Technology

Life meets Goblin. Franky Zapata flies his Flyboard Air in Monaco during the Grand Prix on May 29th, 2016 [via my Dad].

As announced at WWDC 2016, Macworld summarizes the new things in iOS 10. Among them are voicemail transcription, a new Home app for HomeKit-enabled devices, and a redesigned Control Center.

Centralized or distributed computing? It’s a pendulum.

I scrolled straight past the recent entries at The Setup and clicked only on Charlie Lloyd’s based on his job description. And I guessed right. “At work we’re on small MacBook Pros with maxed-out RAM and external monitors on standing desks,” he writes. Check. “I do my coding and writing in TextMate.” Check. Since he passes these tests of sameness with me, the rest is all gold.

It’s been a couple of days since reading “What’s Next in Computing?” by Chris Dixon and I’m still harking back to it. It’s kind of made me a quasi-believer in the Singularity, made me think that these are the final handful of years in which there’ll be some continuity with what has always been. Disconcerting.

A story and video of a young reporter kind of blown away, so to speak, by some new VR porn demoed at CES. [Via DrudgeReport]

Interesting, easy-to-understand breakdown of colors used in iOS app icons in 2015. Reds are most popular, then blues. By Hwee-Boon Yar. [via MacStories]

A professor of medieval history laments the contemporary propensity to be surveilled just as Europeans were by the Church. [Via aldaily.com]

China is taking the lead on converting from fossil fuels to renewables, which is one major reason it’s happening. This is predicted to foster a WWII-scale economic boom, which is the other.

Web site heat map tool HotJar is so impressive and so is Maltese founder David Darmanin, interviewed here by Stephen Esketzis in Feb 2015.

Fallout from Apple’s lawsuit against Samsung, this article by Yoni Heisler contains images of abandoned iPhone designs and the lengthy agenda of a 2010 executive team meeting written by Steve Jobs himself.

I found this quite exciting: Mike Maas of Cisco expounds on how the Internet of Things will be integrated into the factory floor. (1:11:34)

Nice piece by a watch aficionado yet to remove his Apple Watch. [via DaringFireball.net]

The mist insightful piece yet on Apple’s remarkable announcements at WWDC 2014.

Hanna Rosin writes on the iPad and young children. The beginning could have appeared anywhere, the middle in any number of magazines, the end in only a small handful. And a rather relevant topic at the moment in this house, where Good Morning is spoken as “Where the iPad gone!”

7,500-year-old cheese discovered. “The most important ingredient for cheese-making is milk and only domesticates can be milked. Thus, it is unlikely that the origins of cheese-making predates the Neolithic,” says the researcher breezily.

Dutch scientists are testing self-healing concrete. The method is bacteria that produce limestone when wet.

Andy Ihnatko, MacTech Conference attendee, on the group tour of Disney Animation, an advance screening of Wreck-It Ralph, and John Lasseter’s desk. [via TidBits]

Chart showing cancer rates around the world.

Alec Baldwin’s calm, grown-up, entertaining talk show, Here’s the Thing.

“There were many, many truly ingenious features revealed…” David Pogue writes that Apple’s latest product announcements are “dizzying”.

Shai Agassi’s Better Place electric cars roll out in Israel.

“Nation on the Move” is the magnificent second episode of the America Revealed PBS series. Interestingly, the show is British-made.

The Guardian’s Battle for the Internet feature, including Tim Berners-Lee’s warning about walled gardens. BTW, if you’re reading this on Facebook, I don’t write these Trail entries on Facebook, but on my own site at http://adamkhan.net, and a nice Facebook app called RSS Graffiti sends them over.

In The American Interest, a clearly written explanation of why America’s economy will roar back (well, enough of it). Serve with this, from the London Review of Books, an overview of Karl Marx’s prescience.

The teardown: iPad.

Paul Graham PyCon US 2012 keynote
wherein he spells out some of the big ambitious start-up ideas on our collective mind. Be the next Google. Fix email. Be the next Apple. Replace universities. Ongoing diagnostic healthcare.

Siri voice recognition punctuation reference.

“We don’t have castles and noble titles, so how do you indicate you’re part of the elite?” Wicked piece on TED by Benjamin Wallace.

Taking his time, Morozov asks the right questions about Steve Jobs, comparing him first to the Bauhaus movement, then to Henry Ford. Many quotable quotes, and good comments, especially the long one from JakeH at 02/27/2012 – 7:46pm EDT.

Peter Thiel to Francis Fukuyama, full of quotable sentences. “We cannot simply say things went wrong with credit creation in the 1980s; we also have to deal with government malfunction in the 1970s.” “There’s a close link between technological deceleration and increasing cynicism and pessimism about politics and economics.” “There has been this increase in inequality, but it’s a secondary truth. The primary truth is this truth of stagnation.”

Francis Fukuyama builds a drone. Yes, that Francis Fukuyama.

If you walk and don’t talk you can maintain the shock.

Zap yourself into the zone.

Hitchie on Nietzsche: Am I Really Stronger? [link broken]

Israel’s new fence along the Egyptian border is going up fast.

We need to go back to nature in order to move forward. Amazing futuristic ways to be smart about energy in your own house by Philips at Dutch Design Week.

Designs to replace Britain’s electricity pylons.

The inevitable and welcomed iPhone 4S teardown by the ifixit guys.

Arstechnica, the iOS 5 review. Featuring game-changers Siri and the iCloud.

Billionaire Peter Thiel: “The technology slowdown threatens not just our financial markets, but the entire modern political order, which is predicated on easy and relentless growth.” And when you’re finished with that, here it is again in more depth: “The Optimistic Thought Experiment”.

Best of the Steve Jobs eulogies: John Siracusa, David Pogue. And one about his house. A favorable comparison with Thomas Edison.

Today: a world where big stuff can never get done.

Poignant Steve Jobs tale from the Gizmodo guy who got ahold of the iPhone 4 prototype.

Great collection of scientific images.