indexed in the iPhone’s “recent calls” list as a previous call from the legitimate Apple Support line.
Jody Westby is the CEO of Global Cyber Risk LLC, a security consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. Westby said earlier today she received an automated call on her iPhone warning that multiple servers containing Apple user IDs had been compromised (the same scammers had called her at 4:34 p.m. the day before, but she didn’t answer that call). The message said she needed to call a 1-866 number before doing anything else with her phone.
I’m sure most of us wouldn’t get caught out by something like this but not everyone is as tech savvy as we are. My wife almost got caught by this so it’s a good idea to warn family and friends to never answer these kinds of calls unless they are expecting them and specifically request the call.
I believe that Apple’s management made three critical errors in their forecast for this last quarter that were predictable precisely because they had made the same errors before — errors that I wrote about at the time. In other words, I am very much susceptible to confirmation bias as well.
That noted, if indeed I am right, then that is good news for Apple: I suspect the company is in better shape than the last week of hysteria suggests.
Good examination from one point of view of what happened to Apple last week. The Quarterly Call at the end of this month will be very interesting.
Fifteen years ago, John Mayer joined Steve Jobs on stage to introduce a new app called GarageBand. For those of us who loved to create music, GarageBand was a revolution that would change the world.
The release of GarageBand brought the recording and production ability of more complicated apps to the average user. Of course, there were apps available to record digitally, but they were not focused on the average musician.
Typical of Apple apps, GarageBand was easy-to-use and approachable, even if you didn’t play an instrument. Using loops, GarageBand allowed users to create full songs without playing an instrument.
Showing the power of GarageBand, some professional artists released songs recorded in GarageBand. While that was impressive, it was always the way that GarageBand focused on making recording music easier the inspired me.
Even today, I have a GarageBand project set up with a simple drum beat that is ready to record. I plug in my guitar, press record and play. I have the drumbeat looped so I can play for quite a while and just get ideas recorded. So many of my songs were written using this simple method.
If there is something I like, I can start a new project with that riff, and then begin to work on the other instruments. Because GarageBand is built on the same engine as Apple’s professional audio workstation, you can import that project into Logic for more professional features if you want.
It’s impossible to say how much GarageBand has changed the world of music over the last 15 years. I have spoken to so many musicians over the years that use GarageBand to write new material because it is so easy to get new ideas recorded. These are people that used to hum ideas into a recorder and let the band listen to them. Now they can record full song ideas.
I still use GarageBand all the time. With all of the professional gear and apps that I have on hand, GarageBand is one of my go-to applications. I can’t see a time when that will change.
Pick something to draw with, start tapping and dragging. This is fun, and to me, has huge potential, especially if someone created something similar as a native app, drawing on the Bionic chip and machine learning.
To get you started, tap Plant, draw some greenery, then switch to Acid, go to work.
Over the weekend, I came across the linked Twitter thread, showing off a drop-down, draggable, menu system running on an iPhone. Take a minute to watch the first few videos in the thread.
I love this approach. To me, it brings the best of the Mac to iOS. I also see it as a bit of a missing link, bridging the Mac and iOS. Imagine a menuing system that kicked in if you were allowed to run an iOS app on your Mac, or if a pointing device was ever allowed to connect to an iOS device.
She’s a relatively tech-savvy retiree and a longtime Apple fan who has used many of the company’s products over the years. I learned to type on an Apple IIGS at her office, and she was an early adopter of the original turquoise iMac. These days, she uses her iPhone to check Facebook and Instagram, talk with her friends and relatives, and play solitaire and Words With Friends.
Her phone isn’t the latest model — it’s a three-year-old iPhone 6S — and it’s missing some of the latest features. She can’t take portrait mode photos using a dual-lens camera, a feature introduced in the iPhone 7 Plus, and she can’t unlock her phone using Face ID, which was introduced in the iPhone X in 2017. Her phone’s battery life could be better, and the device sometimes runs out of storage space.
But she’s happy with it, and doesn’t feel the need to upgrade.
The case I’m getting here is that this “hold the phone a long time” is something new, something unplanned, something that is happening to Apple.
I see it as strategic planning, long term thinking on Apple’s part. Part of Apple’s iOS evolution was to create an operating system that would support a deeper run of older devices, even improve the experience from previous iOS versions.
To me, what this article shows is that Apple has been successful in this goal. And that means, as the smartphone market has matured and grown more saturated, Apple could ease from a dependence on iPhone sales to pay the bills, to a future where other devices, as well as a growing services ecosystem, could shoulder more and more of that load.
iPad Pro cellular models now feature Gigabit-class LTE, with support for more cellular bands than any other tablet. To provide optimal cellular performance, small vertical bands or “splits” in the sides of the iPad allow parts of the enclosure to function as cellular antennas.
