Iceland Foods:

You won’t see our Christmas advert on TV this year, because it was banned. But we want to share Rang-tan’s story with you.

I don’t usually say this but don’t watch this video on YouTube. Watch it here first and notice when you spot what the issue is. The next question is, why was it banned?

Lifehacker:

If you don’t want to pay $50 each year for Flickr Pro—which frees you of these limitations and throws in other fun features like ad-free browsing, video uploads of up to 10 minute each, and a bevy of stats—you’re probably going to want to prune your account manually. (That, or maybe it’s time to move all your photos to another service.)

Previously, you had to turn to some kind of third-party tool to grab all your photos (or manually download batches of photos or individual albums directly from Flickr itself). You can still do this using any number of apps, but I recommend grabbing your photos directly from Flickr’s website. It’s not that hard of a process, and it’ll ensure that you don’t miss a thing.

I’ll most likely keep and pay for my Flickr account but many of you may not. Here’s one way to get your photos off of the service.

Variety:

A strange thing happened on the iTunes U.S. store on Monday (Nov. 5) when Kris Wu, a Chinese-Canadian actor and artist, practically swept the Top 10 songs chart.

And:

It seemed curious that Wu, whose album “Antares” had yet to be released in China, would have such momentum on a U.S. chart. While he’s a household name in Asia, in America he’s comparably an unknown. Also, Wu’s tracks weren’t streaming in significant numbers which was reason enough for some industry insiders to cry foul.

And:

According to a well-placed insider, Wu’s album sales were acquired fraudulently and will not count toward the iTunes sales chart reported to Nielsen and disseminated by Billboard. The determination was made to “suppress those sales numbers” on Wednesday afternoon following patterns of high-volume purchases on iTunes, first of the explicit version of “Antares,” and then of the clean version.

An odd story, but not quite what it appears. Read on:

According to insiders, there were several factors that contributed to Wu’s showing. First, his album hadn’t yet been released in China where the label purportedly purposely held it back so it could come out on Wu’s birthday, Tuesday, Nov. 6. Typically, albums come out on Fridays worldwide, as per the global release date change instituted in 2015. But in the U.S., it was already available on iTunes, released by Interscope Records on Nov. 2. What transpired was a classic supply and demand scenario where “supply in the U.S. met the demand in China.”

Not sure how this is fraud. One theory holds that massive China fans resorted to VPNs to get the album in the US when they couldn’t get it in China. But is that fraud? Interesting.

Pop the bottom cover, 6 Torx screws to remove the antenna plate, and you’re in. Very similar to the old Mac mini in approach.

I love the way this comes apart. Gives me the chance to repair and replace parts myself.

More of those stretchy adhesive pull tabs. Not as good as screws, but way better than glue.

New York Times:

Innes, a youthful German shepherd, was trying to make his way across a frenetic Manhattan intersection near Central Park and found himself facing down all sorts of projectiles — yellow cabs, bike messengers, pedicabs — as a deafening truck horn blasted and the traffic light changed against him.

But Innes was not negotiating this chaotic scene while out for an afternoon stroll. He was safeguarding his new master, Kathy Faul, 73, a blind woman from Swarthmore, Pa.

Both were relative strangers to New York City, but they had ventured into Manhattan expressly for moments like this, to experience its particular brand of street-level chaos, as the culmination of a thorough course of training by the Seeing Eye, a guide dog school in Morristown, N.J. Founded in 1929, it is the nation’s oldest training school for dogs and one of the largest of its kind.

What a great story. I still remember my first time navigating New York City. This small town kid from Nova Scotia was terrified. I can’t imagine how scary it must be for the blind and their guide dogs.

The Verge:

Tesla has a lot staked on Autopilot. Elon Musk is reportedly personally involved in testing out and debugging the advanced driver assist system, which uses a host of cameras and sensors to control the vehicle’s speed, braking, and steering. As its safety is debated across the industry — and as competitors race to introduce their own partially autonomous systems — Autopilot is the feature that could give Tesla an edge as it grows from niche company to global powerhouse.

My wife and I test drove a Tesla Model X over the weekend and came away impressed with the technology overall. The sales guy showed us a version of “Navigate on Autopilot” and it was very cool.

Reddit:

In light of all the recent price hikes to Apple’s products I was reminded by a quote I read once from Steve Jobs. He was talking about why Apple started failing and almost went bankrupt before they brought Steve back into the company.

And the quote:

What happened at Apple, to be honest, over the years was the goal used to be to make the best computers in the world. And that was goal one. Goal two, we got from Hewlett-Packard actually which was “we have to make a profit”. Because if we don’t make a profit we can’t do goal one. So, yeah, I mean we enjoyed making a profit, but the purpose of making a profit was so we can make the best computers in the world. Along the way somewhere those two got reversed. The goal is to make a lot of money and well, if we have to make some good computers well ok we’ll do that… ’cause we can make a lot of money doing that. And, it’s very subtle. It’s very subtle at first, but it turns out it’s everything. That one little subtle flip… takes 5 years to see it, but that one little subtle flip in 5 years means everything.

