How will nostalgic teens of the future listen to Pink Floyd records when they actually live on the dark side of the moon? MAG-LEV Audio hopes it will be with their levitating turntable, which just launched on Kickstarter. Their high-end design rests the platter on top of a cushion of air and magnetic waves precisely calculated to rest under the needle. Not only does it look like an excessive luxury you'd see in the homes of the mega-rich in Elysium, but MAG-LEV Audio claims that, "Air is the smoothest medium with least amount of friction," which actually makes the listening experience itself better.
The magnetic turntable uses technology we've seen develop exponentially over the past few years, from the ZeroN gestural interface and Crealev's modular magnet design to the hoverboard. Here we've got a polished design that shows what experiments with new technology can yield under an $880 price tag. Thoughtful features like legs to hold the plate when the device is off and a reserve power source to catch it in case of a power outage assure buyers of the company's attention to detail, but those aren't MAG-LEV's big innovation.
"The drive system in this turntable is where all the magic is," they explain on Kickstarter. "We were able to achieve not only magnetic levitation, but we’ve also been able to maintain the incredibly precise turning of the platter with sensor regulating software." They've figured out how to create a consistent rotation with a magnetic motor, which allows you to easily switch between 33.3 rpm and 45 rpm.
Check out the MAG-LEV turntable in a dramatic, "Most Interesting Man in the World"-style video below. Should you decide to donate on Kickstarter, where an early bird price of $780 is still available, we recommend pairing the with ::vtol::'s gravity-defying Bluetooth speaker and LUNALUXX's levitating lamp for maximum futuristicness.
Kate Rubins wears a space suit decorated by patients at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in the International Space Station. All images courtesy of NASA
Surely one of the only downsides to living on the International Space Station (ISS) is the lack of apparel options when it comes to functional space suits! But now, thanks to a collaboration between NASA and the folks at Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center, an astronaut on the ISS has a little extra flair in her space wardrobe. The Space Suit Art Project is headed up by director of MD Anderson’s Arts in Medicine Program Ian Cion and resulted in astronaut Kate Rubins donning a vibrant space suit decorated by cancer patients. As Cion tells The Creators Project: “There are many parallels between the lives and experiences of astronauts and the lives and experiences of patients going through cancer treatment—isolation, physical changes to the body, one’s life being at risk, to name a few. This project was not only designed to motivate and inspire patients to make art, but to think about their experience through a different perspective, to acknowledge that many of the qualities of character that make astronauts pillars of heroism are also present in even the youngest patient fighting cancer.”
HOPE on display
The Space Suit Art Project consists of three suits: HOPE, COURAGE, and UNITY. The first suit, HOPE, was constructed from over 500 canvases that were painted and then quilted together by patients, families, and MD Anderson staff. This suit acts as a sculptural representation of the project that stays on the ground for display.
COURAGE, the second suit, features striking decorations created by cancer patients with acrylic paint on a NASA-grade flight suit. “During the creation of COURAGE, NASA astronauts, including Kate Rubins and Nicole Stott, visited the hospital to work on the suit with patients and families,” explains Cion. “Retired Astronaut Nicole Stott was the first person to ever make a painting in space, and Kate Rubins, currently on board the International Space Station, wore the hand-painted flight suit in a live video conversation with MD Anderson pediatric patients who were able to talk to her from Mission Control.”
A patient decorating COURAGE with acrylic paint
In the collaborative spirit of the ISS, the third suit, UNITY, will be produced from a combination of collaborations that took place in cities around the world, where Cion and Stott traveled to present the project. “Each suit was made with the direct participation of patients, families, and staff. The first two were made exclusively at MD Anderson, while UNITY was made with MD Anderson patients and families as well as other hospitals and space stations around the globe,” says Cion.
While the Space Suit Art Project certainly succeeded in creating unique and beautiful garments through collaborative efforts, Cion explains that the project is much more than just an exercise in participatory creativity: “I began working on a series of projects that were collaborative and large scale with patients, so that their art was not just something we taped to the walls of their rooms, but something that connected them to each other, that formed relationships between patients and connected them to the community in a way that celebrated them not as cancer patients, but as artists.”
Astronaut Kate Rubins speaks to MD Anderson artists from the International Space Station while wearing her customized space suit.
HOPE being quilted together
A detail of HOPE
Kate Rubins and an MD Anderson patient decorate COURAGE with acrylic paint
The Next Keyboard by Tiny Hearts made a big splash when it launched. Funded by a successful $65,000 Kickstarter campaign, it grabbed a lot of press, including from mainstream news outlets like CNBC. At it’s peak, the Next Keyboard made almost $20,000 in a single day, but like most apps, it rode a steep slope down after the initial spike.
When we built Next Keyboard, we were amongst the first to experiment with Apple’s custom keyboard functionality. Unfortunately all third-party iOS keyboards — including Next Keyboard — were never truly stable because of Apple’s API. There’s a surprisingly poor user experience around using third-party keyboards (such as setting up a new keyboard). Even Google’s Keyboard, Gboard, has issues today, a full two years after third-party keyboards were announced.
It’s hard to turn any app into a sustainable business, but the Next Keyboard faced greater challenges than most. Third-party keyboards are hard to build, limitations in the Apple APIs mean they cannot match the system keyboard feature-for-feature, and big companies like Google and Microsoft entered the market shortly after the Next Keyboard was launched.
