The inconvenient truth of future 5G networks is that their increased high-speed bandwidth, and the use of the millimeter wave spectrum (the radio spectrum above 30 gigahertz) to achieve it, comes at a price: Those radio signals barely propagate around the corners of buildings.
In other words, you need a lot more hardware to distribute that sweet, sweet high speed 5G around cities. But that extra hardware means lots of construction, clutter, traffic disruptions and ugly antennas hanging everywhere.
What to do? Someone came up with the idea of turning manhole covers into 5G antennas.
Put the title aside. Instead, think thoughtful insight, rather than snarky complaining. And if you are on the move, wheel over to your favorite podcast player and search for Vector. This is an excellent listen.
Interesting story on Reddit, both for the story itself and for the advice (read the comments that follow the story) on what to do when your phone is stolen.
If you play guitar or just love guitar-oriented music, this is for you. Terrific playlist for both Apple Music and Spotify, with a nice little writeup from Brian Sutich for each song.
Tuesday night in Los Angeles, Musk unveiled the very first tunnel in what he hopes will become a network of underground highways. The first tunnel runs between the headquarters of Musk’s SpaceX company and a parking lot behind a shuttered business a little over a mile away. It’s only for testing purposes and won’t be used by the public.
According to the best moving lead providers, Musk knew nothing about building tunnels when he started this venture. Just as he did with Tesla and SpaceX, he figures to build his expertise as he goes, then find ways to crush the costs down.
While modern subway tunnels in Los Angeles cost around $900 million per mile, he says he built his for about $10 million. One way he saved money: he literally made it dirt-cheap.
“When digging tunnels…it’s quite expensive to have all this dirt trucked off somewhere. And we’re like, well, why don’t we try to use that dirt for something useful? So we are creating bricks on-site…and you can pick ’em up for, they’re very cheap; 10 cents a brick,” he said.
There’s also great savings in owning the entire process, rather than bringing in layers of third party contractors and specialized labor, all of which significantly pumps up the price of any large project.
As to how the whole tunnel thing will work:
At first glance, the tunnel is a bit daunting. At only 12 feet in diameter, it’s much more claustrophobic than most transportation tunnels. According to Musk, cars will be able to travel up to 150 mph in the tunnel but must be on autopilot.
A bit of genius here. Only properly outfitted cars will be allowed in these tunnels. Someone who can build such cars efficiently can make a lot of money. To me, that’s incredible vision on Musk’s part.
Read the article, watch the video embedded below. Both are fascinating.
My thanks to Bare Bones Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. Do you sling code or compose with words? Whether you’re an app developer, web developer, systems admin or just want a powerful writing tool that stays out of your way, BBEdit is worth checking out.
I’ve been using BBEdit since 1995, so I know first hand that it can handle any job I throw at it.
BBEdit is crafted in response to the needs of writers, web authors, and software developers, providing an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching, and the manipulation of text.
Someone stole a package from me. Police wouldn’t do anything about it so I spent the last 6 months engineering up some vigilante justice. Revenge is a dish best served fabulously.
This is some fantastic engineering. Here’s hoping he open sources the design.
The results take seconds, work amazingly well, though I’ve found with more complex backgrounds, artifacts do creep in. Seems to work really well with head shots.
Whether you want to show off your beautiful wallpaper, or simply want your set up to look different from the millions of other iPhones out there, one of the best way to do that is to add blank icons to your Home screen.
These invisible icons will allow you to create empty spaces on your Home screen to either let the wallpaper shine, or to arrange your app icons in a very specific way.
This tutorial will show you how to create create blank iPhone icons, no jailbreak or hack required.
This is my new favorite way to add blank icons to customize your home screen. Note that you have to re-jump through the hoops if you want to change the blank icons.
In a nutshell, you use iPhone Safari to browse to iempty.tooliphone.net. That site lets you customize your page, as you like.
Daisy chaining: I can connect two Bose headphones to one device. I’d love to do this with AirPods, so my SO and I can watch the same movie on an iPad, or listen to the same podcast on a walk. (This is called “Music Share” in the Bose Connect app, but works with any audio coming from the device.)
Multiple Active Devices: My Bose headphones can connect to two devices at once. I’d love to be able to have an active connection to 2-3 devices on my AirPods, so I can use my phone / tv / laptop all at once.
A connection management tool. I thought I’d hate this. But I love it. I can easily select from a list of past devices which ones I’d like my headphones to be connected to, and it does it nearly instantly.
That first one is my favorite. I would love to be able to share audio with someone when playing it out loud is not practical, or allowed. For example, watching a movie together on a long plane or train ride. Or watching TV, late at night when the baby is asleep.