To be clear, I’m not posting this as a comment on the current state of Apple. To me, Apple then and Apple now are two completely different beasts. But I did appreciate the quote, thought it worth sharing.

From this tweet by Ryan Jones:

Health data truth, as on Nov 2018.

✅ iCloud Sync, if toggled on
❌ iCloud Backup, never ever

❌ Unecrypted iTunes Backup, never ever
✅ Encrypted iTunes Backup, only if iCloud Sync is off

So, if you get a new phone and it magically disappears from iCloud… F’ed.

— Ryan Jones (@rjonesy) November 6, 2018

And this from the linked post by Michael Tsai:

The Health app can’t import its own data, so you need to use (and trust) a third-party app. Also, chances are you’re going to use iCloud (or some even less secure means) to transport the export file, so why not just include it (optionally) in the iCloud backup. This is a pattern we see from time to time with Apple. You run into the limits of Apple’s idealized solution and then it’s sort of your fault if something goes wrong with the more pragmatic solution that you resort to. But it’s also sort of Apple’s fault for only solving part of the problem that it was in the better position to address.

If you are at all invested in your health data, read the whole post.

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

The new 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro features a USB-C port instead of a Lightning port. However, just because a device features a new port, it does not mean anything with a USB-C connector will suddenly work with the iPad Pro. There are still some limitations but USB-C makes it even easier to connect to external displays, cameras, and other accessories.

Here’s what you can do with your new iPad Pro and its shiny new port.

First things first, nice job by Benjamin Mayo laying all this out. Terrific read.

But I have to say, while I applaud USB-C’s reversibility (like a Lightning plug, there’s no upside down, no wrong way to plug it in) and ubiquity (a wave of adoption, making their way onto devices in the same way as USB-A), I struggle with the wildly different functionality offered by identical looking cables and ports.

Ben covers a few examples, but here’s another one:

Fun in USB-C land with the new iPad Pro and an UltraFine 4K display:

The USB-C cable that comes in the box with the iPad Pro *cannot* mirror the iPad to the external display. It just charges it.

The USB-C cable that comes with the UltraFine supports 4K60 mirroring.

?‍♂️

— Federico Viticci (@viticci) November 8, 2018

There’s no way to tell from just looking at a cable what functionality it supports. And while you might just try all the cables in your cable drawer until you find one that works, there might be trouble down that road as well. From this Gizmodo post, courtesy of Stefan Arentz:

All cables are not created equal: some will charge most efficiently, others might just fry your battery. Google Chromebook engineer and Caped Cable Crusader Benson Leung has been testing USB-C cables off Amazon, and it’s not just the no-brand products that have been failing.

I’ve had some personal experience with this, especially where USB-C dongles are concerned. Though all those USB-C ports look identical on the outside, some pass through power, others not as much, and some not at all. Yeesh.

More good news as far as Apple products and repairability:

Big news for repairability and environmental responsibility: the battery can be individually replaced in the new MacBook Air, according to Apple’s internal Service Readiness Guide for the notebook, obtained by MacRumors.

And:

In all other MacBook and MacBook Pro models with a Retina display released since 2012, when a customer has required a battery replacement, Apple has replaced the entire top case enclosure, including the keyboard and trackpad. This is because the battery is glued into the top case in Mac notebooks with Retina displays.

The battery in the new MacBook Air is still glued into the top case, the aluminum enclosure that houses the keyboard and trackpad, but Apple will be providing Genius Bars and Apple Authorized Service Providers with tools to remove the battery and reinstall a new one with no top case replacement required.

Glue is the bane of repairability. I wish Apple would develop a version of the 3M Command strips, the ones that stick to walls, strong enough to hold up a framed picture, but come off by stretching them. They’re even reusable.

Would love to be able to remove a battery by pulling on the adhesive tab to loosen it, replace the battery with the same adhesive strip, all without that gooey mess of melted glue.

UPDATE: Apparently, Apple does use something akin to these Command adhesive strips in some iPhone models, though they are not reusable. More of this! And H/T Gabriel Jordan.

This is a relatively easy thing to do. It’s all screws, no glue or other messy bits to deal with.

If you are considering a Mac mini purchase, check the replacement RAM costs before you order.

UPDATE: As the linked post says, the images are from the 2014 Mac mini, thought the steps are the same. Thanks to Patrick McCarron, here’s a link to another post that accomplishes the same thing, but on the actual 2018 Mac mini.

BBC:

I’d been picking up bits and pieces about this ‘screech-in’ ceremony, a welcome ritual of sorts that transforms an outsider into an honorary Newfoundlander. It’s not a compulsory ritual for visitors to the province, but if your host or friend thinks you might enjoy it, they will likely take you to one.