The experience was a costly and disappointing one for Tiny Hearts, but not without value. As Jama explains:
Even though it was an expensive lesson, things worked out. There are things we wished would’ve turned out differently. We let our users down, and we don’t feel good about that. But we came out stronger and smarter for it, we’ve learned an unbelievable amount, and we will still bet on iOS, messaging and conversational interfaces. If you don’t play, you’ll never win. It’s been tough for us to swallow, but we paid for one of the most important lessons: making money with an app is risky.
Starting today, Google Photos users who turn to the app’s Assistant panel may notice that the AI-powered image sharing app has learned a couple of new tricks.
Following a server-side update, Assistant, the left-most tab in Photos, will now generate several new prompts to help users organize and re-live their photographic moments.
The first of four new prompts will automatically flip sideways photos to ensure they’re properly oriented. Two other notifications take advantage of Google’s advanced facial recognition algorithms to group photos together. One will surface older photos of an individual the user has taken a lot of images recently, while the other will create a highlight reel of a frequent subject. We’ve reached out to Google to find out if these two features are available to Canadian users; most of the app’s facial recognition functionality is disabled in Canada.
Last but not least, Photos will create short GIFs of videos (example below).
Like all of Photos other features, today’s feature additions are available on Android, iOS and the Photos website.
Update 10/14/16: Google has informed us that all the new features detailed in yesterday’s blog post are available in Canada.
The New York Times interviewed Ed Humes who has written “Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation” looking at how we shaped the world around our personal ownership of a car. And Mr. Humes wastes no words describing the car as a social, health and economic challenge.
Next to our home, the car is our single largest household expense. We’re paying for it round the clock. Yet, it sits idle for 22 hours a day. Plus, it’s horribly inefficient in how it uses energy. The average car wastes about 80 percent of the gasoline put into it. By comparison, an electric vehicle uses about 90 percent to actually move the car.
Humes also quotes the National Safety Council’s data on car crashes showed that in 2015, 38,300 people died and 4.4 million were seriously injured. Roads are built for vehicles to travel much faster than the stated speed limit. People go to fast, and speeding is one of the major reasons for crashes. Humes points out that over a lifetime, we each have a one in 113 chance of dying in a car. Despite safety devices in vehicles, cars are driven too fast to survive collisions. And pedestrians?
A pedestrian struck by a vehicle going 40 miles an hour has a 10 percent chance of surviving, and one struck by a car at 20 m.p.h. has a 90 percent chance. So when we post a 40-mile maximum speed limit on a boulevard where pedestrians walk, we’re saying that in the event of a crash, a 90 percent mortality rate is acceptable.
In the 1920s, The New York Times referred to what we now erroneously call “accidents” as “motor killings.” There was more outrage then.
Humes describes that in the 1920’s there was a national movement to place speed governors on cars that would prevent cars from travelling at high speeds. The car industry pushed back. Humes sees the driverless car technology as taking the life-or-death decisions out of the hands of the drivers, and getting back to the days of speed governors on cars. Except this time the car industry is backing the technology. And Humes notes that until the driverless car technology is perfected, those speed governors are not a bad idea to be implemented now to save lives and prevent injuries.
Business in Vancouver has published an article about the Really Big Deal-The sale of the Oakridge Transit Centre located on 41st Avenue near Oak Street.
Frank O’Brien and Bob Mackin reveal that the sale price for the 5.6 hectare site was between $425 and $450 million dollars, the second most expensive land deal done in the province after the Jericho Lands. Despite the fact the land is public-owned, TransLink cannot talk about the deal due to the purchaser’s confidentiality requirements. It appears the buyer is Modern Green, who has been doing joint ventures in the province, including a residential project at UBC.
The Oakridge Transit Centre development lands have been approved for a density of approximately 1.26 million square feet of residential and retail, according to a 2015 City of Vancouver planning document. The proposed density is approximately 2.1 FSR (floor space ratio) over the entire site, or 2.5 FSR if a planned 2.3-acre park is not included in the calculation. The focus is on residential, with the city recommending that 20% of the homes be affordable housing.
“The majority of buildings will be mid-rise [six to 12 storeys]. The maximum height will be 15 storeys (or 150 feet), achievable in two identified locations,” said a staff report.
The city anticipates $73.5 million in development levies and community amenities.
If we design and develop our cities and our spaces around basic principles of walkability we would have healthier happier citizens and much more legible places. You would think that the Quebec developer Cambridge Ivanhoe who are operating a 1.2 million square foot mega mall on First Nations land would have thought through the experience of those making the most minimum ecological footprint to access the mall-those folks that are walkers and transit users.
But that has not happened. There are large slabs of lonely concrete smack on the highway with no shelters where transit passengers huddle in the rain to catch a bus. And if you are walking from Tsawwassen or from another part of the First Nations development, you are also out of luck-even though there is an access eastward from the residential development at Tsawwassen Shores to the mall, there are no crosswalks or easy pedestrian access points from the parking lot to the start of the mall. The design of the mall attempts to funnel folks on the east side of the mall and on the south side, where there ARE properly painted crosswalks and pedestrian amenities. On the west side? None.
You do see groups of people massed on either side of Highway 17 at 52nd Street who have decided to walk to the mall. Like many suburban places, people in Tsawwassen are great walkers, and think nothing of a stroll of a few kilometers for fitness and to see the ‘hood.
