Let’s talk about the best and worst cities for motorcycle enthusiasts to live in. If you’re looking for a place where you can enjoy more quality time on your bike in safety, then you’ll love the top 10 cities on our list.
I’m surprised that two cities I’ve lived and ridden in – Portland, OR and Nashville, TN – didn’t score higher. Unsurprising that cities in the West scored the highest while East coast cities, particularly in the heavily populated NYC area, scored the worst.
Facebook today announced that it has canceled its F8 developer conference that was set to take place at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California on May 5 and 6.
In a statement, Facebook said that given “growing concerns” about COVID-19, the in-person component of F8 has been nixed. Instead of F8, Facebook is planning locally hosted events, videos, and live streamed content.
F8 is an event that’s on the same scale as Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, and last year, it attracted 5,000 attendees. It was also set to take place on May 5 and 6, which is just about a month ahead of when Apple is likely planning to host WWDC 2020 at the same venue. Whether Apple is considering a similar cancelation remains to be seen as WWDC is a month later, but with F8 canceled, there’s a possibility.
The Loop’s Publisher and I talked about this on last night’s Your Mac Life show. Apple has definitely had high-level discussions about WWDC and whether it should go ahead or not and, if not, what would take its place. Perhaps a “virtual” WWDC similar to what Facebook just announced?
If I’m honest, at the time I wasn’t thinking at all about trying to catch Marc Marquez in mid-air. I merely hoped to catch someone with both wheels off the ground.
I knew Turn 1 was a high speed section of Laguna Seca’s layout, and for this reason you don’t often see photographers there. MotoGP bikes are going somewhere around 165mph as they crest the hill and turn slightly left, too fast for even the best pro DSLRs and lenses to track focus.
This article combines two of my passions – motorcycling and photography. Jones is an incredible MotoGP photographer and the story of this amazing image is a combination of luck, perseverance, skill, equipment, and a talented shooter all coming together to get The Perfect Shot. Imagine trying to get a specific image (both wheels off the ground, race winner, etc.) of a motorcycle traveling at 165mph coming up over a blind hill.
The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus were really popular smartphones and Apple sold them up until about a year and a half ago. There are lots of customers who are still using the devices but with A9 processors from 2015, they’re starting to show their age (not to mention battery performance throttling). If you’re curious how much faster a new iPhone would be compared to your iPhone 6s, check out the latest speed test pitting the two against each other.
We get used to our machines, iPhones and otherwise, running at certain speeds. Perception plays a big part. But this test shows that, while the iPhone 6s is still a “capable” device, it predictably doesn’t hold a candle to the latest and greatest.
The so-called “Steve Jobs auction” opens for bidding on March 5th and includes a fully functional Apple-1 computer, a Steve Jobs signed Macintosh PowerBook, some signed contracts, and a bunch of other interesting items.
Two years after launching a chain of convenience stores without cashiers or checkout lines, Amazon is opening its first “Amazon Go Grocery” store in Seattle on Tuesday morning, enlarging the footprint for surveillance-style shopping and signaling a larger challenge to the broader world of brick-and-mortar retail.
Surveillance-style shopping! Gotta remember that one.
You enter the store and scan a QR-code, which is tied to your account, lets you pay for your groceries. Once you’re in:
Hundreds of cameras in the ceiling overhead make up the key technological component of the just-walk-out concept.
And:
The cameras are keeping track of those “interactions” with the product and know exactly what is being taken off shelves and put back. Allowing people to do this type of “considered shopping” plays into the Go Grocery concept of making sure that customers don’t have to do anything unnatural when it comes to how they shop.
This is an incredibly difficult problem to solve. Not to mention the ethical problems involved in eliminating certain jobs from the chain. Great for Amazon’s financials, not so great for the humans involved.
A 2019 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) examined this detection by smartwatches of “irregular pulses” in almost 420,000 people over eight months. In this study, which was funded by Apple, the authors concluded that the Apple Watch was effective in detecting AFib, stating that 84% of the smartwatch notifications were accurate in alerting for atrial fibrillation.
And:
But what the study didn’t find—or perhaps more accurately, didn’t even examine—is that the Apple Watch will largely not detect or categorize AFib at a heart rate greater than 120 beats per minute, according to information supplied to the FDA by Apple for the feature’s approval.
And:
In 2015, a study published in the Annals of Medicine found that in a cohort of 2,821 patients with new-onset AFib, the mean heart rate was 109 bpm. But, according to the study, roughly one-third of patients had a heart rate of over 120.
