Jim Papadopoulos has spent much of his life fascinated by bikes, often to the exclusion of everything else. He competed in amateur races while a teenager and at university, but his obsession ran deeper. He could never ride a bike without pondering the mathematical mysteries that it contained. Chief among them: What unseen forces allow a rider to balance while pedalling? Why must one initially steer right in order to lean and turn left? And how does a bike stabilize itself when propelled without a rider?
As kids, we “counterbalanced” by instinct. When I was learning to ride a motorcycle, the explanation of “steer right, go left” confused the living daylights out of me.
There’s no shortage of word processing software in the world, but few have the cult following that Scrivener does. Long available for OS X and Windows, it’s finally ready to be downloaded by anyone who owns an iOS device for $20.
I’m not much of a writer so I’ve never used Scrivener but many of the writers I know swear by it and have been waiting impatiently for this app for their iPads.
This is a bit hard to follow, but it is a pretty ingenious scheme. In a nutshell, the scammer sets up a pay phone line, a phone number that people have to pay to use. They then use that number as a verification number with Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. and take an action which causes that number to be called.
By automating the process, they bring in a nice little wave of money. That’s the theory, anyway. This was pieced together by a security researcher who raised the issue to get companies to put barriers in place to prevent this hack.
This sounds like an exaggeration, I know, but take a look at this resume. Not effective in a traditional sense, since it can’t be printed and won’t fit in with most job search engines, but still, great job.
Just call 917-ASK-NYPL, and a live librarian will try to answer your question, using vast archives collected over 120 years.
And:
Set up in the 1960s, the line is manned by nine librarians and information assistants. The team gets a lot of calls from people who want to fact-check things they’ve heard on the news, says Caballero-Li.
What I find amazing is that this service still exists, has not been overwhelmed with demand. Fascinating read.
Garry Marshall, who created some of the 1970s’ most iconic sitcoms including “Happy Days,” “The Odd Couple,” “Laverne and Shirley” and “Mork and Mindy” and went on to direct hit movies including “Pretty Woman” and “The Princess Diaries,” died Tuesday in Burbank, Calif. of complications from pneumonia following a stroke. He was 81.
Marshall went from being TV writer to creating sitcoms that touched the funny bones of the 1970s generation and directing films that were watched over and over: “Happy Days” helped start a nostalgia craze that has arguably never abated, while “Mork and Mindy” had a psychedelically goofy quality that catapulted Robin Williams to fame and made rainbow suspenders an icon of their era. “Pretty Woman” likewise cemented Julia Roberts’ stardom, while “The Princess Diaries” made Anne Hathaway a teen favorite.
“Happy Days” star Henry Winkler credited him for launching his career, tweeting “Thank you for my professional life.”
Garry Marshall was a huge influence, sending out waves far beyond the specific content he created.
The new episodes of Making A Murderer will provide an in-depth look at the post-conviction process of convicted murderer Steven Avery, and his co-defendant, Brendan Dassey, as their respective investigative and legal teams challenge their convictions and the State fights to have their life sentences upheld.
Like many people, I was glued to the TV set watching this series.
Gawker Media LLC founder Nick Denton faces personal bankruptcy after a U.S. judge refused on Tuesday to extend protections shielding him from liabilities resulting from a lawsuit over the invasion of privacy of former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan.
Version 2 sports the world class, professional photo editing that you users of Camera+ for iPhone have been enjoying via The Lab. But the iPad version takes photo editing to a new level by supporting selective brushing of the various edits and filters. And those of you who own an Apple Pencil will appreciate it even more because we’ve also added Pencil support, enabling you to get very fine, precise control over brushing with it.
Camera+ has a lot of tools and is certainly worth a look if you are into photography on your iPad.
Twitter Inc said on Tuesday it had signed a deal with the NBA to stream exclusive non-game programing, pushing deeper into sports streaming as it seeks new ways to attract users.
Twitter also signed a deal with the NFL this year. I’ll have to wait and see what kind of content comes out of this deal, but on the surface, I’m not sure this appeals to me.
“Due to the wide array of available Android devices, we are targeting our support to a select number of Android devices to continue improving our overall Salesforce1 for Android user experience,” the company said in the support document.
Translation: Android is so fucked up, we were forced to take steps to make it work for us.
There will be a day where some of my old machines will stop working. There will be a day where none of them work anymore.
As sad as that will be from a hardware perspective, it’s devastating in terms of preserving software. Old operating systems are sealed inside these machines. A dead Mac is really just a beige — or Bondi Blue — sarcophagus for the software stranded on its internal disk.
Preserving the textual contents of a document is one thing, but how do we preserve the experience? How do we save the applications and the non-textual data?
Great piece by Stephen Hackett. Absolutely worth reading.