This lack of walking amenity was mentioned in The Delta Optimist by a local resident who noted: “Driving home in the dimming light of the evening last week, I noticed the tiny concrete island between the right turn lane and the rest of the lanes of 52nd Street on the south side of Highway 17 full of people carrying bags and hanging onto children. They were waiting patiently for the pedestrian sign to light up so they could continue walking east on Highway 17 towards the bus stop. As my car climbed the 52nd Street hill, I passed several school children happily walking down the sidewalk towards the mall. This was already a dangerous intersection before the mall (remember the woman on the scooter who was killed in 2014).
Once the days grow shorter and the weather becomes wetter and colder, asking people to walk across that busy highway in the dark is a disrespectful proposition…As a half-way measure in the meantime, I would suggest moving the bus stop into the mall parking lot. There must be enough room in that massive lot for a couple of buses to exchange passengers in a safe, out of the way location…We should be encouraging people to walk to the mall from Tsawwassen, and to take the bus from other locations, but I know I would be leery of letting a child go to the mall without an adult if it means crossing those busy lanes of speeding traffic.”
The Vancouver Sun Editorial Board has published an editorial today with another take on the Tsawwassen Mills Mega Mall. Under the heading “Tsawwassen Mills Mall Symbolizes First Nation’s Independence” the editorial states:
“Traffic chaos was but one of many complaints levelled against the new outlet mall before and after the opening. Early on, development opponents condemned the loss of what they believed to be arable farmland, and others raised their fists against rampant consumerism. Animal rights activists objected to the display of live fish in the aquarium and the taxidermy collection in the Bass Pro shop. Still others questioned whether the mall, in the absence of public transit and population nearby, offering retail outlets readily available at more conveniently located shopping districts, and on a road to nowhere other than the B.C. Ferries terminal and Deltaport, could be successful. And doesn’t the project seem at odds, one blog post asked, with Metro Vancouver’s goals of density and sustainability?”
The Sun’s editorial goes on to say that Tsawwassen First Nation Chief Bryce Williams called the project “reconciliation in action”, referencing the federal government’s acknowledgment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommendations. And Shane Gottfriedson, B.C. regional chief of the Assembly of First Nations, added that what the Tsawwassen First Nation accomplished “is what every First Nation would like for themselves.”
The editorial ends by saying “Tsawwassen Mills is not just a shopping mall. It is a symbol of First Nations independence and growing economic strength. Given the significance of the project, opening just weeks after the Business Council of B.C. and the B.C. Assembly of First Nations signed a formal agreement to help lift indigenous communities out of poverty and build the province’s economy, the complaints seem almost petty.”
There is no doubt that this is a tremendously important venture for all the First Nations. The question is whether it is appropriate to comment on the mega mall which is contracted to a Quebec owned company and appears to have major regional impacts, including threatening the livelihood of small businesses in Ladner and Tsawwassen. Should the project be treated differently and not commented on?
The Galaxy Note 7 was probably among the best, if not the best, Android smartphone released this year. It packed a beautiful design that was also resistant to water, a great 12MP rear shooter with OIS, iris scanner, and a large and beautiful 5.7-inch Quad HD curved Super AMOLED display. However, thanks to the handset exploding randomly across the world, the device is no longer in production and on sale.
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I saw a colleague answer this question and thought I’d give a go:
Are sure it’s just Python programmers? I think that relatively speaking Ruby developers and Java developers hate on PHP more (and Perl and Javascript developers less).
From a software language design perspective, the PHP language is an ugly hack. One of the creators of Java said that when he thinks of PHP his heart goes dark (showing a complete black slide in his presentation for emphasis). The more structured the language (and Java and Python certainly are), the more offensive this ugliness is. (Ruby gets this view not from the language but for being the home of a lot of programmers who were trained in Java in school and for Ruby on Rails being a popular framework in the webspace already crowded out by PHP.)
However, there are t-shirts out there of me saying back in 2006, “PHP is a ball of nails, but when you throw it at a wall, it sticks” and that still applies today—it’s ugly, true; but it works. If anything, the language is far more ubiquitous on the web now than then, though that’s mostly due to the popularity of applications written in PHP such as WordPress and Facebook rather than any success in the language itself. The language has proved remarkably successful due to its adaptability and limited focus on what problems it tries to solve.
I imagine that this popularity-in-spite-of-aesthetic-beauty is offensive to those working in the web who think themselves above the direct, simple, and crass. That reality may sit so ill with some people that they feel the need to disparage PHP which becomes an object of their derision and the villain in their story. It’s only natural for a cohort in the minority to feel that way toward a market leader: Apple Macintosh users used to act like that toward Windows PCs, Windows Phone users act this way toward iOS and Android, etc.
The irony is that PHP is a market leader in only one tiny aspect of the programming market: the server-side, non-event-driven web. It has no footprint in the client-side web, none in application space or even the mobile app space, no recognized products in non-web tools and applications; and is just a rounding error in the DevOps space (to pick just one area where Python seems dominant/ascendant). It even makes no pretension to be a programming language to facilitate learning programming (another area Python is better suited to). Since all these areas are growing as the niche PHP represents is static, I find it ironic people still wage language-religious jihad against PHP.
That’s like hating on a horseshoe monopoly after the automobile has been invented.
And I say this as someone who has programmed PHP for 16 years and gives keynote speeches in the language.
In 2013, a Dutch designer named Dave Hakkens posted a YouTube video called Phonebloks. It went viral (about 22 million views), because its logic was so compelling: We should be able to snap together the various components we want in a smartphone: camera, processor, storage, GPS, screen.
