Now when you search for “depression” on Google on mobile, you’ll see a Knowledge Panel that will give you the option to tap “check if you’re clinically depressed”, which will bring you to PHQ-9, a clinically validated screening questionnaire to test what your likely level of depression may be. To ensure that the information shared in the PHQ-9 questionnaire is accurate and useful, we have partnered with the National Alliance on Mental Illness on this announcement.
Samsung Electronics Co Ltd set out to wipe the slate clean in New York on Wednesday with the new Galaxy Note 8 phablet, hoping features like dual rear cameras and its biggest-ever screen will extinguish memories of its fire-prone predecessor.
Luna Display seamlessly extends your Mac desktop to your iPad, creating a wireless second monitor with stunning image quality. Available for Mini DisplayPort or USB-C, Luna sets up in seconds and instantly works with your existing Wi-Fi.
This is a remarkable product. I had a chance to use it this summer and was truly impressed with the implementation and how it worked.
For the uninitiated, Kinder Eggs are a chocolate treat widely available throughout Europe, Mexico and Canada, with the company that makes them, Ferrero (perhaps better known in the U.S. for being the makers of Nutella), selling a whopping 1.5 billion of the eggs per year. Where they don’t sell any is the United States, where the eggs are indeed illegal (though something of a blackmarket does exist for them). So why is a beloved candy the world over explicitly banned in the land of the free?
I knew that Kinder eggs were illegal in the US (and it’s a point we Canadians often use to show our “superiority” over America) but I didn’t know the legal reasoning behind it.
SMPTE (The Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers) have announced that former Adobe, Macromedia and Apple employee Randy Ubillos will be receiving the Workflow Systems Medal at the SMPTE 2017 Awards later this year.
In honor of John Lee Hooker’s 100th birthday, Craft Recordings has announced King of the Boogie, a comprehensive, five-disc box set of the blues legend’s greatest hits, plus some rarities, live recordings and numerous previously unreleased cuts.
Throughout the 1980s, Stewart traveled 60,000 miles a year as a full-time spectator, living out of his car, getting stoned, and using television’s obsession with athletics as a vessel for promoting his faith. In doing so, he made the Bible passage a fixture of professional sporting events.
It was a noble effort—but one Stewart would end up undermining with some increasingly eccentric behavior.
If you watched sports in 1980s, you saw this guy in the background of major sporting events. I found him incredibly annoying and, while I never wondered or cared about what happened to him, the path his life took is tragic.
The Powerball jackpot now stands more than $850 million CAD according to currency conversion calculators ($700 million USD). At this pace, the Powerball could soon break its own world-record and award a prize higher than the mammoth $2.1 billion CAD jackpot that stunned the world back in January 2016.
According to the official Powerball website, Canadians can “purchase a Powerball ticket…play the game and…collect prizes.” The website clearly states: “You do not have to be a [US] citizen or a resident to play the game.”
Canadians attracted by this amazing jackpot don’t have to cross the border if they want to play to win the exploding Powerball jackpot. They can play from the comfort of their homes.
Many of us Canadians are jealous about the size of the Powerball jackpot. This is an easy way for us (and others outside the US) to get in on the fun.
You’ve tried to silence unimportant push alerts but couldn’t figure out the complicated settings. Or worse, you thought you mastered the settings, but trivial messages still manage to sneak through like a mouse in an air vent.
Our attention has become such a precious commodity that apps, social networks and, yes, news outlets have deployed infuriating numbers of pop-ups to conquer it.
“Silence all the notifications!” is not the answer, however. Do I want Facebook to ding me to update my profile? Never. But I sure as heck want to be buzzed by the babysitter watching my newborn.
Notifications are a constant river of pain. But they do have value. The key is tuning them. The post does a nice job walking through some settings to give a sense of what lives where and what you can control.
But the article goes further, raising the point of the big UI divide between Apple’s (and Google’s) notification settings and those more fine tuned settings that live inside the biggest offenders, like Facebook.
The system-wide notification settings are found in the Settings app, listed under Facebook. These enable/disable notifications, and specify the various forms those notifications can take. But the detailed notification settings (notify me when someone likes my post, for example) are buried inside the Facebook app itself.
While this division is logical, Joanna makes this point:
The design of this system is confusing. Apple and Google should make it easier for us to get from system settings to individual app menus. It now takes about four taps to get from an app’s home screen to its notification controls.