I only knew that there was a possibility of kissing a fish and a good chance I’d be downing shots of rum. I much preferred the latter.

As a proud Nova Scotianer, I feel no shame in saying, categorically, that Newfoundlanders are the nicest people in Canada. I was honoured to have been screeched-in many years ago in a bar in St John’s and highly recommend it to anyone who visits this lovely province.

Austin Mann:

Halló from Iceland!

I’m here working on a couple of art commissions and leading a private workshop and I brought the new iPad Pro along to better understand how it can integrate into the mobile photographer workflow. How does it work to ingest, backup, edit, and share images?

The new iPad Pro with Apple Pencil is the biggest generational upgrade I’ve experienced from Apple in a really long time.

Mann looks at the new iPad Pro from the same POV I would – how is it for a professional photographer working in the field? After reading the review, I really want a new iPad for my photography workshop in Lisbon next March.

Ars Technica:

After the hardware announcements last week, Ars sat down with Anand Shimpi from Hardware Technologies at Apple and Apple’s Senior VP of Marketing Phil Schiller to ask. We wanted to hear exactly what Apple is trying to accomplish by making its own chips and how the A12X is architected. It turns out that the iPad Pro’s striking, console-level graphics performance and many of the other headlining features in new Apple devices (like FaceID and various augmented-reality applications) may not be possible any other way.

I’m not smart enough to understand much of what this article is about but the majority of the reviews of this new iPad reference how incredibly powerful the A12X system on a chip is.

Open Culture:

The Library has done its digital users a service in this regard as well, with its “Free to Use and Reuse Sets,” a sizable collection of images that the Library “believes… is either in the public domain, has no known copyright, or has been cleared by the copyright owner for public use.”

Need photographs of Abraham Lincoln—and scans of his speeches, letters, and “dueling instructions”—for that book you’re writing? You’re covered with this gallery. Need a collection of classic children’s books for your website (or your reading pleasure)? Here you go.

What an incredible collection to peruse and use.

Steven Sinofsky:

We used to use PC tools to do things like place orders, deal with customer service, do banking, budgets, and more. All are phone tasks now for billions. AND more volume and new things.

Many things ran on mainframes for years after PCs took over.

Many things ran on DOS for years after Windows “won”.

Many things ran as Win32/OSX apps even though phones dominate computing.

In each case, the new way opened up a scenario to an order of magnitude more people.

Really interesting thread from a guy who knows a lot about this stuff.

Lots and lots of numbers in this review, packed with easy to read comparison charts. This iPad Pro comes out on top all the way through.

There’s a battery life comparison (based on continuous web surfing), with the iPad Pro lasting more than 13 hours, compared with the Surface Pro 6 at a bit over 9 hours. Same with GeekBench 4 numbers, with the iPad Pro multi-core at 17995 and the Surface Pro 6 at 13,025.

But scroll down to that video transcoding chart. Whoa. The Surface Pro 6 took 31 minutes to transcode a 12-minute 4K video clip. The MacBook Pro fared a bit better, just under 26 minutes. But the new iPad Pro? 7 minutes, 47 seconds.

That is one blazingly fast machine.

Follow the link, check that second photo. Stunning. Simply stunning. Amazing to me that this picture was taken from a satellite.

Lots of links to explore in the linked Kottke.org piece.

Though we did include this review in yesterday’s list of the new MacBook Air reviews, I wanted to link to John Gruber’s review separately, for his take on Intel.

The elephant in the room at last week’s Apple event was Intel.

Apple introduced two products based on Intel chips — the new MacBook Air and new Mac Mini — but barely mentioned the company’s name. The word “Intel” appeared on a single slide during VP of hardware engineering Laura Legros’s presentation of the new MacBook Air. She also spoke the word once, saying the new Airs have “the latest Intel integrated graphics”. In the presentation of the new Mac Mini, “Intel” never appeared in a slide and wasn’t mentioned.

And:

Apple is not going to throw Intel under the bus — they’re taking an “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” approach, as they should.

Push is slowly coming to shove here. As John points out, the new iPad Pro simply crushes the Intel-powered MacBook Air in GeekBench score, especially that MultiCore score (18,051 to 7,847).

As products, the Mac and the iPad are still on different tracks, not plug replaceable. But it does seem highly likely (a “when”, not an “if”) that Apple will eventually ship a Mac powered by their own bionic chip.

AirPods have long flirted with the top spot on Best Buys’ monthly sales list but this report is the first time they’ve made it all the way to the top.

Why now? Could be the new iPhones, Macs and iPads, combined with the approaching holiday gift-giving season, a bit of a perfect storm.

Number three on that list? Apple’s Lightning-to-3.5mm headphone adapter. Interesting counterpoint.