MIT Technology Review:

For several years now, Apple has operated a hush-hush fitness lab in an undisclosed location at its campus in Cupertino, California, and this week the company offered up a few details about how it’s studying all kinds of activities—on dry land and in water—in order to build algorithms for tracking them on the Apple Watch.

Jay Blahnik, Apple’s director of fitness for health technologies, said Tuesday that Apple believes the gym-like lab—which was built before the Apple Watch was released in 2015 and uses employee volunteers as guinea pigs—has now collected more biometric data than anyone else.

This is an all too short article. I’d love to read more about what Apple is doing in the gym and how. Unlikely, I know.

TechCrunch:

Unless you’ve had a chance to try some Apple HomeKit products in someone’s home or apartment, it can be hard to understand how it all works. In order to help with that, Apple has unveiled interactive HomeKit experiences in 46 of its retail stores worldwide.

Now, when you go into Apple’s new retail stores, you’ll be able to use the Home app from either an Apple Watch, iPhone or iPad to control devices like the Philips Hue light bulb, the Hunter ceiling fan and many others. If you tap to lower the shades in the living room, for example, you’ll see the shades lower in the house shown on the screen.

This is one of the primary reasons Apple created the Apple Retails Stores – to show off their products and technology. I can’t wait to go to my local store to try this out. It’s not exactly like the “real” HomeKit experience but it looks like a good approximation.

TidBITS:

I want to pick apart this story, not to criticize Motherboard or the reporter per se, but instead to explain in greater depth for existing 1Password users why this licensing shift doesn’t force them to put their passwords in the cloud. And, additionally, how AgileBits’s approach to zero-knowledge encryption in the cloud, which is similar to that employed by Apple for iCloud Keychain and LastPass for its system, may be less risky and less exposed in some ways than using Dropbox to sync vaults.

The devil is in the details, though: despite having a robust design, the implementation of AgileBits’ cloud-based system isn’t as fully transparent and audited as many researchers would like.

As usual, there is a lot of hair on fire reporting from the tech and Mac media on subjects they don’t understand and/or are too lazy to actually do any research or real reporting. Fleishman does a great job on both.

Equinux blog:

Apple is known for doing things with more attention to detail than most companies. So it should come as no surprise that even App Store gift cards with their promo codes have a few secret details that help make the experience more Apple-like.

So what powers the simple App Store promo codes? Secret fonts, special dimensions, and many more.

Today, we uncover these secrets.

And:

Apple’s App Store gift cards have a special trick: you can simply hold one up to your iPhone or Mac’s camera and it’ll automatically scan in the code and redeem the card for you. As developers, we thought it’d be cool to print some of our own promo code cards to give away at events, so we tried to create our own scannable cards. Turns out, there’s more to it than meets the eye…

This is some fascinating reverse engineering. My concern is that the post exposes font details that might be used to break Apple’s carefully built promo card system. If so, I’d expect a pretty rapid response by Apple.

Charvel continues its long-held partnerships with Warren DeMartini and Jake E Lee with the upcoming release of brand-new signature models. The Warren DeMartini USA Signature Frenchie and the Jake E Lee USA Signature Blue Burst will be unveiled this week at the Summer NAMM Show in Nashville, Tenn., and available to consumers in October 2017.

Both of these guys are among my favorite players.

Australia on Friday proposed new laws to compel companies such as U.S. social media giant Facebook and device manufacturer Apple to provide security agencies access to encrypted messages.

They don’t seem to understand that you can’t just let them have access to the information. Once access is grant, security is weaker for everyone.

Thanks to Jamf Now for sponsoring The Loop this week. Jamf Now is an on-demand mobile device management solution for your iPad, iPhone and Mac devices at work. We make management tasks like deploying Wi-Fi passwords, securing company data and enforcing passcodes, simple and affordable, so businesses can support their users; no IT required. Get started for free today!

This is a brand new refresh of the iOS/Mac/web refund process. Bookmark and pass along.

Disney doesn’t add entire new lands that frequently. A new land is an entire new, heavily themed area for the park, with new rides, new attractions and, of course, new shops.

In this case, both DisneyWorld and Disneyland are getting a new Star Wars Land, which is said to open in 2019. TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief Matthew Panzarino wrangled an invite to see what the new land is going to look like. Follow the headline link to step through the slide show, and check the video embedded in the tweet below for a panning shot of the 3D model.

Video pan pic.twitter.com/zitsWNz81N

— Matthew Panzarino (@panzer) July 14, 2017

The only thing better than Radiohead hiding the app like this is the fact that someone figured it out. Deep geek.

But as security ominously filed into SoundCloud’s meeting rooms at its offices around the world during the all-hands video conference broadcast from its Berlin headquarters, the startup’s staff discovered they wouldn’t be getting the answers they wanted. Instead, sources at SoundCloud tell TechCrunch that founders Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlforss confessed the layoffs only saved the company enough money to have runway “until Q4” — which begins in just 50 days.

