This does have drawbacks: switching will scrub your device of files, etc and start afresh. Bugs and crashes should be expected on the developer channel. You trade stability for an early look at new features as they’re being developed.
After switching to dev you need to opt-in to Android apps access via Settings > Enable Android Apps to run on your Chromebook.
How Well Does It Work So Far?
Early reports from social media users playing with Android apps on their flip is positive. The Play Store can be opened and browsed as usual, and you can sign-in with your Google account to install apps.
Not every app on the store is listed as compatible, and some don’t work as intended. The Play Store also treats Chromebooks as an Android 6.x tablet meaning apps only designed for phones are not available (e.g., Instagram), while some tablet apps have orientation issues (e.g., Snapchat) but others work much better than they did under the old ARC implementation (e.g., Skype, Flipboard, and bunch of others).
‘Not every app on the store works as intended’
You can’t resize app windows (though some apps can have their orientation changed), and you can’t cycle through Android apps using the ALT+Tab shortcut.
Power management differences between Chrome OS and the Android runtime currently ‘pauses’ apps when you switch focus away from them (i.e. video stops playing, music stops playing, and so on).
See this Reddit thread for more on the feature, and check in to this mega thread if you have it and want to share which apps work/don’t work.
Schedules
‘the feature is only rolling out to a small number of devices’
Chrome OS 53 is the milestone that is, currently, set to bring Android apps to Chromebooks. The initial feature roll out targets a small number of Chromebooks.
But as the feature is widely tested, feedback gathered, and the feature improved it will begin to hit more devices through the developer channel. Once things are running well enough it will be added to stable builds, where all supported Chromebooks, boxes, bases and bits can take advantage of it.
Is your ASUS Chromebook Flip on the dev channel? Let us know your experience of using Android apps in the comments gap below.
I can't decide if Emilo Estevez and Charlie Sheen (who are brothers) in those roles together is brilliant or nuts.
If Captain America: Civil War Was in Different Decades
Reddit user thamonsta is making these clever fan castings for Marvel's Captain America: Civil War if it was set in different decades! So far they've done the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. What do you think of the casting choices? Who would you cast?
Excellent. Now I won't forget to have a moment of silence a week from Sunday in honor of Thomas and Martha Wayne.
I love James Joyce's Ulysses, spent a huge chunk of my life in grad school trying to figure out that book, still follow a ton of modernist scholars and Joyce freaks on social media, and even I managed to forget that today was Bloomsday, the anniversary of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold and Molly Bloom's treks across Dublin in that book.
I also love Star Trek: The Next Generation, probably even more than I do James Joyce, and I had no idea that today was also "Captain Picard's Day," when the children on the Enterprise honor him (and make him deeply uncomfortable) by presenting him with arts and crafts.
What I needed (for a peculiar definition of "need") was a calendar plugin, something to put the anniversary of Terminator 2's Judgment Day, The Simpsons' Whacking Day, and Roy Batty's inception date directly into my stream of doctor's appointments, scheduled phone calls, NBA games shown on broadcast basic cable, and Facebook friends' birthdays.
And that's exactly what the staff at Atlas Obscura made: a pop culture calendar of imaginary holidays. It doesn't solve real problems, unless those problems include properly commemorating The Purge. But it is pretty fun.
Playing board games and sharing a meal seem like two of the very few activities people of all ages still like to do that involve, real, face-to-face, technology-free human interaction*. And BoardGameTables.com is doing their part to see that they endure, particularly with their latest project, the Duchess, a transformable gaming / dining table that doesn't cost a fortune.
Well, relatively speaking. The fully-loaded Duchess is going to Kickstarter backers for $799. BoardGameTables.com says that's a fraction of what you'd pay for a similar high-quality convertible table able to comfortably seat 6 dinner guests who will never know "there is a half finished game of Pandemic just inches below their chicken parm."
For avid board, card, and role-playing gamers, the Duchess aims to deliver a superlative experience with:
A 3" wide rail around the edge. This gives players a place to rest their arms without blocking views of others' players boards, and prevents dice and other game pieces from rolling, bouncing, or dropping on the floor.
A padded play surface that facilitates picking up tiles and cards.
A quad of cupholders that slide out from underneath the table for storing drinks during play, and gaming pieces during dinner.
A wood tabletop that fits in between the rails, filling in the 2-1/4" depth, and creating a gap-free, 3-1/2' x 5-1/2' eating surface (play area is 3' x 5').