And when you get there, you often see a long and messy list. The alternative is worse: a single on-off switch—or no notification control at all. Seriously, Lyft, I know when I need you, so alert me when my driver is arriving, not when there’s a sale on rides.
I think this is two separate issues. Nothing Apple can do about the granularity of an individual app’s notifications. That’s an app design issue.
But Apple could make it easier to get from an app’s notifications settings in the Settings app to the more detailed settings in the app itself. Perhaps via a link you tap in the Settings > Notifications > Facebook page that brings you to the sub-page in Facebook itself to tweak the more detail settings. To me, this consistency would be welcome.
Daisuke Wakabayashi, writing for the New York Times:
The company has put off any notion of an Apple-branded autonomous vehicle and is instead working on the underlying technology that allows a car to drive itself.
And:
A notable symbol of that retrenchment is a self-driving shuttle service that ferries employees from one Apple building to another. The shuttle, which has never been reported before, will likely be a commercial vehicle from an automaker and Apple will use it to test the autonomous driving technology that it develops.
And:
Five people familiar with Apple’s car project, code-named “Titan,” discussed with The New York Times the missteps that led the tech giant to move — at least for now — from creating a self-driving Apple car to creating technology for a car that someone else builds. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about Apple’s plans.
The project’s reduced scale aligns Apple more closely with other tech companies that are working on autonomous driving technology but are steering clear of building cars. Even Waymo, the Google self-driving spinoff that is probably furthest along among Silicon Valley companies, has said repeatedly that it does not plan to produce its own vehicles.
This is the way Apple works. In fact, this is the way any large-scale, R&D based business works. Experiment, build, test, learn, pivot. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes you end up going in a completely different direction.
Research counts on missteps. It’s part of the process.
The tone of this article reads to me as: “Apple screws up royally, they just couldn’t build a car, have to settle for the scraps of building a shuttle for its employees.”
Another take could be, “Apple continues to learn about the auto space, takes another step forward by designing and building an actual, working autonomous vehicle which they will put into use moving employees around their campuses. Amazing that they came so far so quickly. Who knows where they’ll ultimately take this technology?”
Me? I think that second take is closer to reality.
Today we’re launching the first step of an exciting new phase at Medium.
We strongly believe that quality content needs to be paid for by consumers — not advertisers — so creators can do their best work, and to align the incentives of everyone involved. So, since March, we’ve been experimenting with our subscription paywall and putting more and more great stories behind it. But that’s only a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of fantastic stories published on Medium every day. And, though Medium is an open publishing platform, we haven’t enabled a way for most of our writers to participate in the economics.
Until now.
In a nutshell, Medium is updating their Partner Program to allow writers to be paid by engagement. And how is that engagement measured?
For the creators in the program, each month you will be paid based on the level of engagement your stories get from Medium members. Essentially, we look at the engagement of each individual member (claps being the primary signal) and allocate their monthly subscription fee based on that engagement. This is one of the reasons we love Claps — it helps us measure the depth of appreciation that a member has for each individual post. (For our members, we’re excited to give you more meaningful control over the stories you support. The more claps you give a locked post, the more share of your membership fee that author will get.)
To me, this move was inevitable. The question is, will this amount to more than pennies for all but the most widely read authors? Reminiscent of the music streaming model.
Popular weather app AccuWeather has been caught sending geolocation data to a third-party data monetization firm, even when the user has switched off location sharing.
And Jim’s followup:
How can you ever trust them again? You can’t.
Last night, AccuWeather released this statement:
Despite stories to the contrary from sources not connected to the actual information, if a user opts out of location tracking on AccuWeather, no GPS coordinates are collected or passed without further opt-in permission from the user.
Other data, such as Wi-Fi network information that is not user information, was for a short period available on the Reveal SDK, but was unused by AccuWeather. In fact, AccuWeather was unaware the data was available to it. Accordingly, at no point was the data used by AccuWeather for any purpose.
And
To avoid any further misinterpretation, while Reveal is updating its SDK, AccuWeather will be removing the Reveal SDK from its iOS app until it is fully compliant with appropriate requirements. Once reinstated, the end result should be that zero data is transmitted back to Reveal Mobile when someone opts out of location sharing. In the meanwhile, AccuWeather had already disabled the SDK, pending removal of the SDK and then later reinstatement.
My gut says AccuWeather was caught by surprise here, rather than caught with their hand in the cookie jar. The way I read this, this is an issue with the Reveal SDK, not an intentional act of deception on the part of the AccuWeather app. Disagree?