We’d save money, we’d replace only individual components as technology improved, and we’d stop pouring 2.5 million tons of sharp, toxic, non-biodegradeable electronics into our landfills every year.
Compelling, yes; practical, no. For example, a modular phone would be much bigger and bulkier and uglier than today’s integrated, unified models. And that’s assuming you could persuade the Apples and Samsungs to embrace the modular concept; they love that we throw away our phones every year. (Google experimented with a modular phone project, but eventually shut it down.)
All of which brings us to the Moto Z family.
It’s all about those magnets on the back.
Three things make these 5.5-inch Android smartphones radical, innovative, and risky.
First, they’re thin—the thinnest in the world, Moto says. The Moto Z model ($700, available for any carrier) is only one-fifth of an inch thick; you could practically fold it like a paper airplane. Its sibling, the Moto Z Force (Verizon [VZ] only), costs $20 more and gets you a higher-resolution camera and longer battery life—yet it’s still thinner than a Samsung Galaxy S7.
The Z Force (top) is a tiny bit thicker than the Moto Z.
Second, the Z and Z Force have no headphone jacks. So you’ll have to carry around the included adapter to accommodate normal earbuds, just as on the iPhone 7.
(The new Moto Z Play is fractionally thicker, has a lower-res screen and slower processor, and lacks the shatter-resistant screen and optical camera stabilizer of the others. But it restores the headphone jack, its battery goes for days—three or four between charges—and it costs only $408 from Verizon, or $450 from Moto for use on other networks.)
But third—and this is the big news—the Moto Z phones are, in fact, modular. Now, don’t get excited; they’re not nearly as modular as the Phonebloks or Google’s Ara concepts. Instead, each phone can accommodate one new component that magnetically snaps onto the entire back.
The magnets provide a satisfying click and a super-firm grip.
At the moment, there are five of these Modo Mods available: interchangeable back panels, stereo speakers, battery pack, projector, or camera. Here’s a rundown:
* Style Shells ($20). These are thin, light back panels made of cool materials like wood or nylon. You can use the phone without one, but it really looks as though it’s expecting something to snap on; the Style Shell completes the phone by adding a smooth, slightly rounded back.
Style Shells are cool-looking back panels.
* JBL SoundBoost Speaker ($80). When you snap this speaker onto the phone, the sound of your music or movie instantly starts coming out of the JBL speakers. No settings, no switching, not even a power button. The sound is like what you’d expect of, for example, a Bluetooth speaker about this size: Big and much richer than what a phone can provide by itself. The built-in battery goes for 10 hours on a charge, which is a pretty long party. A built-in kickstand props the phone up for video watching—and turns the table into a resonant surface for the downward-firing speakers.
Better sound, in a snap.
* Incipio OffGrid Power Pack ($60 and up). Backup battery packs are nothing new. What makes this one cool is that it also adds a feature to your Moto: The ability to charge just by setting it down on a charging pad.
The power pack is both a battery and a wireless-charge receiver.
* Moto Insta-Share Projector ($300). Yes, you read that right: projector. This Moto back panel is actually a medium-powerful LED pico projector. Snap it on, press the On button, pop the kickstand out, and everything you see on the phone’s screen is now blasted onto a wall or ceiling. As with most pico projectors, the image isn’t very bright unless the room is dark (50 lumens); if the room is dark, a picture as big as 70 inches is watchable. (The auto-keystone correction is amazing; no matter how you tip the thing, the projected image snaps to perfectly rectangular.) The battery lasts for only an hour, though, and the resolution is only 854×480—not, in other words, high definition. You have to charge the projector separately.
A projector. On your phone. Yeah.
* Hasselblad True Zoom ($200 ). This add-on gives your phone a 10X optical zooming camera.
$200 buys you the equivalent of a cheap pocket camera.
The Mods are amazingly designed. You snap them on and do nothing—there’s no pairing, no OK button, no software switches. They just work, instantly and reliably. Life, at this point, has taught us that there are always steps to connect one gadget to another, so it catches you by surprise every time these things just work.
They’re not, on the other hand, a very good value. You’d have to be a serious Moto nut to buy that $300 projector, with its one hour of battery life and crude resolution; it’s easy to find brighter, longer-lasting hi-def pico projectors for that price that work with any phone. The speaker is cool, but $80 would also buy you a very nice Bluetooth speaker that sounds better. The Hasselblad camera takes mediocre photos and its software is half-baked, according to CNET’s review. And the wireless-charging battery pack—well, OK, but don’t forget you still have to buy the charging stand.
That problem gets worse when you remember that they work only with this phone. When it comes time to upgrade to a new phone in two years, all of your Mods may well be worthless junk.
But what about the phone?
The mods may be middling. But the phone is fantastic.
If a phone from Apple (AAPL) and Samsung packed this much clever engineering and innovation, we’d be swooning in our seats. (Why isn’t there such a thing as a Moto fanboy?)
This thing is packed with Moto’s traditional clever gestures and smart features. Some of these require turning on in Settings, but take a look:
You can wave your hand over the sleeping screen to wake it and read about any missed notifications.
Jump straight into camera mode by twisting the sleeping phone twice (or double-tapping the Home button).
“Chop” twice with the phone, karate style, to turn the flashlight on or off (the back-panel LED). Glorious.