In an ultimatum, Iranian officials asked iPhone manufacturer Apple Inc. to either officially register in Iran or have its products banned, a local news agency reported Monday.
“If Apple will not register an official representative in Iran within the next few days, all iPhones will be collected from the market,” Tasnim News Agency quoted the director of Iran’s anti-smuggling office as having said on Sunday.
More than 40 million Iranians are using smart phones, including millions of iPhone users, whose devices are often imported into the country by smugglers.
And:
For anti-smuggling purposes Iran has started a project, running under the president’s office, to ban smuggled mobile phones. The scheme, which will start later this week, will require all mobile phones to be registered with Iran’s telecommunications user database. Any that are not will not be able to be used.
Hard to know what to make of this. Given past events, is it wrong to be skeptical here?
Google’s grand plans for a futuristic new campus in the North Bayshore district of Mountain View, CA may finally become a reality thanks to a new real estate deal struck with LinkedIn. According to the Silicon Valley Business Journal, the two tech companies came to an agreement on a property swap that puts to rest a longstanding feud over lucrative current and unused square footage in Silicon Valley. Google paid $215 million for the swap, while LinkedIn paid $331 million, the report states.
In a nutshell, Google’s plans for their campus were put on hold last year when the Mountain View city council voted to award a huge tract of land to LinkedIn instead of Google. With the swap, Google now has the property it needs to push forward.
Politics aside, follow the various links to see pictures and video of this planned campus. To me, it’s like a science fiction fantasy. It will be interesting to watch this unfold. Looks like Apple, Facebook and Google will all have their grand palaces.
Starting today, Apple Pay is now available in France for credit and debit cards issued by Banque Populaire, Ticket Restaurant, Carrefour Banque, and Caisse d’Epargne. Apple’s website also notes that support will soon be added for cards issued by Boon and Orange.
Out of the 4 big banks in France, just BPCE is supported (Banque Populaire and Caisse d’Epargne merged to become BPCE in 2009). There is no word on when cards issued by the other three big banks (BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole or Société Générale) will be supported by Apple Pay.
The iPhone is “faster; smoother. Android freezes up” and has to be restarted too often, the source said. The problem with the Android is particularly noticeable when viewing live feed from an unmanned aerial system such as Instant Eye, the source said.
Makes sense that the Army would want the best equipment they can get.
I am absolutely astounded by what this report from F-Secure says. It makes the “gangs” seem like companies being graded on their customer service after hacking your computer:
Ransomware criminals actually care about your convenience. That’s according to a recent experiment detailed in a new F-Secure report, Evaluating the Customer Journey of Crypto-Ransomware and the Paradox Behind It. The experiment involved evaluating the “customer experience” of five current crypto-ransomware variants, beginning with the initial ransom screen all the way to interacting with the ransomware criminals behind each of those variants.
The report’s findings include:
Those families with the most professional user interfaces are not necessarily also those with the best customer service.
Crypto-ransomware gangs are usually willing to negotiate the price. Three out of four variants were willing to negotiate, averaging a 29 percent discount from the original ransom fee.
Ransomware deadlines are not necessarily “set in stone.” 100 percent of the groups contacted granted extensions on the deadlines.
One of the groups claimed to be hired by a corporation to hack another corporation — a kid playing a prank, or a sinister new threat actor?
If you installed any of the updates Apple released today, you may be interested in the security content of what you installed. These are for the official releases, not the betas.
It’s a big day for Apple updates. In addition to a number of beta updates released today, Apple also updated iTunes to version 12.4.2. According to the update, it “resolves a playback issue with short Apple Music songs in your Up Next queue.”
You can download iTunes by checking for new updates in the Mac App Store.
For children, playgrounds are where magic happens. And if you count yourself among Baby Boomers or Gen Xers, you probably have fond memories of high steel jungle gyms and even higher metal slides that squeaked and groaned as you slid down them.
When you dismounted from a teeter-totter, you had to be careful not to send your partner crashing to the ground or get hit in the head by your own seat. The tougher, faster kids always pushed the brightly colored merry-go-round, trying to make riders as dizzy as possible. In the same way, you’d dare your sibling or best friend to push you even higher on the swing so your toes could touch the sky.
Today, these objects of happy summers past have nearly disappeared, replaced by newer equipment that’s lower to the ground and made of plastic, painted metal, and sometimes rot-resistant woods like cedar or redwood.
This is a fascinating article about the history of the playgrounds many of us horsed around on as kids. We think of them with nostalgia but, if we’re honest with ourselves, some of that equipment was incredibly dangerous. We had metal slides that, in the heat of the summer, could cause significant burns. And who doesn’t remember being spun off (or doing the spinning off) the Merry Go Round? And how many kids fell from the top of the Monkey Bars, hitting every steel bar on the way down, knocking out multiple teeth?