On how those splits are made:
These bands are manufactured using a process called co-molding. In this high-temperature process, plastic is injected into precisely milled channels in the aluminum enclosure where it bonds to micro-pores in the aluminum surface. After the plastic cools, the entire enclosure is finished with a precision CNC machining operation, yielding a seamless integration of plastic and aluminum into a single, strong enclosure.
So far, so good. But:
The new straight edges and the presence of the antenna splits may make subtle deviations in flatness more visible only from certain viewing angles that are imperceptible during normal use. These small variances do not affect the strength of the enclosure or the function of the product and will not change over time through normal use.
Tucking this link away, on the off-chance I come across an iPad Pro that exceeds “subtle deviations in flatness”.
Today, we present the definitive list of every important technology ever, ranked by their importance. These aren’t all necessarily good technologies, of course. There are plenty that have made the world a more miserable place for everybody. But they’re still on the list.
If you have any opinion about the fact that this list may be omitting an extremely vital technology, you would be wrong. This list is both correct and definitive and cannot be changed. And you’re wrong.
As usual, an interesting list. Can you think what your Top Five most important technologies ever would be?
In an industry first, a new iTunes Movies and TV Shows app will debut only on Samsung Smart TVs in more than 100 countries. AirPlay 2 support will be available on Samsung Smart TVs in 190 countries worldwide.
“We look forward to bringing the iTunes and AirPlay 2 experience to even more customers around the world through Samsung Smart TVs, so iPhone, iPad and Mac users have yet another way to enjoy all their favorite content on the biggest screen in their home,” said Eddy Cue, senior vice president of Internet Software and Services at Apple.
This is great news for those of you who use these products but I wouldn’t allow a “smart TV” into my home for love or money.
I have spent the last couple of days thinking about Apple and its recent troubles. There is no doubt Tim Cook’s message to investors lowering Apple’s earnings guidance for the first fiscal quarter sent shockwaves throughout the industry. For a company that continually crushed estimates to falter like this made people really think about the future of the iPhone, and indeed, Apple itself. But it’s not all bad.
Per Tim Cook, the majority of Apple’s revenue shortfall comes from the economic deceleration in China.
In fact, most of our revenue shortfall to our guidance, and over 100 percent of our year-over-year worldwide revenue decline, occurred in Greater China across iPhone, Mac and iPad.
Apple rode that wave up to record revenues, so now it has to endure a tough quarter and ride that same wave down. However, this is an economic problem, not a product issue with Apple.
As Cook noted:
In fact, categories outside of iPhone (Services, Mac, iPad, Wearables/Home/Accessories) combined to grow almost 19 percent year-over-year.
What I mean by this not being a product issue is that there is nothing that Apple has done to cause this downturn in its earnings. It wasn’t caught abusing its user’s privacy like Facebook, and it didn’t release subpar products that caused demand for its products to diminish.
I would be a lot more concerned about this whole affair had that been the case. If Apple eroded the trust in its customer base, this would be a problem of its own making, but it’s not.
I’m not trying to put lipstick on this pig. This is a serious situation, and there are things Apple needs to address in the coming quarter. What I am saying is that if you take China out of the mix, Apple wouldn’t have had to issue an earnings warning.
I also wouldn’t be surprised to other companies report similar issues related to China’s economy.
Will China’s economy improve? I’m no economist, and there are a lot of factors that play into the answer to that question, but my best guess is, yes.
No amount of diversification would have led Apple to be in a better spot today. No matter their revenue guidance, the situation in China would still have led to an earnings warning based on iPhone sales.
Apple is already looking at better ways to allow users to trade-in iPhones, which should help them in many markets. I suspect there are other ideas the company is working on, as well.
While there has been a lot of focus on the negatives in Cook’s message to investors, here are a few of the positives from that same letter:
Our installed base of active devices hit a new all-time high—growing by more than 100 million units in 12 months.
Revenue outside of our iPhone business grew by almost 19 percent year-over-year, including all-time record revenue from Services, Wearables and Mac.
Services generated over $10.8 billion in revenue during the quarter, growing to a new quarterly record in every geographic segment
Wearables grew by almost 50 percent year-over-year, as Apple Watch and AirPods were wildly popular among holiday shoppers
launches of MacBook Air and Mac mini powered the Mac to year-over-year revenue growth
The launch of the new iPad Pro drove iPad to year-over-year double-digit revenue growth.
We also expect to set all-time revenue records in several developed countries, including the United States, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Korea.
Finally, we also expect to report a new all-time record for Apple’s earnings per share.
The more I thought about this earnings warning, the more it came down to what Apple could have done to prevent it. The simple answer is nothing. It’s an economic problem that is entirely out of Apple’s control, and an issue that will rectify itself over time.
In the meantime, Apple needs to do everything it can to allow easy upgrades for users, and most importantly, continue to excel at making great products.
China’s Huawei Technologies has punished two employees for New Year greetings sent on the smartphone maker’s official Twitter account using an iPhone, an internal memo showed.
All companies use competitors products, but they usually don’t use them to post public messages. This isn’t a huge issue, but still a blunder that makes the company look bad.