If you're interest in having a Duchess in your dining room, check out the table's Kickstarter page, and make your pledge through July 12, 2016.
*I mean, except that we all keep our phones on the table in case an important text or Snapchat notification comes in.
Earlier this month, the president made a donation that totaled 16,666,000 pesos to the Scholas Occurentes educational foundation, which is backed by the pope.
Francis wrote to the Argentinian branch of the foundation, asking them to return the money. In a postcript, he wrote: “I don’t like the 666.”
The appeals court for the District of Columbia decided by a vote of two to one that companies providing consumers with internet service cannot discriminate among the bits they ship.
Executing snap find * returned a… less than impressive list. In total there were 7 snaps available from the store for install– 2 of which were example applications provided by Ubuntu.
Now, to be fair to Canonical and Snapper… The idea behind Snapper is that of OS X (now MacOS) bundles. You don’t download them from a central repository, you download them from the application authors directly.
When one issues “sudo snap install” on an application, part of the downloading output is the total size of the snap. Since snap uses bundled libraries, I was rather curious to see how big these relatively simple applications would be:
Ubuntu Clock App: 120.11 MB – admittedly, this is written in QML, so it has to pull in Qt. Ubuntu Calc App: 120.01 MB – same as above. LibreOffice*… 1.1 GB
he Document Foundation’s download page lists the sizes of all the various installers, broken down by operating system.
Windows x64? 238 MB. Mac OS X? 201 MB. Linux x64 RPM? 229 MB Linux x64 Deb? 229 MB
So, even if you took all the installers for every OS and added them together, you would still come out at less used space than the single LibreOffice 5.2 Beta .snap package. To snap’s credit, it did function. Less to snap’s credit…the binary appeared to be Ubuntu-specific.
This seems incredibly wasteful of space. Every package includes all of its dependencies. What’s the point in even having a package manager, then?
However, there was a very good point made on Reddit:
Reading the comments I feel like people are missing the point of snaps. They aren’t intended to replace your distro’s package manager. I’m not even sure why some packages are in the snap repo, except perhaps to test it with certain large packages? (ie libreoffice?). What distro doesn’t have Libreoffice?
In my mind, snaps are best for applications that aren’t in your distro already. Yes, they become inefficient on disk space (although space is cheap) but that one packages works on every distro that supports snaps.
In today's post on "What is barbecue?" I skipped past "is a hot dog a sandwich?" so quickly that I forgot to answer the question. So in the same spirit in which someone can boldly declare that only smoked, slow-cooked pork is barbecue, here is my minimal definition of a sandwich:
A sandwich is any solid or semi-solid filling between two or more slices of bread. Not a roll, not a wrap, not a leaf of lettuce: sliced bread. What is inside far less than the container.
Consequently:
A hot dog is not a sandwich.
A burrito is not a sandwich.
A wrap is not a sandwich.
A cheeseburger on a roll is not a sandwich. Sliced bread only.
A lobster roll is not a sandwich.
A hoagie is not a sandwich.
An ice cream sandwich is not a sandwich.
A hot turkey sandwich is not a sandwich.
An open-faced sandwich is not a sandwich.
If you make a sandwich using one end of the bread and one proper slice, it's kind of a sandwich still, but not really. See also folding over a single slice of bread for a half-sandwich.
If you make a sandwich using both ends of the bread, it is no longer a sandwich at all.
A peanut butter or grilled cheese sandwich is a sandwich.
A mayonnaise, butter, or ketchup sandwich is probably a sandwich -- I'm not sure whether those fillings are solid enough -- just not a very good one.
A sandwich made with crackers instead of bread is not a sandwich, but an imitation of a sandwich.
A sandwich made with crackers between two slices of bread is a sandwich, but not a very good one.
Alternatively, "sandwich" is a family-resemblance concept and we can't appeal to definitional consistency to get away from the fact that language is a complex organism and its rules don't always make perfect sense.
(PS: I do not speak for Jason or Kottke.org on this matter, please do not argue with him about sandwiches)
Update (from Jason): Boy, you leave Tim to his own devices for a few hours and he establishes the official kottke.org stance on sandwiches. [That new emoji of the yellow smiley face grabbing its chin and looking skeptical that you might not have on Android IDK I'm Apple Man] I was just talking to my kids the other day about this important issue and Ollie, who is almost 9, told me that both hamburgers and hot dogs are sandwiches because "the meat is sandwiched in between the bread; it's right there in the word". When Ollie and Minna take over the family business in 2027, they can revisit this, but for now, Tim's definition stands.