Put the phone face down to turn on Do Not Disturb mode.
Stop the phone’s ringing by picking it up. Just as your parents did for decades.
When you want to speak to the Android voice assistant, you don’t have to say “OK Google.” You can choose any introductory phrase you want.
The Moto Z’s run Android 6.0 (Marshmallow).
The phone won’t go to sleep while you’re looking at it. How great is that?
You can set things up so that your password isn’t required in situations where it’s pretty clear that it’s you using it: when the phone is connected to your car or smartwatch, when the GPS tells the phone that you’re at home, or even—get this—when the phone detects that it’s on you, in your pocket. (It locks only when you set it down somewhere.)
You can also unlock the phone either by voice or by face. (That is, the phone unlocks when it recognizes you.)
The phone can announce incoming calls and text messages while you’re driving or using a headset—hands free. That’s brilliant. (You can even specify a geographical location for this feature to kick in, so it’s not happening all the time.)
All three Moto Z phones come with Turbo Chargers, which means they recharge really fast. After charging the phone for only 15 minutes, you can get 8 or 15 hours’ worth of charge (on the Moto Z and Z Force, respectively). Now, that’s a feature that means something.
Why can’t all cellphones charge this fast?
The Moto Z’s charging jack (and headphone jack) is the sensational USB-C, which you can read about here.
You can expand the storage with a microSD card. (Nobody would dare build an expandable phone without a card slot, would they?)
And don’t forget: this phone is thin.
Really, you might wind up with only three complaints.
First, the fingerprint reader doesn’t double as the Home button, as on Apple and Samsung phones. You’ll spend your first week trying to click it by mistake. (On the other hand, you can touch the reader to unlock the phone, and touch it again to put the phone to sleep. Nice.)
Second, without something attached to the back, the phone is insanely thin but feels incomplete. There’s a metal ridge outline that screams, “Attach something here!” And the camera cylinder pokes out absurdly.
Third, the Moto Z’s camera is fine, but not up there with the Samsung and Apple cameras. It occasionally gave me some weird white-balance problems (color casts).
So, here’s the sad thing: The Mods feature probably won’t catch on. Despite the genius of the concept and the execution, they’re just too expensive, thick, heavy, and limited. You could buy each thing—battery, speakers, projector, camera—as standalone units that won’t be worthless when you get a different phone someday. For much less money, and with much better features, .
But the actual phones are terrific—some sensational pieces of engineering. Thank you, Moto, for showing that there’s still room for radical innovation in the smartphone design. May Z Force be with you.
David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. Here’s how to get his columns by email.
Smartphones and many other devices contain gyroscopes that determine their location and position. Google Creative Lab recently created an app on Unity called Sprayscape that hack an Android phone’s gyroscope, turning it into a “VR-ish” camera that can capture “faces, places and spaces.”
Google Creative Lab openly describes Sprayscape as "imperfect," and this is apparent when using the app. With Sprayscape open, the user touches and holds the screen, slowly capturing images that the app then stitches together or “sprays” onto the inside of a 360-degree sphere.
“On user tap or touch, the camera feed is rendered to a texture at a rate of 60 frames per second,” Google Creative Lab explains. “That texture is then composited with any existing textures by a fragment shader on the GPU. That same shader also creates the scape you see in app, handling the projection from 2D camera to a 360 sphere.”
"Scapes," as Google Creative Lab calls them, are saved as flat panorama images in a device’s app data. When shared on social media, the three.js web viewer (a Javascript 3D WebGL library) wraps the 2D image onto a virtual sphere, which users can explore by panning, tilting and other movements on their devices.
The results aren’t exactly accurate but, again, Google is pretty open about it. The upside is that the code is on Github, so hopefully it will get refined. And in the meantime there could be some great intentional misuse that could lead to some pretty creatively glitchy and hilarious results.
Click here to check out Sprayscape, and here to see more of Google Creative Lab’s Android Experiments.
Following another global recall of the Galaxy Note 7, which includes the replacement units, Samsung has come forward with some numbers.
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Following the permanent discontinuation and recall of the Galaxy Note 7, which ran into issues related to battery combustion, Samsung Canada has informed MobileSyrup that it will offer buyers of the ill-fated device $100 CAD to exchange it for a Galaxy S7 or S7 edge.
Even customers who decide to ditch using a Samsung smartphone altogether can get $25 for returning their device.The offer is available to Canadians who purchased their device through a retail partner, such as Bell or Best Buy, or online at Samsung.com.
“We greatly appreciate the support and patience of our customers, carrier and retail partners and remain committed to putting our customers first,” says Paul Brannen, chief operations officer and executive vice-president of mobile solutions at Samsung Canada.
The company is also offering a full refund on Note 7 specific accessories purchased through Samsung or any authorized reseller, as long as the buyer has proof of purchase.
As to how the credit will be dealt out, the company states that the details will be specific to each carrier or retail partner.
In the U.S., where this offer was first announced, the value is being applied as a bill credit. MobileSyrup is reaching out to Canadian carriers to ascertain whether the situation will be the same here.
Update 10/13/16: Bell states the offers will be applied as a bill credit.
This article is featured in our Summer 2016 issue of dandyhorse.
GET YOUR MEAT ON THE SEAT is an old slogan you’ve probably seen on a patch or a T-shirt. You may have heard the phrase without knowing it originated from a small group of pedalling priestesses that delivered the bodacious bicycling battle cry with a sexy and aggressive twist. Those priestesses were the visionaries behind the ’90s femi- nist bike zine, Chicks United for Non-noxious Transportation or C.U.N.T.
