Apple Watch alerts adding to your stress level. Turn ’em off. At least until we all come up for air again.

Follow the headline link, check out the banner on Apple’s front page. Apple’s previous statement was that stores would be closed until March 27th. This statement seems more realistic.

It ends with:

We look forward to seeing you soon.

Me too.

Follow the link, look at all the prices. The iPad Air is a particularly good deal, $99 off across the board.

Amazon blog:

Company will invest over $350 million globally to increase pay by $2/hour in the U.S., £2/hr in the UK, and approximately €2/hr in many EU countries for employees and partners who are in fulfillment centers, transportation operations, stores or those making deliveries so that others can remain at home.

And:

We also know many people have been economically impacted as jobs in areas like hospitality, restaurants, and travel are lost or furloughed as part of this crisis. We want those people to know we welcome them on our teams until things return to normal and their past employer is able to bring them back.

No matter what you think of Amazon, the company is playing a critical role here, getting goods and food to people who cannot/should not be out and about. Amazon delivery people are on the front lines, much like postal and retail workers. To me, those raises are hazard pay.

Take Control Books:

We’re in a time of unprecedented uncertainty. In the middle of a global viral outbreak, you were told or asked to work from home—and you’ve never or rarely had to be productive where you live before. What to do? We’re here to take at some stress out of your life with a new, free book that details how to set up a home office and balance work and home life for those not accustomed to it.

The book delves into furniture and hardware setup, including the right kind of audio input and output for calls and videoconferencing, as well as looking at security, collaboration, and communication software tools you may be unfamiliar with or might set up for your team or company.

I’ve worked from home for over 26 years now but it’s not easy. This free eBook has some good advice on how to manage it successfully.

The Hollywood Reporter:

NBCUniversal on Monday announced its current movies from the Universal Pictures stable — including the upcoming event family movie Trolls World Tour — will be made available on-demand at the same time they hit those theaters that remain open during the coronavirus pandemic.

Movies will be made available on a wide variety of on-demand services for a 48-hour rental period at a suggested retail price of $19.99 in the U.S. and the price equivalent in international markets. The announcement was made by NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell. Insiders say it isn’t a blanket policy for the studio’s entire 2020 calendar and that decisions regarding other titles and the duration of the policy haven’t been made yet.

Rather, the studio is hoping to provide options for consumers who cannot or should not go to cinemas.

I think you’ll see other studios doing this. It won’t last past this summer but for those of us practicing “social distancing” and not wanting to go to a movie theater, this is welcome news.

Apple:

Q: I want to return a product I recently purchased but the 14-day return period will end before March 28—what should I do?

A: Don’t worry. We’ll accept your return up to 14 days after we reopen. Exclusions: Contracted iPhones (US, CA, JP, AU); Carrier financing (US only); Trade-in devices (value of device can be given in form of gift card)

This and several other questions answered on Apple’s page.

AppleInsider:

Fortune has released a list of 100 products that they’ve deemed “the greatest designs” of modern times. Unsurprisingly, Apple features prominently throughout.

Coming in at number one was Apple’s iPhone. Fortune cited the company’s relentless innovation in hardware and software design as its reason for success, saying it was “a device that changed how we live.”

Of course, the iPhone wasn’t the only Apple product on the list, either. Second place went to Apple’s own Macintosh computer, which helped to define what the personal computer would become.

The iPod took the tenth spot with a special shoutout to Jony Ive. The iPod was released in 2001 and changed the way we listen to music forever.

Congratulations to everyone at Apple. They should be proud to dominate such a list. But I’m a bit miffed that the original iMac didn’t make the list.

CNET:

There’s no shortage of March Madness highlights on YouTube, from the best plays from last year’s tournament or from 2018 or from 2017 to the best buzzer-beaters of the last decade or the biggest upsets in tournament history. Or you could skip to the end and watch the tournament’s One Shining Moment recap video from last year and others.

While I could easily spend an entire afternoon going down a rabbit hole of March Madness highlights, we’re going to need full games to get us through the rest of the month. Therefore, in reverse chronological order, here are the full-game videos that will let you walk backward in time through 16 of the best games in March Madness history — all the way back to none other than Michael Jordan in his freshman year, 1982.

If you’re a fellow NCAA Men’s Basketball fan, no March Madness this year is incredibly disappointing. But here are 16 classic games to help you get through it.

Travel and Leisure:

Going into a self-quarantine can have many complex issues and complications beyond having enough food and supplies for two weeks. In terms of entertainment, it also probably means you’re in for a lot of boredom, a lot of Netflix, and a lot of browsing the internet.

But there is a way to get a little culture and education while you’re confined to your home. According to Fast Company, Google Arts & Culture teamed up with over 500 museums and galleries around the world to bring anyone and everyone virtual tours and online exhibits of some of the most famous museums around the world.

Now, you get “go to the museum” and never have to leave your couch.