Sounds like that cheaper car needs to get rooted and have that software block removed.
Tesla has two cars, the S60 and the S75, that are physically more or less identical, but one costs $8500 more than the other. The cheaper car ($66K base price) has a software block on its battery which limits its range to 208 miles on a full charge. Pay $8500 up front, or $9000 for an over-the-air update later, and you get an extra 40 miles.
Same car, same battery. About 20 percent more efficient, for $9000. Better software license.
Cars are big computers, and have been for a while, but we're slowly starting to treat them like it. Different expectations, different pricing, different ownership structures, different usage; different everything.
Here's another story on managing expectations for cars, about steering wheels. Steering wheels have a basic function; they control the car. But if a car is capable of driving itself, and is also an interface for a wide range of general computing tools, what does that mean?
Volvo's Concept 26 vehicle, which debuted in November at the Los Angeles Auto Show, features a retractable steering wheel. Robin Page, Volvo chief of interior design, says Volvo chose to keep the familiar shape of the steering wheel.
"We wanted to keep that recognition of a round steering wheel," he said. "People need to get used to autonomous drive, so being able to get back to that steering wheel and grab hold of it, that's comforting. We decided to have it there as a recognizable icon."
The steering wheel becomes a skeuomorph. It becomes a surveillance device, registering pressure to tell whether you have both hands firmly on the wheel, or if you've fallen asleep or are in distress. It becomes an entertainment console. It transforms and retracts into the dash to signal when you've shifted between user-controlled and autonomous modes. Its familiar presence soothes you through the transition. Eventually, you forget it was ever there at all.
Let’s say we’ve just changed some CSS in a file and we want to stage it with Git. You might do something like this:
git add styles.css
...and then we’d want to make a commit with that staged code:
git commit -m "Fixed the CSS"
I’ve been doing this for a long time, but there’s lots of problems with this approach. For one, what happens if you changed more than one thing in `styles.css`? Perhaps we changed the borders of an element and then we changed the background color of an element that’s completely unrelated to the first. Well, it’s going to be very difficult to understand the history of our commits if we run git log.
This is where Git’s patch mode comes in. It’s a thoroughly helpful flag that lets us split parts of a file so that we can stage and commit each part separately.
git add -p styles.css
Once we run that command we should see something like this:
We’ve made two changes on two separate elements, but there are all sorts of commands that we can run on something called a “hunk”. What we see here is one part of the codebase, or one hunk, but to see what all these commands mean we can just type ?. This will list all of the commands for us:
In this case, our two changes that we’ve made are currently part of the same hunk, so we’ll need to split them by typing s.
Now we can see that only the changes on the .table class have been selected, which is precisely what we wanted. Then all we have to do is type y to stage that hunk. However, git will give us the option to stage more hunks which is useful when we make similar changes to different parts of the codebase. Yet in this situation we just want to quit out of this process so we’ll need to run q.
This all makes more sense when we type git status into the command line; we’ll see that we’ve added some code from styles.css and if we run git diff styles.css we’ll see that only one line of CSS has been staged:
All that’s left is to make the commit whilst making sure we write something memorable for future reference, such as:
git commit -m "fixed the border of the form"
This way we can scan through our commit history and understand it all much more easily.
Frogs are some of the kinkiest amphibians in the forest. Biologists have identified six different sex positions among the planet’s 7,000-plus species of frogs and toads.
Recently, scientists discovered a seventh position – dubbed the dorsal straddle.
This essay by astrophysicist Adam Frank in the New York Times is upbeat, confident: "Yes, There Have Been Aliens." Basically, he argues that we've now observed enough Earth-like planets outside our solar system that unless the odds of life (and intelligent life, and intelligent life capable of radio communications, etc.) coming into being are much, much smaller than most scientists have believed, then alien civilizations that are at least something like our own have appeared before elsewhere in the galaxy.
But! Frank and his colleague Woodruff Sullivan get to this conclusion in a way that's pretty distressing. They relax any assumptions about how long such a civilization might last.