Popular weather app AccuWeather has been caught sending geolocation data to a third-party data monetization firm, even when the user has switched off location sharing.
It has been a few years since a decision by a major tech company last turned me into a green rage monster, but it just happened again. Code42 Software has announced that it’s discontinuing its consumer backup product, CrashPlan for Home.
Product Graveyard is a fun way to keep track of and commemorate our favorite products that are with us no more. I worked on this as a side project during my summer internship at Siftery. Hope you enjoy and please join in by contributing a funny story or eulogy for one of the featured products!
It’s a little depressing to see how many of these products I used over the years that are no more.
Congratulations to those of you who used proper solar eclipse glasses and witnessed the phenomenon without permanently damaging your vision. Good job! But now you’re probably wondering what to do with those flimsy pieces of cardboard and black polymer that were basically priceless just hours ago.
Fortunately, Astronomers Without Borders has offered to take them off your hands so that children will be able to use them in future eclipses. The organization says it will soon announce a program dedicated to redistributing glasses to schools in Asia and South America, where there will be solar eclipses in 2019.
What a great idea and wonderful service by Astronomers Without Borders.
Of the estimated 2.4m apps available on the App Store, we believe less than 1% leverage ML today – but not for long. We believe Core ML will be a driving force in bringing machine learning to the masses in the form of more useful and insightful apps that run faster and respect user privacy.
It’s going to be interesting to see what we will be able to do with our devices in the next three years as machine learning and artificial intelligence make their way into our lives in a bigger way.
After touring with his prototype models throughout 2016 and 2017, Slash is proud to announce the release of these limited edition Gibson Custom Slash Anaconda Burst Les Pauls.
It’s very nice, but I’m more of an Appetite for Destruction Les Paul guy.
This is a major drop in shipping time, from 6 weeks (down to 4 weeks recently) down to 2-3 weeks. This is on the US Apple Store. Not sure about other countries.
Your Mac contains a lot of personal information, and is connected to a number of Apple accounts. When you plan to dispose of your Mac — whether you sell it, give it away, or send it for recycling — there are a number of things you should do to make sure your data and your accounts remain secure. There are also a few steps you need to take to remove that Mac from Apple’s accounts.
In this article, I go over the 8 steps you should take before getting rid of a Mac.
Some basic, common sense advice here. Bookmark, pass along, especially to folks you know who are relatively new to the Mac.
Forget fiddling with passwords or even fingerprints; forget multiple layers of sign-in; forget credit cards and, eventually, even physical keys to our homes and cars. A handful of laptops and mobile devices can now read facial features, and the technique is about to get a boost from specialized hardware small enough to fit into our phones.
Using our faces to unlock things could soon become routine, rather than the purview of spies and superheroes.
And:
Depth-sensing technology, generally called “structured light,” sprays thousands of tiny infrared dots across a person’s face or any other target.
By reading distortions in this field of dots, the camera gathers superaccurate depth information. Since the phone’s camera can see infrared but humans can’t, such a system could allow the phone to unlock in complete darkness.
And:
Teaching our phones what our faces look like will be just like teaching them our fingerprints, says Sy Choudhury, a senior director at Qualcomm responsible for security and machine-intelligence products. An image of your face is captured, relevant features are extracted and the phone stores them for comparison with your face when you unlock the phone.
As with fingerprint recognition, the facial images are securely stored only on the device itself, not in the cloud. History — from Apple’s battles with domestic law enforcement over unlocking iPhones to Amazon’s insistence that the Alexa doesn’t upload anything until it hears its wake word — suggests companies will use this privacy as a selling point.
My fingerprints don’t change, but moisture, sweat, and dirt can make my fingerprints unreadable to Touch ID. I wonder if a haircut, beard trim, shift in makeup patterns will have a similar impact on facial recognition.
“Breakout” was created by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak with help from fellow co-founder Steve Jobs as a successor to “Pong,” and requires a player to knock down rows of colored bricks with a paddle.
Nestle simply replaced the bricks with brown Kit Kat bars, used in a Kit Kate Bites commercial titled “Kit Kat: Breakout,” showing adults and children using paddles to knock the bars down, according to Atari.
How does Nestle possibly defend themselves against this lawsuit? They seem guilty as hell.
Lots to love about this fantastic video. There’s the solar eclipse itself, of course, , but there’s also a chance to see the great Walter Cronkite at work. I love the reference to 2017 as the next total eclipse. Seems impossibly far off.