Having been to several of these museums, I can tell you it’s not the same online but it’s fun to “wander around” and see some famous art in its “natural” setting.

This is day 2 of the 12 Days of Apple Stores, brought to life by the prolific coverer of all things Apple Store, Michael Steeber.

Each day, Michael explores an unusual or favorite Apple Store, with background and links of interest. Nicely done.

Wesley Hilliard, AppleInsider:

Apple improves on their A-series processors every year for each new iPhone release, so a successor to the current iPhone 11 A13 chipset is expected in the fall of 2020. Each year as the iPhone flagship release approaches, benchmark scores for said to be from the new processor in the device start to populate popular benchmark tools, like Geekbench.

And:

New Geekbench testing, purporting to be from the A14 processor shows the first A-series processor to cross the 3.0 GHz mark.

The 12.9-inch iPad Pro has an A12X chipset with 8 cores and scores 1110 on a single core, and 4568 on the multi-core. The scores for the alleged A14 go beyond even that.

Single core performance of the device shows a 1658 score, with a 4612 multi-core score. This indicates a huge gain in its overall performance and will make multitasking and navigating apps smoother than ever.

Just for comparison, I went to the Geekbench browser and looked up Apple’s latest, the 2019 16″ MacBook Pro. The single-core score is 1122 and the multi-core score is 6993. Not exactly an apples to apples comparison, but amazing to see how far the Arm chipset has come.

Follow the headline link for the tech details from Juli Clover, watch the video below to see the new Powerbeats in action. And here’s a link to the official Powerbeats page on the Beats by Dre site.

CNBC:

French antitrust authorities ordered Apple on Monday to pay a 1.1 billion euro ($1.23 billion) fine for anti-competitive behavior.

The French competition authority said the iPhone-maker was guilty of creating cartels within its distribution network and abusing the economic dependence of its outside resellers.

And:

“Apple and its two wholesalers agreed not to compete and prevent distributors from competing with each other, thereby sterilizing the wholesale market for Apple products,” said Isabelle de Silva, president of the French Competition Authority.

Apple’s response:

“The French Competition Authority’s decision is disheartening. It relates to practices from over a decade ago and discards 30 years of legal precedent that all companies in France rely on with an order that will cause chaos for companies across all industries. We strongly disagree with them and plan to appeal.”

Hard to imagine this fine standing as is.

Kanopy:

Enjoy thoughtful entertainment and stream thousands of films for free, thanks to the generous support of your public library or university.

We partner with public libraries and universities to bring you ad-free films and series that can be enjoyed on your TV, mobile phone, tablet and online.

Enjoy critically-acclaimed movies, inspiring documentaries, award-winning foreign films and more.

There are some really good, interesting movies on this site.

Ars Technica:

Comcast announced late Friday that it is suspending enforcement of its data cap and overage fees for 60 days during the coronavirus pandemic.

“With so many people working and educating from home, we want our customers to access the Internet without thinking about data plans,” Comcast’s announcement said. “While the vast majority of our customers do not come close to using 1TB of data in a month, we are pausing our data plans for 60 days giving all customers unlimited data for no additional charge.”

T-Mobile also issued an announcement late Friday, saying it will upgrade all current customers to “unlimited smartphone data for the next 60 days (excluding roaming).” This applies to any T-Mobile plan or Metro by T-Mobile prepaid plan that has a monthly data cap. Additionally, T-Mobile said it is giving all customers “an additional 20GB of mobile hotspot/tethering service for the next 60 days.” Sprint, which is being acquired by T-Mobile, is taking identical steps.

Comcast is also making its Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspots free for anyone to use. Millions of the hotspots are scattered throughout the country; you can find hotspot locations here. The hotspots are normally free to Comcast customers, while anyone else needs to buy a temporary pass to use them.

Another example of companies doing what’s best. Good to see.

VOX:

Are you the sort of person who enjoys imagining the dark thought of a new, potentially deadly disease spreading across the planet like wildfire, infecting cities, then regions, then continents, then planets? Does this wholly imaginary scenario play into a macabre desire to explore what a worst-case scenario might look like? Do you also like telling your friends what to do?

When Pandemic begins, four different diseases — represented by different colored cubes — have sprung up around the globe, and you and your friends play employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). If you can develop vaccines for all four, you win. If any number of other scenarios happen, you lose. (Seriously, there are so many ways to lose this game. It’s mean.)

What makes Pandemic so good — and so enervating — is the way it quietly encourages you and your fellow players to do just a touch of roleplaying, as you gather around the table and quietly implore each other to do this thing or that thing, because it’s the only way to save the world.

It might seem a bit morbid to play this game right now but it’s actually a lot of fun and wonderfully cooperative. You can’t win unless you all work together.

New York Times:

Most American restaurants do not offer paid sick leave. Workers who fall sick face a simple choice: Work and get paid or stay home and get stiffed. Not surprisingly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2014 that fully 20 percent of food service workers had come to work at least once in the previous year “while sick with vomiting or diarrhea.”

