I do love the crest, cars and everything about the driving experience.

Ryonghung, a North Korean technology company, recently announced a new tablet. It looks a lot like the weird, firewalled computers the country has produced in the past, with the addition of one curious new feature: the name. It’s called… the iPad.

I have no idea how Apple is even supposed to fight this one.

I had such a great time chatting with John Gruber on his latest episode of The Talk Show.

This is the biggest thing that we’ve ever done. The most innovative, beautiful and powerful thing that we’ve ever done. And it’s also the most Mac thing that we’ve ever done! This is what the legendary Pixelmator Team has been secretly and incredibly passionately working on for 5 whole years.

This totally caught my attention today. I love the folks at Pixelmator and the great apps they make, so if they’ve been working on something this long, you know it’s going to be big.

FOX Sports:

But why should I care now?

Because playoff hockey is amazing and one of the greatest viewing experiences in sports. At the end of the Stanley Cup Final all the players say the f-word on TV as they pass around giant trophy that everybody gets to kiss. It’s a lot of fun.

As a Canadian, I feel it is my duty and obligation to post this for our American readers. You’re welcome.

The Essential Phone, brought to us by the person who created Android, is finally ready for the spotlight. It’s an incredibly audacious and ambitious project, with an outlandish screen and the beginnings of a modular ecosystem.

Rubin has been trying to one-up Apple for years but could never quite pull it off. We’ll see how this works out, but I suspect once Apple outlines its next iOS and iPhone hardware later this year, interest in Rubin’s “Essential Phone” will wane.

AppleInsider:

Apple has hired Qualcomm Engineering VP Esin Terzioglu as a wireless “System on a Chip” lead, offering additional evidence that the company may plan to expand its internal chip development into Broadband Processors working as mobile modems.

Terzioglu’s profile notes that he began working at Qualcomm in August 2009, where he lead the company’s QCT [Qualcomm CDMA Technologies] Central Engineering organization, defining its technology roadmap.

Apple is making moves. We’ll see the results of this hire in six months to a year.

MotoGP:

Directed by Mark Neale and narrated by Ewan McGregor, DTK looks back at the 2005 US GP which marked the premier class return to Laguna Seca.

The Kentucky Kid of the title is Nicky Hayden who tragically lost his life last week after being struck by a car while out training on a bicycle. The movie is quite dated but does give a good sense of what professional motorcycle racing is all about.

Fast Company:

When it comes to websites, we have ever more sophisticated techniques at our disposal to block the ads that sometimes track our wanderings around the internet. But most of us spend much of our time these days in mobile apps that offer no transparency on how we’re being tracked or sold–nor tools for blocking that behavior.

I don’t mind app tracking per se but I want to know which apps are doing it and be able to revoke that permission if I so choose.

Mashable:

The Newton proved to be a flop, but its impact was huge. The product marked the beginning of a dark era for Apple, one in which the company nearly went bankrupt. Without those struggles, there’s a good chance Steve Jobs doesn’t return to Apple in 1997. With no Jobs back at Apple, who knows what happens to products like the iPod or iPhone.

A lot of the things we use today came from the Newton.

Ars Technica:

Almost 10 years ago, journalist David Kushner had a chance to interview Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, the two creators of Dungeons & Dragons, before they died. Kushner’s reporting became a story for Wired, and now he’s expanded the scope of his tale into a graphic novel. Rise of the Dungeon Master, beautifully illustrated by Koren Shadmi, is both a moving portrait of two creative outsiders and a chronicle of how a new kind of storytelling changed pop culture forever.

Kushner recounts the story of Gygax and Arneson in the second person, addressing the reader as if Kushner were the dungeon master. “You” are young Gygax, the child of immigrants growing up in the midwest, seeking escape from ordinary life by exploring the wilderness, hunting, and eventually learning to break into an old, abandoned asylum. The narrative technique sounds gimmicky, but it works: you’re sucked into the story and into immediate sympathy with Gygax as he traces his fascination with adventure games back to his childhood, when he climbed around in the maze of tunnels below the creepy asylum’s rotting rooms.

I would love to read this not just for the story telling style of a graphic novel but because, even in middle age, I have a soft spot for D&D and would play it again this weekend if I could.

justinobeirne:

Shortly after I published my Cartography Comparison last June, I noticed Google updating some of the areas we had focused on. Coincidence or not, it was interesting. And it made me wonder what else would change, if we kept watching. Would Google keep adding detail? And would Apple, like Google, also start making changes?

So I wrote a script that takes monthly screenshots of Google and Apple Maps. And thirteen months later, we now have a year’s worth of images.

Some very interesting and very geeky comparisons between the two mapping services. I can confirm what he says about TomTom. My motorcycle GPS is a TomTom and frankly, it’s often not very good.

Washington Post:

Google has begun using billions of credit-card transaction records to prove that its online ads are prompting people to make purchases – even when they happen offline in brick-and-mortar stores, the company said Tuesday.

The advance allows Google to determine how many sales have been generated by digital ad campaigns, a goal that industry insiders have long described as “the holy grail” of online advertising. But the announcement also renewed long-standing privacy complaints about how the company uses personal information.

To say the very least, this is incredibly creepy.