Used to be, you’d plug in a splitter and then plug in your wired headphones. Two headphones Bluetooth’ed into your iOS device or Mac would be a terrific idea.
This a Bluetooth 5 thing? I believe the W1 chip in the AirPods is based on Bluetooth 4.2. The W3 chip in the Apple Watch Series 4 supports Bluetooth 5. So might this feature be possible in the next generation of AirPods?
A lawsuit blaming Apple for a child’s death in a car crash, has been dismissed by a US appeals court in California.
Garrett Wilhelm told police he was using FaceTime on the iPhone 6 when he crashed into the back of a family car.
Five-year-old Moriah Modisette died from the injuries she sustained in the 2014 Christmas Eve accident in Texas. Her family held Apple responsible for not enabling “lockout” technology on the phone.
This is an awful, horrible tragedy and our hearts go out to the little girl’s family but it’s not the responsibility of Apple.
Apple Books has published six exclusive audiobooks this week, showcasing six great first listen titles read by celebrity narrators. The books themselves are all public domain works from Pride and Prejudice to Winnie the Pooh, recorded by Apple and released in the Book Store for free.
Only available on Apple Books, Apple has partnered with celebrities including actresses Kate Beckinsale and Karen Gillan, and comedian Tituss Burgess. The titles range from four to twelve hours in length, and there’s even a retelling of Winnie the Pooh recorded by Disney.
I’m not a huge fan of audiobooks in general but I’d listen to Kate Beckinsale read the phonebook.
In a viral Twitter thread Wednesday, Maya Hughes, a 20-year-old college student in California, revealed a wild story: In a desperate ordeal when she was 5 years old, a kind stranger helped her fly back the U.S. from Sierra Leone.
Through an unexpected chain of events 15 years later, she and her mom finally found out who the man was: Tom Perriello, who went on to become a Virginia congressman and Democratic gubernatorial candidate.
I don’t post “happy news” stories simply for the sake of it but this one was so wonderful, I had to share it.
A recent issue of the American Heart Journal illustrates the power of Apple’s brand and the simplicity of its approach. Based on the Journal’s reporting, the Apple Heart Study enrolled a massive 419,093 participants, making it the largest investigation of its kind ever fielded. To put this into perspective, a large-scale Swedish study also investigating arrhythmia screening fielded just 25,000 participants.
The sheer mass of the study was important to researchers, as bigger is generally better when it comes to investigations of this type — the larger the sample size, the narrower the margin of error for the study. Stanford Medicine researchers say that the study is in the final stages of data collection. Results should be available early next year.
And this is just the beginning for Apple in the field of health apps, activity, and management.
Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he’s got an answer: “536.” Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, “It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,” says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.
Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit.
What an incredible story. Fascinating to think how this affected not only that year but all the way through history.
It’s December, which means Best of 2018 lists are here. With so many lists out there, who has time to read all of them?
Turns out: We do. But because you probably don’t, we rounded up all the Top 10 lists we could find, smashed ’em together in a big spreadsheet, and spit out overall Top 10 lists for the year’s best albums, songs, books and movies. You’re welcome.
I suppose it had to happen eventually but I’m officially old. Not only have I not heard any of these songs, but I’ve never even heard of six of the artists on the list.
The app is called MacPlayer and works thanks to the magic of Spotify Connect. The speaker itself streams and plays the music, and the Mac simply tells the speaker which song to play (as well as volume, current playlist, shuffle mode and other settings). Communication is over Wifi.
The app performs well on a stock SE/30, although it does rely on a bit of help from the on-board OpenWRT Wifi router to handle the HTTPS communication with the Spotify API. The router has stunnel installed on it, which acts as a HTTP to HTTPS tunnel. I updated the MacWifi Extension to allow the Mac to create SSL tunnels on the router as needed. Here’s a video of how the app performs (no music unfortunately due to Copyright):
I don’t understand half of what he is talking about but it looks amazing.
This is a little bit of a wander, so please bear with me. All of this is in appreciation.
First things first, I grew up in New Jersey, and as is the law, I am a lifelong fan of The Boss, Bruce Springsteen. I know that I am far from alone in this.
Bruce is winding down his career, just wrote his bestselling memoir, the excellent Born to Run. Bruce also created an intimate one-man-show, Springsteen on Broadway, which sold out every single performance of its entire, just-concluded, run.
Sadly, I was unable to make it to see the show. A missed opportunity that, a bucket list item for me. But Netflix worked with Bruce to create a movie of the show. It is truly wonderful, a soulful gift to his fans who couldn’t make the show.
If you are a fan, this is not to be missed. If you wonder what all the hype is about, this should answer the question. The real magic of Springsteen is seeing him live. And not just for the music, but for the storytelling, the preacher side of Bruce, the showmanship of it all.