C.U.N.T. co-founder Cathy Katrib-Reyes was amazed when she saw a photo of Toronto band Metric’s lead singer, Emily Haines, wearing a C.U.N.T. T-shirt on her Instagram feed a couple of years ago.
“The T-shits were all over. I sold about five different runs of them, so they went all over the underground bike communities; I travelled to San Francisco, NewYork and Montreal [for] different types of bike events with C.U.N.T.”
Katrib-Reyes along with Bridget Newson, Sally McKay, Nancy Smith Lea and Nancy MacDougall were the women behind C.U.N.T. when it first published in 1995. At the time, the women were heavily involved in Toronto’s cycling sub-culture. This was before bikes were mainstream in the city; when cycling downtown was considered a pastime for punks and renegades.
They needed a place to talk about the adventures they had on their bikes and the crazy – sometimes horrifying – things they encountered on the road. The word “cunt” was something hurled at them by angry motorists who couldn’t come to terms with women cycling in the street. In launching the zine, they were looking to reclaim the word and fill a void. At the time there weren’t a lot of organizations advocating for cyclists. C.U.N.T. used cut and paste before it was a computer func- tion. No Photoshop. No InDesign. No Quark even. Just PageMaker, a really, really long stapler, lots of glue sticks and a company photocopier –and every three months, a new C.U.N.T. was born.
Each issue had articles, pho- tos and cartoons that were glued into the zine and photocopied with a different colour cover for each volume. They were handed out at bike shops, coffee houses and other bike-friendly places. Johnny “Jet Fuel” Englar, who is still an important figure in the cycling and coffee communities in Toronto, would help distribute the zines and would host C.U.N.T. parties at Jet Fuel, his Cabbagetown coffee shop. Englar was one of the people who started the back-street courier bike races now known worldwide as “alley cats” and also helped bring the wooden figure-eight bike racing track known as the “human pow- ered roller coaster” to Toronto.
Photo by Claire Macfarlane
In C.U.N.T.’s heyday, Katrib-Reyes and Newson would slide copies of the zine into the new- est issues of NOW magazine, the most guerilla of distribution methods. They say they did it because it was fun and they were building community... and the only special tools they needed was that really long stapler, some elbow grease, and a sassy atti- tude. It was “extremely free freelance” says Katrib-Reyes.
C.U.N.T. was always intentionally feminist. They chose their name because they wanted to take back the word and to give it a better, more positive meaning. They used to always say “thank you,” as a retort when drivers would try to use it as an insult. “Just living as a woman you find yourself in conflict often,” says Newson. But have we come a long way, baby?
The women behind C.U.N.T. think we have come a long way as far as cycling in Toronto is con- cerned. In the ’90s, there were hardly any bike lanes, a drastic contrast to the city’s streetscapes today. Admittedly, Katrib-Reyes and Newson don’t bike as much as they used to. They often work from home and are close enough towalktoworkwhentheyneed to be in the office. Newson says she’s a bit nervous of riding with her young daughter, who is now too big to ride in the child seat on the back of her bike. “To feel comfortable riding with kids, it takes protected bike lanes and it takes quite a few of them,” says Newson. Now they say they prefer scenic rides down residential side streets. Newson says Queen Street West is the worst; she was once knocked off her bike while riding it. And, the underpass on Bloor, west of Lansdowne is at the top of the “best avoided by bike” list. Katrib-Reyes says Avenue Road north of St. Clair is terrible, and the Queensway with its highspeedanddangerousgrates is a “white-knuckle ride.”
As far as the feminist movement is concerned, we may not have gained as much ground as we have with bike lanes. Around the world, cities are recognizing the beautiful efficiencies of the bicycle, but in most places, we are still fighting for gender equality. The gender pay gap is still real and there still seems to be a general lack of institutional support for women (like lack of affordable daycare).
The bicycle has a strong connection to the emancipation of women. C.U.N.T. was a declaration of independence that helped move women forward – and the cycling scene in Toronto too.
C.U.N.T. eventually allowed P.U.N.T.s (Penises United for Non-noxious Transportation) to join their masthead and soon, the scrappy little lady zine that came up with the biking battle cry “get your meat on the seat” was a co-ed operation.
As bike culture and appreciation for C.U.N.T. grew (C.U.N.T. was featured in The Globe and Mail, BUST magazine and Broken Pencil) the need for a radical voice diminished. The women went their own ways in 2000, while Advocacy for Respect for Cyclists (ARC), the group that places white bikes at the site where cyclists are killed, and Critical Mass were going strong.
The humour and ferocity that C.U.N.T. brought to the bike scene was important. Nowadays the co-founders of the city’s original feminist bike zine say it’s important to have the spectrum of advocacy from radical to mainstream.
Perhaps a radical voice is necessary to achieving radical change in Toronto’s cycling infrastructure. Perhaps, it might take a little more noise in order to obtain a true minimum grid of bike lanes in the city. Only then will Newson feel comfortable riding with her child downtown.
At the pace we’re moving, we may see a full resurgence of ’90s zine culture before we get a minimum grid. Or, for that matter, before we achieve gender parity.