The point being made here is that Apple Watch will miss a significant number of AFib cases.
While this is true (assuming the studies are correct), consider the alternative. Without an Apple Watch, odds on catching AFib drop considerably.
The headline is a bit of a troll, though the article is interesting.
How about, “Apple Watch does a lot for your health, you should get one, but be aware Apple Watch will not detect AFib when your heart beats more than 200 times a sec. Mmmkay?”
Last week Marco Arment tweeted this screenshot of a glitch/bug in the Finder on Catalina: he selected a folder full of multi-hundred megabyte files and the Inspector panel showed the folder size as “Zero KB”.
Clearly that’s wrong. I know from talking to Arment privately that about 30 seconds after he took the screenshot, the Inspector updated to show the actual folder size. But that’s still very wrong. The Finder should never show inaccurate information regarding the state of the file system. Never.
This a one-off? No.
Moltz mentioned a similar problem I’ve seen too: you put some large files in the Trash, then empty the Trash, and the available space shown in Finder windows (View → Show Status Bar) doesn’t change at all for an indeterminate amount of time.
In my Catalina life, I’ve got no shortage of similar examples. Is this about Catalina? About APFS? Or (and this is the answer I favor) is this about the current state of my Mac’s dependence on iCloud?
If the move to iCloud is contributing to latency in Finder reporting (speculation on my part), what path should Apple follow? If you launch an app that automatically opens a file that’s been offloaded to the cloud, what else can the app do but wait for the file to be returned to earth? Does the Finder depend on some iCloud reporting to paint an accurate picture of the file’s size?
Read the rest of Gruber’s post. Accuracy in life is important, more so with your computer.
Anyone who knows me will be tediously aware of how much time I’ve spent since September wading through the ocean of games on Apple Arcade, to the detriment of reading, side writing projects, interpersonal relationships etc. It’s a strange thing: playing a high-quality iOS game is fun, playing 10 of them is a chore, and playing 111 is a Sisyphean ordeal. Hashtag first-world problems, right?
The problem…is that most of the really excellent games arrived at the start. What The Golf, Bleak Sword, Grindstone, Card of Darkness, Shinsekai, Spaceland, Mutazione, Tangle Tower, Overland – that’s nine of the top 10 – were part of the original lineup. And more recent launches have been altogether less impressive.
As a casual gamer, I unsubbed from Apple Arcade a few weeks ago. So many of the games I wanted to play either had text/graphics (on the iPhone) that was too small to be read by my middle-aged eyes or, when trying to play on the Apple TV, required a controller. As well, my 14-year-old has no interest in the service and my wife is not a gamer. What has been your Apple Arcade experience?
Adobe makes so many software that it can be quite overwhelming for even a professional to understand what each one is used for.
Many people who are new to this have confusing questions regarding similar apps like “what is difference between after effects and premier pro” or “What is the difference between Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom and Bridge”.
So, I made this video to quickly give you an overview of all adobe products as I couldn’t find a similar guide anywhere else, not even in Adobe’s own website. I hope it helps anyone entering the creative fields to get a sense of different apps.
On Saturday in Toronto, injuries to both James Reimer and Petr Mrazek forced the Carolina Hurricanes to call on in-house emergency goaltender David Ayres in the second period against the Toronto Maple leafs. Reimer was forced out with an injury late in the first period, and Mrazek left after Kyle Clifford collided with him while going for a loose puck midway through the second period. Clifford was given a charging penalty on the play.
Here’s the moment Ayres was brought on for his unexpected duties.
Here's something you don't see every day.
After Petr Mrazek and James Reimer went down with injurues, emergency goalie David Ayres makes his @NHL debut! pic.twitter.com/DR1pswn90C
Carolina held Toronto to 10 shots on goal in the 28-plus minutes Ayres was in net, and he stopped the final eight in helping the Canes to a 6-3 victory. He told Sportsnet in Canada after the game that the experience was awesome: “Obviously the time of my life out there … once in a lifetime, I’ll take it.”
For Canadians, feel-good stories don’t get any better than this. The fact he beat the Leafs makes it even sweeter for me.
Apple held its annual shareholders meeting today at Steve Jobs Theater. While the yearly event is usually relatively light on news for consumers, it serves as an opportunity for shareholders to hear directly from Apple executives, including Tim Cook. Here’s everything you need to know.