CNN: > Lauren Kern will leave her role as executive editor of New York Magazine on June 2nd for the Cupertino-based company, New York Magazine Editor-in-Chief Adam Moss announced on Wednesday in a staff memo obtained by CNN. >

“I am not happy to report that we are losing our beloved Lauren Kern to the Apple corporation,” Moss wrote. “I mean, I’m happy for Lauren certainly. It’s an exciting opportunity to be the editor in chief of Apple News, to bring a journalistic vigor and intelligence to an operation that has always seemed to me so full of promise.”

This broadening and focusing the scope of Apple News will be interesting to watch.

It always amazes me when I see artists using the iPad and Apple Pencil to make illustrations like this. There is a video on the page showing how the cover was made.

Thanks to Letter Opener for sponsoring The Loop this week.

Letter Opener for macOS

Working together with Windows users shouldn’t be problematic at all. Still, some email messages can not be natively read by the Mac and are packed into Winmail.dat or MSG files that have to be extracted and displayed somehow. Letter Opener for macOS does that with a simple double-click!

Letter Opener for macOS Mail

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If Winmail.dat files are a reoccurring problem, Letter Opener for macOS Mail is the solution. Installed into Mail it opens and displays the files directly inside Apples Mail application, so the user can forget about Winmail.dat files entirely.

Use coupon code ROCKET88 for 30% off Letter Opener for macOS Mail.

MacRumors:

Apple today added a new events page to its main website, confirming that its June 5 Worldwide Developers Conference will be live streamed and available to watch on the Apple website and through the Apple TV.

Apple previously said it would provide a live stream of the Worldwide Developers Conference through its Apple Developer website and through the WWDC app, but the new event page makes it clear the keynote event will be available for all to watch even without a developer account.

Expect big things.

This is my last weekly column for The Verge and Recode — the last weekly column I plan to write anywhere. I’ve been doing these almost every week since 1991, starting at The Wall Street Journal, and during that time, I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know the makers of the tech revolution, and to ruminate — and sometimes to fulminate — about their creations.

Cheers, Walt!

Sir Jony succeeds Sir James Dyson OM, Provost of the College (2011–17), as this key honorary role is renamed. The Chancellor is head of the College, presiding over meetings of the Court, a member of its governing body, Council, and conferring degrees at Convocation. Baroness Gail Rebuck remains Chair of Council and becomes Pro-Chancellor of the university. The posts of Chancellor and Pro-Chancellor are non-salaried.

Congrats, Jony.

Nearly a quarter of American adults sold or traded in a vehicle in the last 12 months, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll published on Thursday, with most getting another car. But 9 percent of that group turned to ride services like Lyft Inc and Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] as their main way to get around.

About the same percentages said they planned to dispose of cars and turn to ride services in the upcoming 12 months.

This makes a lot of sense in urban areas and for people that don’t like to drive. I enjoy driving, so I wouldn’t do that, but it seems to be a growing trend.

MacRumors:

In a new study comparing the accuracy of seven different fitness trackers, the Apple Watch was found to have the lowest margin of error when measuring heart rate, beating the Basis Peak, Fitbit Surge, Microsoft Band, Mio Alpha 2, PulseOn, and Samsung Gear S2.

Researchers set out to determine the accuracy of wrist-worn devices at measuring both heart rate and energy expenditure, aka calories burned via physical activity. 60 volunteers participated, including 29 males and 31 females, each of whom wore several fitness trackers and completed activities like cycling, running, and walking.

If these numbers are important to you (and they are for a lot of people), it’s good to know the Apple Watch comes out ahead.

Macworld:

Last week at the Google I/O developer conference, Google announced a raft of forthcoming additions to its Google Photos service. Since Google Photos runs on iOS and in any web browser, it’s a serious photo-storage option for Mac, iPhone, and iPad users—and in many ways, it’s way ahead of Apple’s Photos apps and iCloud Photo Library service.

Then again, WWDC—Apple’s own developer conference—is in just two weeks. It’s an opportunity for Apple to declare where it’s taking Photos and iCloud Photo Library next. In the meantime, though, it’s worth pointing out where Google Photos is beating Apple’s offerings, and where Apple’s ahead—and how WWDC could be poised to change both sides of the equation.

I don’t use either to manage my photos. Any Loopers want to weigh in on their particular pros and cons?

The Sweet Setup:

You don’t have to wear a tin foil hat to understand the benefit of removing GPS info from your photos. In this workflow post, we’ll show you how to remove this metadata from your photos on both your Mac and iOS devices.

Removing GPS data on your Mac is simple to do with the built-in Preview app. You can also remove GPS info from photos on your iOS device, but you’ll need a third-party app in order to do so.

My life is an open book so I don’t care about the GPS data on my photos but many people do have legitimate concerns. These are easy steps to take.

Petapixel:

Cone is a beautifully designed iOS app that uses the phone’s camera to pick Pantone colors from the world around you.

The $2.49 app samples colors along with their Pantone name in real-time. Cone is a very handy way to create satisfying color palettes from real life scenes, and it also provides the hex color values for use in web or unlimited graphic design.

I don’t know that I have a use for this app but it’s a very clever implementation.

Chaos Computer Club blog:

Biometric authentication systems – again – don’t deliver on their security promise: The iris recognition system of the new Samsung Galaxy S8 was successfully defeated by hackers of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). A video demonstrates how the simple technique works.

The video is embedded below (with a German voiceover). This seems incredibly easy to replicate. Did Samsung even try to break their own iris recognition system?

Sigh. Oh, Samsung. [H/T Robert Davey]