OK, moving on. So the headline above talks about grabbing people out of the audience to perform. Meaning, an established artist has someone in the audience (likely pre-vetted, but unrehearsed) come up and perform with the star.
This happens far more than you might think. So much so, that Casey Newton pulled together this thread showing examples of this in action:
Recently I decided my favorite YouTube genre is “teenagers getting pulled on stage to perform with their idols and melting everyone’s faces off,” and so here are some videos in that vein that you may enjoy
One of the videos from this thread fits this Loop post just perfectly. Bruce and a kid from the audience singing “Growing Up” (embedded below). Don’t miss the part in the middle where the kid plays along and Bruce talks about the lesson he learned about getting his first guitar. And that selfie at the end. What a moment.
We tested four of the hottest handsets running Google’s operating systems and Apple’s iPhone to see how easy it’d be to break into them. We did it with a 3D-printed head. All of the Androids opened with the fake. Apple’s phone, however, was impenetrable.
And:
An iPhone X and four Android devices: an LG G7 ThinQ, a Samsung S9, a Samsung Note 8 and a OnePlus 6. I then held up my fake head to the devices to see if the device would unlock. For all four Android phones, the spoof face was able to open the phone, though with differing degrees of ease. The iPhone X was the only one to never be fooled.
And:
When first turning on a brand new G7, LG actually warns the user against turning facial recognition on at all. “Face recognition is a secondary unlock method that results in your phone being less secure,” it says, noting that a similar face can unlock your phone. No surprise then that, on initial testing, the 3D-printed head opened it straightaway.
And:
There’s a similar warning on the Samsung S9 on sign up. “Your phone could be unlocked by someone or something that looks like you,” it notes.
What I get from these tests: Android facial recognition is for convenience. Apple’s Face ID is for both convenience and security.
This whole “50 Years in Tech” series is an insightful and interesting look back, but this story is my favorite so far. Does not hurt that Jean-Louis Gassée was both in the room when it happened (yes, a Hamilton hat tip) and is a terrific writer.
Solid list from the folks at Time Magazine, albeit short. There more pages to this that I missed?
One thing that struck me: All 10 apps on this list run on iOS. Three of them also run on Android. This simply iOS bias? Or something more, perhaps a comment on the craft/tools/devs in each community?
I’ll be the first to admit that, even though I’ve seen these things a million times, I really had no idea what they were and certainly didn’t know they were grown.
After Apple announced a large new campus in Austin, Tex. — creating as many as 15,000 jobs, none of them expected to be manufacturing — it’s worth looking at the company’s flirtation with advanced manufacturing in Silicon Valley in the 1980s. > Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs, had an abiding fascination with the tradition of Henry Ford and the original mass manufacturing of automobiles in Detroit, as well as the high-quality domestic manufacturing capabilities of Japanese companies like Sony. But his efforts to replicate either in California were examples of his rare failures.
With Apple’s present success, many don’t realize what awful shape the company was in with past CEOs and decisions. Makes their comeback and success today even more remarkable.
“You know, Barkley has a big personality,” my dad, Lin Wang, told me last year, when I recorded him talking about Barkley.
As I talked about the relationship with more and more people, I began to think that either my dad was one of the luckiest basketball fans ever — or this whole thing was an elaborate joke, a “Dinner For Schmucks”-type situation.
Americans are becoming less reliant on physical currency. Roughly three-in-ten U.S. adults (29%) say they make no purchases using cash during a typical week, up slightly from 24% in 2015. And the share who say that all or almost all of their weekly purchases are made using cash has modestly decreased, from 24% in 2015 to 18% today, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
As more Americans are going cash-free, a growing share of the public is comfortable being without physical currency. Today, 53% of Americans say they try to make sure they always have cash on hand just in case they need it. That represents a 7-percentage-point decline from the 60% who reported this in 2015.
Even when I have money, I rarely, if ever, use cash to purchase things.
After what’s being described as a highly competitive bidding situation, Apple and its forthcoming originals operation has landed the rights to new Peanuts content.
The tech giant, which has not-so-quietly been amassing a strong roster of talent and original productions that is said to start rolling out in 2019, has completed a deal with DHX Media to create series, specials and shorts featuring iconic Charles M. Schulz characters such as Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the entire Peanuts gang. DHX, the Canadian-based kids programming giant that acquired a stake in the Peanuts franchise in 2017, will produce all of the projects.
Better to see Apple get this property than Disney.
The value of a Costco membership just got significantly better. Today the popular wholesaler started selling units from the MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and iMac lines on its website with starting discounts ranging from $50 to $200. Impressively, you’ll sometimes get AppleCare+ included with the price.
The more and varied places you can buy Macs and get discounts, the better.