This post advocates a design philosophy I’m calling view-inspired, model-driven. We’ll look at a domain, task-tracking and project management, and examine the failure of an alternate philosophy, ‘view-first’, using Trello as the case study. I don’t mean to pick on Trello specifically, because once you are on the lookout for it, you can see the symptoms of view-first design in many applications.
Task tracking
Good task tracking and project management is based on 1 important principle:
By default, the user should only have to look at the tasks that are currently relevant to them.
This sounds kind of obvious, but it’s amazing how poorly existing productivity and task-tracking apps facilitate this. More on that later.
A task might not be relevant now because:
It’s blocked on another task or it depends on another task which isn’t done yet. (“Publish website” comes after “purchase domain for
site”)
It can’t or shouldn’t be addressed until some time in the future. (“Give Bob a call on Friday”)
It’s a task assigned to someone else (“@Alice do writeup of project
proposal”), and the user isn’t following up on this task until later.
The user is at work, and tasks that can only be completed at home. (“Hang picture frame in living room”)
The task has decayed, meaning the preconditions for it being relevant no longer hold. (“Use the $15 off coupon for this restaurant before it expires next Tuesday”)
The task would otherwise be relevant, but has a lower priority and so isn’t shown when the user has too many other higher priority tasks that are relevant.
Note: We can view all these as a special case of a more general principle. Each task has what we’ll call a relevance function. Given various inputs, the relevance function indicates whether the task is currently relevant. “Hang picture frame in living room” might have a boolean input for “whether the user is at home”.
More technically, we want both perfect precision (only relevant tasks are shown) and perfect recall (all such relevant tasks are shown; none are left out). With bad recall, the user isn’t shown and forgets to do an important task. With bad precision, the user is overwhelmed by lots of irrelevant info.
Poor recall is pretty obviously a problem, but some very bad user adaptations happen with poor precision:
To deal with the bad precision, the user spends lots of extra time processing the information in the app. (Example: email, for people who maintain a strict inbox 0 discipline) This is sort of a best-case scenario. Most people aren’t so disciplined.
Instead, the user “adapts” by missing relevant information, since it’s mixed in with too much extra info the user doesn’t care about. (Again: email)
The user also begins losing trust in the system and avoids adding items to it in a comprehensive fashion. This might improve precision, but loses recall. The user then faces anxiety due to a vague sense that tasks exist that aren’t really tracked anywhere.
The user stops checking the system, due to lack of trust in it. This is a downward spiral. As the user stops checking the system, the information in it becomes increasingly stale (precision and recall both decline).
The user starts adding items to a different system. Sometimes items are spread across different systems, leading to additional processing time and anxiety about whether all items are tracked or whether you’ve checked all the right places.
If you’ve ever tried to use a task-management system and gave up after a while, maybe you recognize some of these failure modes.
Case study: Trello
Trello is a nicely polished app billed as being capable of helping you “organize anything”. In Trello, there are “boards”, “lists” (within boards), “cards” (within lists), and “sub-card lists” (within cards). Because of this rigid hierarchy of items (a card cannot exist on two boards), attempts to achieve good precision and recall are doomed. The essential problem is that:
Even for a single individual, a rigid hierarchy is inappropriate for managing the set of tasks in their universe. If I’m at work, I shouldn’t have to look at tasks that can only be completed at home. If I’m working on project A, I shouldn’t have to look at tasks relevant to project B.
BUT, at the start of my day, perhaps I would like to view a summary of “upcoming tasks” for each of the different projects I’m involved with, to decide which project to focus on. Once focused on a project, more tasks and detail can be revealed, since the user has opted in to getting this information. That is, the user’s notion of “what’s relevant” is a very fluid notion, not something that fits in a fixed hierarchy.
When multiple individuals are collaborating on items, a fixed hierarchy is even less appropriate, since it requires that everyone be in sync on what is relevant.
To combat these limitations, Trello has some support for “labels” and “filters”. But bolting on features in an ad hoc fashion to compensate for a poor underlying model never works out nicely.
Let’s look at a case study. Suppose Carol and Dave are a young, conscientious couple looking to get organized with all the tasks in their life. Dave is a graphic/web designer and blogger and has his own consulting business, while Carol is an attorney at a small 4-person law practice. Both Carol and Dave have lots of tasks and items they’d like to track that aren’t relevant to the other. Dave might have various sales leads that he’s tracking, workstreams for different active clients, random design ideas, blog post ideas, and so on. And Carol and the partners at her firm have info about active clients and their cases, and lots of other items that aren’t relevant to Dave (and indeed, Dave should not be allowed to even see some of this information that is client-specific).
At the same time, Carol and Dave have lots of tasks that are common to both of them. There’s day-to-day errands and tasks (“go grocery shopping”, “buy new shoes”), but perhaps Carol and Dave are in the process of finding and purchasing a home. There’s lots of tasks here, related to getting a mortgage, looking at homes, making offers, and eventually moving. Although most of these tasks can be anticipated in advance, there are a lot of dependencies between the various tasks and only a few can be actively worked on at a time.
How might Carol and Dave use Trello?
Sharing a single board is a nonstarter. There’s way too much information being tracked, and the tools for filtering and so forth are too limited. An essential problem is that Trello has no notion of task dependencies, and can’t show you a view which filters out any tasks with uncompleted dependencies. People sometimes fake it by adding info or sublists to a card, but these have second-class status and are quite limited (a sublist can only be one level, for instance).