A good overview of what happened at this morning’s Apple shareolders meeting.
We’ve been hearing about 5G for ages, and 2020 is the year it’ll finally become a reality for some people. Until this point there have been a few sparse 5G networks available in cities, but with only a handful of phones supporting 5G, even if you lived in an area with coverage odds are you couldn’t connect. That’s all set to change with a host of new 5G phones expected to be announced through 2020, and providers all around the world starting to switch on additional 5G towers.
Even so, it’s hard to know what to expect from 5G. Depending on your provider and your network, you may get blazing fast speeds but only in certain places, a bump in reliability without much speed, or anything in between. It turns out 5G isn’t really one thing, it’s a collection of technology and new frequency bands, and different carriers are focusing on different aspects of the network.
In fact, the idea of walking at least 10,000 steps a day for health goes back decades to a marketing campaign launched in Japan to promote a pedometer. And, in subsequent years, it was adopted in the U.S. as a goal to promote good health. It’s often the default setting on fitness trackers, but what’s it really based on?
“The original basis of the number was not scientifically determined,” says researcher I-Min Lee of Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
She was curious to know how many steps you need to take a day to maintain good health and live a long life, so she and her colleagues designed a study that included about 17,000 older women. Their average age was 72. The women all agreed to clip on wearable devices to track their steps as they went about their day-to-day activities.
20th Century Flicks is the oldest video rental store in the world. It’s small, close-knit crew has unwittingly become custodians of the largest collection of DVDs and VHS tapes in the UK, and faces a constant struggle to adapt and survive in the age of streaming and downloading.
“It’s an ode to the video shop experience and a bygone way of watching movies. With studios like Disney launching their own streaming services and joining industry kingpins such as Netflix and Hulu, we have an almost endless flow of entertainment available at the click of a button. It’s amazing to me that a little independent video store can survive the Netflix cull and even outlive Blockbuster. Drop into the shop next time you’re in Bristol for a dose of movie nostalgia, have a chat about film and go home with a VHS rarity and a bag of popcorn.” – Director, Arthur Cauty
The owner’s description of talking about film is one of the things I loved about my long-gone video rental place.
The Etch a Sketch Revolution is a tad smaller than your typical Etch a Sketch, but it does feature the two signature knobs at the bottom. The main difference is it features a spinning screen that makes drawing circles magnitudes easier. As in, all you have to do is manipulate the knobs on the spinning rim, and that’s it. It’s simple, but pretty neat when you consider just how torturous trying to draw anything circular, rounded, or curvy on a traditional Etch a Sketch is.
Okay, I know there is a certain percentage of you looking at this and saying “WTF!” However, for those of a certain age, this is really cool. I doubt Apple is “doomed” with this the release of this breakthrough technology, but it’s still fun.
The NTSB said that although Huang was a distracted driver, Tesla’s forward collision warning system did not provide an alert, and its automatic emergency braking system did not activate as his Model X SUV with Autopilot switched on accelerated into a highway barrier.
and
The NTSB also called out Huang’s employer, Apple, for failing to set a strict policy for its employees banning non-emergency use of mobile devices while driving.
That is just ridiculous. How is an Apple policy going to help when people get behind the wheel of a car and decide to game instead of watching the damn road like they supposed to do.
This is not your typical Mac Pro walkthrough. It’s full of focus on the, what some might say is, over-engineering that makes the new Mac Pro a beautiful piece of gear.
Two things to watch for: The coordination of the fan frequencies to make them, essentially, silent, and the lack of cables in the interior. Fascinating.
Two programmer-musicians wrote every possible MIDI melody in existence to a hard drive, copyrighted the whole thing, and then released it all to the public in an attempt to stop musicians from getting sued.
And:
To determine the finite nature of melodies, Riehl and Rubin developed an algorithm that recorded every possible 8-note, 12-beat melody combo. This used the same basic tactic some hackers use to guess passwords: Churning through every possible combination of notes until none remained. Riehl says this algorithm works at a rate of 300,000 melodies per second.
Once a work is committed to a tangible format, it’s considered copyrighted. And in MIDI format, notes are just numbers.
This won’t stop musicians from getting sued for copyright infringement, at least until this is used, successfully, in a lawsuit defense.
And if it is successful, are all bets off? Will wholesale copyright theft follow?
Mr. Iger, who has run Disney for nearly 15 years, would be replaced as chief executive by Bob Chapek, a 27-year veteran of the entertainment conglomerate who has most recently served as chairman of Disney’s theme parks and consumer products businesses.