Under the current climate, I don’t see how SoundCloud can stay alive.

The BIAS Mini is a compact and portable size amplifier that comes in two versions, Guitar and Bass—each one specially designed to be the most versatile amplifier on the planet for the gigging musician.

And

The BIAS Twin Delay, Modulation, and Distortion pedals are Positive Grid’s new line of professional effects stompboxes designed for maximum tone versatility. All three pedals feature the same incredible tone of the award-winning BIAS Pro pedals in a compact 2-button pedal format.

I love Positive Grid’s software, but I haven’t tried their hardware gear yet. From what I’ve seen, it’s great sounding though.

From the SFMOMA site:

Text 572-51 with the words “send me” followed by a keyword, a color, or even an emoji and you’ll receive a related artwork image and caption via text message.

For example, I texted the words “send me cake” and got a text back (in about 30 seconds) with a pic of Wayne Thiebaud’s “Dessert Tray”.

SFMOMA has about 35,000 pieces in their collection, only a fraction of that on display at any moment. This gives you random access to the entire thing. Fun!

Editor Paul Machliss has cut some difficult movies. You’ve seen his work if you’ve ever seen the quick edits in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and The World’s End, both personal favorites.

From the linked Premium Beat article:

For the film to work just right, Machliss had to be on set editing to verify that the timing of each shot was perfect: “To make it work you had to sort of be there at the moment of creation . . . I was there every day of every moment of every take. Edgar would do a take and yell ‘Cut!’ and then from the other side of the set go ‘How was that Paul?’ . . . and sort of wait until you went . . . ‘Yes it’s good.’ Then he felt he could move on. The advantage, of course being, we knew that six months down the line we weren’t gonna go ‘Ugh, we missed a trick here,’ ‘This didn’t work.’”

And:

To keep up with the production, Machliss had to be mobile and fast. He managed to put together an editing cart, pictured above: “This was the edit cart, basically, which was loaned to me by the sound department when we very quickly learned that I had to be absolutely mobile.”

The cart is pretty bare bones — a MacBook Pro, some external hard drives, “[Avid] Media Composer with an A-grade monitor which doubled either as a second screen for Media Composer, or as a full screen in its own right when Edgar wanted to come over and say ‘How does that look?’”

Check out the image of the extended keyboard at the very end of the article. It was new out-of-the-box when the film started.

[H/T Oliver Thomas]

Experts said a 5,800-square-kilometer (2,239-square-mile) section of Larsen C was confirmed to have broken away between Monday and Wednesday by NASA’s Aqua MODIS satellite.

Holy crap, that’s huge.

The security issue, uncovered by research from cybersecurity firm UpGuard, was caused by a misconfigured security setting on a cloud server due to “human error.”

The error made customer phone numbers, names, and some PIN codes publicly available online. PIN codes are used to confirm the identity of people who call for customer service.

Wow!

Speaking of companies I respect, check out the new Fantastical for Mac. It’s just packed with great new features.

Design, create, sketch, and diagram. An incredibly powerful app for both beginners and professionals.

There are very few companies I respect as much as The Omni Group.

Get Beats wireless headphones when you buy an eligible Mac or iPad Pro for college. And save more with Apple education pricing.

Personally, I don’t like Beats headphones, but I guess it’s something free.

iOS 11, however, will let you record the screen directly on your device, keeping your Mac out of the equation entirely. Here’s how it works in the developer and public betas.

This is a really handy addition in iOS 11. I’ve recorded my iOS screen with my Mac before, but now I’ll be able to do it right on the device.

Facebook Inc, Twitter Inc, Alphabet Inc and dozens of other major technology companies protested online on Wednesday against proposed changes to U.S. net neutrality rules that prohibit broadband providers from giving or selling access to certain internet services over others.

It’s hard to believe we’re still arguing about this.

Macworld:

Autoplay video: The bane of the web. You either hate them, or are completely disgusted by them. Fortunately, with Safari 11 in macOS High Sierra, you can easily disable autoplay video and surf the web in relative peace.

I hope the irony of this tip being posted on a page with autoplaying video is not lost on Macworld.

Megan Rose Dickey, TechCrunch:

Unless you’ve had a chance to try some Apple HomeKit products in someone’s home or apartment, it can be hard to understand how it all works. In order to help with that, Apple has unveiled interactive HomeKit experiences in 46 of its retail stores worldwide.

Now, when you go into Apple’s new retail stores, you’ll be able to use the Home app from either an Apple Watch, iPhone or iPad to control devices like the Phillips Hue light bulb, the Hunter ceiling fan and many others. If you tap to the lower the shades in the living room, for example, you’ll see the shades lower in the house shown on the screen.

Smart.