As the new coronavirus spreads across the United States, the time has come for restaurants, retailers and other industries that rely on low-wage labor to abandon their parsimonious resistance to paid sick leave. Companies that do not pay sick workers to stay home are endangering their workers, their customers and the health of the broader public.

Studies show that paying for sick employees to stay home significantly reduces the spread of the seasonal flu. There’s every reason to think it would help to check the new coronavirus, too.

At the best of times, the lack of paid sick leave is a bad thing. Now, it’s an actual public health emergency. The vast majority of people who work in the Retail, Hospitality, and Grocery segments are low paid as it is. Without paid time off, they have to go to work, sick or not.

The Atlantic:

Until recently, giraffes have suffered from surprising scientific neglect. Few researchers have studied them in the wild, so even basic aspects of their lives remain mysterious. Perhaps that’s because giraffes live in what researchers suspect are protean societies lacking the cohesiveness of elephant herds or lion prides. Whatever the reason, one of the world’s most conspicuous creatures has somehow been overlooked.

The same goes for its impending extinction. And without fanfare, many other major animal groups—insects, birds, and amphibians—have also declined precipitously. Quite a few of the public’s favorite wild animals, including lions, cheetahs, and gorillas, are in greater peril than is widely realized. But, according to a 2018 study, this gap between rose-tinted perceptions and dire reality is greatest for giraffes.

I’ve always been fascinated by giraffes and while I knew they were endangered, I didn’t realize how dire the situation was until I read this article.

Scientific American:

At the North Pole, 24 time zones collide at a single point, rendering them meaningless. It’s simultaneously all of Earth’s time zones and none of them. There are no boundaries of any kind in this abyss, in part because there is no land and no people. The sun rises and sets just once per year, so “time of day” is irrelevant as well.

Yet there rests the Polarstern, deliberately locked in ice for a year to measure all aspects of that ice, the ocean beneath it and the sky above. The ship is filled with 100 people from 20 countries, drifting at the mercy of the ice floe, farther from civilization than the International Space Station. I’ve been supporting communications for the mission remotely from landlocked Colorado, where time is stable. My world is a bewildering contrast to the alien one the ship’s scientists are living and working in—where time functions and feels different than anywhere else on the planet.

If drifting without established time zones isn’t alienating enough for people onboard, add the unsettling reality that there is no time of day either. What we think of as a single day, flanked by sunrise and sunset, happens just once per year around the North Pole. So I can’t help but wonder: Does a single day up North last for months? Is a year just a day long?

This would be deeply unsettling. I don’t know if I could be on that research vessel for that long.

AppleInsider:

Apple’s App Store guidelines for developers have been updated to explicitly state that only apps from official health organization accounts may develop coronavirus resources for distribution.

After multiple developers complained about their apps being rejected for being related to coronavirus, Apple has released an update regarding the ban. The update issued by Apple on Saturday afternoon is clear about what it will allow to be distributed.

Apple is saying, “Don’t screw with us right now. We’re not in the mood.”

New York Times:

On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States was announced, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver S.U.V. to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tenn., they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home Depot. At each store, they cleaned out the shelves.

Over the next three days, Noah Colvin took a 1,300-mile road trip across Tennessee and into Kentucky, filling a U-Haul truck with thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer and thousands of packs of antibacterial wipes, mostly from “little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods,” his brother said. “The major metro areas were cleaned out.”

The next day, Amazon pulled his items and thousands of other listings for sanitizer, wipes and face masks. Now, while millions of people across the country search in vain for hand sanitizer to protect themselves from the spread of the coronavirus, Mr. Colvin is sitting on 17,700 bottles of the stuff with little idea where to sell them.

“It’s been a huge amount of whiplash,” he said. “From being in a situation where what I’ve got coming and going could potentially put my family in a really good place financially to ‘What the heck am I going to do with all of this?’”

Zero sympathy for this ghoulish price gouger. I hope he loses his shirt.

MacRumors:

Apple Card holders today received an email informing them that should they need financial assistance due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, they can enroll in a new customer assistance program that will allow them to skip their March payment without incurring interest charges for that billing cycle.

To initiate the process, send the following message to Apple Card support via iMessage: “I would like to enroll in the Customer Assistance Program.”

Another good move by Apple.

Apple:

Apple’s committed donations to the global COVID-19 response — both to help treat those who are sick and to help lessen the economic and community impacts of the pandemic — today reached $15 million worldwide.

We’re also announcing that we are matching our employee donations two-to-one to support COVID-19 response efforts locally, nationally and internationally.

We will be closing all of our retail stores outside of Greater China until March 27.

All of our hourly workers will continue to receive pay in alignment with business as usual operations. We have expanded our leave policies to accommodate personal or family health circumstances created by COVID-19 — including recovering from an illness, caring for a sick loved one, mandatory quarantining, or childcare challenges due to school closures.

This is an extraordinary move by Apple. The question is, will other retails follow suit? Malls?