And:
“In thinking about what I want to accomplish before I leave the company at the end of ’21, getting everything right creatively would be my No. 1 goal. I could not do that if I were running the company on a day-to-day basis.”
And:
Mr. Chapek, who has limited creative experience, became the seventh chief executive in Disney’s nearly 100-year history. He can come across as a bit stiff in comparison to the magnetic Mr. Iger, whose celebrated run at the company has made him a corporate celebrity.
From a public point of view, this was absolutely an abrupt move, timed unfortunately to a stock market correction.
Gonna be hard to replace Iger, though Chapek seems a reasonable choice. Chapek oversaw construction of the Disney theme park’s massively successful Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge and Rise of the Resistance ride. No small thing.
In 2018, unwilling to continue paying the “Apple tax,” Netflix followed Spotify and Amazon’s Kindle books app in pulling in-app purchases from its iOS app. Users must now sign up elsewhere, such as on the company’s website, in order for the app to become usable. Of course, these brands are big enough to expect that many users will seek them out anyway.
Smaller app developers, meanwhile, have little choice but to play by Apple’s rules. That’s true even when they’re competing with Apple’s own apps, which pay no such fees and often enjoy deeper access to users’ devices and information.
Now, a handful of developers are speaking out about it — and government regulators are beginning to listen.
There’s plenty to dislike and be annoyed at with Apple’s App store policies. It’s an easy argument for developers and others to say Apple has overstepped its boundaries and is squeezing for all its worth. But, for most consumers, the App Store is the safest, best place to get iOS apps for their devices.
But Apple has a fine line to follow especially given increased governmental scrutiny. They need to do what is best (in its opinion) for its customers but it can’t afford to force the government’s hand and have them step in and force Apple into policies it doesn’t want to implement.
Culture connoisseurs, rejoice: The Smithsonian Institution is inviting the world to engage with its vast repository of resources like never before.
For the first time in its 174-year history, the Smithsonian has released 2.8 million high-resolution two- and three-dimensional images from across its collections onto an open access online platform for patrons to peruse and download free of charge. And this gargantuan data dump is just the beginning. Throughout the rest of 2020, the Smithsonian will be rolling out another 200,000 or so images, with more to come as the Institution continues to digitize its collection of 155 million items and counting.
Listed under a Creative Commons Zero license, the 2.8 million images in the new database are now liberated from all restrictions, copyright or otherwise, enabling anyone with a decent Internet connection to build on them as raw materials—and ultimately participate in their evolution.
The Smithsonian is a literal national and international treasure and this release continues that reputation.
An ill-advised family photo shoot on a set of active train tracks in Greencastle, Pennsylvania nearly ended in tragedy when a freight train came barreling through, narrowly missing the photographer, parents, and five children.
In the video, a family of seven plus a photographer are wandering up and down on the tracks when one of them screams “here comes the train.” From there it’s a mad scramble to get everyone—including a few very young children—off the tracks before it’s too late.
As a photographer, I get why some people like these shots but you’re likely not taking an “original” shot, you’re trespassing, it’s illegal, and you’re putting your life in danger. It’s not worth it.
I just got back from my first trip to Japan, and I’m now in love with the country. The ramen, yakitori and sushi. The gorgeous volcanoes. The fascinating people and culture. But of all the things I fell in love with, there’s one that I can’t stop thinking about: the toilets.
Most of the toilets in Japan are made by a company called Toto, which started the high-tech toilet revolution in 1980 when it unveiled the Washlet, a first-of-its-kind electric toilet seat with an integrated bidet. Toto has been innovating on the design ever since. So I reached out to the company. It put me in touch with Bill Strang, the president of corporate strategy and e-commerce at Toto USA.
“U.S. toilets are effectively bedpans with a drain,” says Strang. The lofty price of Japanese-style toilets are another reason that they might not be catching on.
I had the same Japanese experience the author did. While initially confused by my hotel’s toilets, the detailed instructions (!) in English helped and I “loved” using the toilet for the week I was there. We are in the market for a new toilet in our house and while there’s no way we’d splurge for a Toto, there is nothing similar to them on the market for a non-exorbitant price.
This is one of those tips that’s worth going through, just to understand the mechanics of how calendars and reminders are stored in iCloud. Worth tucking away for a day you hope will never come, when your calendars or reminders come up missing or accidentally deleted.