See, if you're trying to figure out the odds of contact between humans and aliens, you need to have some idea about how long alien civilizations stick around. If, in general, civilizations last a long time and keep moving up the Kardashev Scale, they're more likely to bump into each other. If, on the other hand, they usually wipe out their own species with nuclear weapons, global climate change, gamma rays, or (insert calamity here) shortly after getting a little light industry going, then they'll keep missing each other.
In his treatment of the Fermi Paradox, Tim Urban calls this "The Great Filter." We don't know if the Great Filter is ahead of us or behind us. If it's behind us, then complex/intelligent life is super rare -- much smaller than even Frank and Sullivan's consensus low estimates. If it's ahead of us, then we, or any other species lucky enough to make it this far, will most likely die off or (best case scenario) get stuck more or less where we are now.
In short, humanity may not be first, but it might very will be next.
We're living in a baby name world that Kaitlyn built. That name, in a variety of popular spellings, turned -lyn into an all-purpose suffix for girls and shaped a whole generation of names in the process. Right now, Brooklyn is the reigning queen of the -lyn world. Are there challengers to her throne?
To answer that question, let's take a look at how -lyn names have changed. Traditionally, long names ending in -lyn were mostly variants on -line names. Caroline became Carolyn, Madeline became Madelyn. But in the 1980s American parents discovered the Irish name Caitlín ("KAHT-hleen," traditionally Anglicized as Kathleen) and pronounced it "KateLynn."
As Caitlin/Katelynn/Kaitlyn soared in every imaginable spelling, it created a template for new compound names. Almost any short name + lyn could make a new and contemporary-sounding name. And in time, most of them did.
Back in 1980, nine different -lyn/-lynn names ranked among America's top-1,000 names for girls. They were all fairly traditional, or creative spellings of traditional names à la actress Jaclyn Smith of the then-current tv series Charlie's Angels:
Fast-forward to 2015. Now, 52 different -lyn/-lynn names make the top-1000, including Jazlyn, Brooklyn, Emmalynn, Avalyn, Kaelynn, Raelyn, Adalynn, Braelyn and Gracelynn. Beyond the top-1000 you'll find Westlyn, Faithlyn, Jesslyn, Irelyn, Shaylynn, Natalytynn and many hundreds more.
Microsoft is buying LinkedIn, and I can't think of anyone I'd rather read thinking through what that might mean more than Paul Ford.
Microsoft is a software company, sure, but it's also a bit of a nation-state with an enormously broad mandate. LinkedIn is an unbelievable data-mining platform; it has the ground truth about the global economy, especially around the technology industry, and it has a lock on that data. Microsoft will know what's going with Facebook before Zuckerberg does; it'll know what skills are being added to Googlers' resumes; it'll know what kind of searches HR departments are doing across the world, and it can use that information to start marketing its own services to those companies...
It's...terrifying. And we'll never really know what's going on. Which makes it kind of brilliant. But still terrifying.
Filled with straightforward observations (hey, Microsoft now has a huge, well-targeted advertising network to match Google's and Amazon's) to delightfully bizarre ones, like LinkedIn's secret synergy with Minecraft (!), 9 Things Microsoft Could Do With LinkedIn blends consulting memo, standup routine, and Borgesian counterfiction. I've always aspired to this sort of thing, and Paul just rattles it off. Dang it.
The white waters of a raft trip, the salty spray of ocean waves in a kayak, the downpour of summer storms on your Hawaiian vacation. Whether it's expected or arrives WTF-style, when life gives you water, make...sure you've got your gear shielded safe from its saturation.
Aqua Quest says its 75L White Water duffel provides total protection from infiltration without altering the classic duffel shape and style. Throw it in your boat, on your roof rack, or on the back of a motorcycle or ATV and go big without worrying wet, ruined gear will force you to go home. White Water duffels withstand wet ground and rain and snow storms, plus dirt, dust, and sand attacks. According to Aqua Quest, "it will protect against any conceivable circumstance other than complete submersion."
The 75L duffel weighs 2.2 pounds and is made of abrasion-resistant Oxford 420D RipStop fabric, with TPU lamination and DWR coating. It has double bar-tacked stress points and welded seams to cement its durability. An adjustable, removable shoulder strap attaches to any of 6 D-rings, and a padded handle provides further carrying options. In addition to the sealed-tight interior pocket, you'll find a pair of rubberized mesh pockets, along with 4 bottom webbing loops for rack / vehicle attachment on the duffel's exterior.
Now this is a crossover done correctly!