A problem with using card sublists to track dependencies is that Carol and Dave may have different ideas about whether they want an “exploded” or collapsed view of a task and its dependencies. Dave may be fully-owning some portion of the house-buying process, like obtaining a mortage, and hence may want to view dependent tasks as separate cards with more detail and notes, while Carol may be comfortable with just seeing the overall “obtain mortgage” item, if at all. But even for Dave, he may change his preferences about what he wants to see expanded. Perhaps he expands something into a card, then realizes later that the card can’t be completed until later. There is very poor support for going the other direction (from cards back to sublist).
Furthermore, Dave and Carol really shouldn’t have access to information about their respective clients, which may be of a sensitive nature.
They might try splitting things out into different boards. Perhaps a board for “Moving stuff”, a board for “Mortgage stuff”, a board for “Dave client leads”, a board for “Dave active clients”, a board for “Carol law firm clients”, and so on. The problem here is that there’s no longer a single place that either Carol or Dave can go to get a high-level view of each of these areas, with just enough detail for them to do planning or decide on an area of focus. Trello provides some ad hoc views, so Carol can view all tasks assigned to her, or all tasks that are overdue, but a) these views cannot even be bookmarked or saved, and aren’t first-class in any way, and b) they are too limited in their capabilities. For instance, here are two extremely useful queries that Trello cannot express:
“Show me all tasks assigned to me without any dependencies” gives a list of all possible tasks that can be actively worked on now. Useful for planning a day out. May be further filtered by label.
“Show me all tasks assigned to others without any dependents” gives a summary of what others are working on. For instance, the “obtain mortgage” task might have lots of dependencies, but no dependents, since it is a “root” task. (Or it might be a dependency of the “move to new house” task if Carol and Dave choose to model it that way, and filtering could be done on this basis also.)
With great discipline and lots of processing time, people who are really committed to using Trello can probably find a workflow that gets them 85% of the way to a fluent, usable system. Then again, with discipline and lots of processing time, most people can also maintain inbox 0.
Trello isn’t a bad application. It’s polished, pleasant to use, and works quite well in some contexts. But it’s based on a bad model, the result of lazily importing some physical-world metaphor into the design of software. It has a surface-level intuitiveness and ease of use, but breaks down for more complex scenarios.
We are seeing here the deficiencies of a “view-first” design philosophy. The application was designed around a particular view. The view is polished and pleasant for what it is, but other views, or even more dynamic views, are just not well supported because the underlying model is too limited.
I advocate a design style I call “view-inspired; model-driven”. It’s fine to use views as inspiration for an application, since we are often driven to design applications by thinking of a possible end user experience. But these ideas should just be taken as inspiration to drive development of a clean, general model that can express both the views you think of now and the ones you (or your users) might think of later.
A model for a task management system
I hesitate to call this a model for a task management system, because it’s actually something more general-purpose. But it can certainly be used for task management. The model is simple and consists of two parts.
First, we have a set of cards. I’m not calling the cards “tasks” since a card might be used for other things (ideas, notes, whatever). Each card has a set of fields. Here are a few example fields:
due-date, of type Date, indicating when the card should be completed
archived: a Boolean indicating whether the card is ‘archived’ or not
description: a String
dependencies: a List Card, indicating any dependencies
labels: a List String, with some labels assigned to the card
assigned-to: a List User with some users assigned to the card
readable-by: a List User indicating what users may view the card. The ‘Public’ user means anyone, without needing a login.
writable-by: a List User indicating what users may view and edit the card
Not all cards must have the same fields, and in fact my comments on the above fields are just comments or conventions. With the exception of readable-by and writable-by, no fields are magic or built-in. The meaning of these fields is derived by the queries used to build views of this set of cards that constitutes the model.
The other part of the model is a list of views. A view denotes a Set Card -> List Card (we might call this the “query”), plus a Card -> Card indicating how cards created within that view should be initialized. Perhaps a view also includes a rendering function to be used for each card returned by the query. The general idea here is the view converts a set of cards to an ordered list of cards, chooses how each card is displayed, and also controls how cards created within that view are initialized. Views are first-class. A user saves these views to their account, but can also share them with others. (Unlike every other app for task tracking that comes with a rigid set of predefined views.)
I won’t go into detail on the query language, but it should support common queries like:
All cards with a label “House stuff”, ordered by priority
All cards due in the next week
All cards assigned to Alice or Bob
Etc
Note that when creating cards, we may do so in the context of some view. Any labels, due dates, or other fields selected by that view should by default be included in any newly created cards, and the user may opt out of these defaults if they wish. So if I have a view which is “tasks assigned to me due this week”, and I create a card within this view, it should be initialized with a field that assigns the card to me, and the default due date for the view might be Friday of the current week.
By not special casing things, we get a more powerful, flexible system that is simultaneously simpler to implement. Note that with this model we can compose views, basically adding subfiltering.
That’s it for the model. I’ll leave it as an exercise to figure out a nice UX for creating and interacting with this model.
Remarks
We often think about views first because views are concrete, and it’s what we interact with directly when we use software. But actually designing software ‘view first’ is problematic because it leads to rigid models that aren’t flexible enough to support the myriad of creative ways that people use your software. It also leads invariably to feature creep—when your model is overly influenced by some concrete views you had in mind during design, it invariably ends up insufficiently general purpose. So as your software becomes more popular, you start adding one-off ‘features’ to support concrete use cases that your users are asking for. A few years pass of this feature creep, and you have a bloated, complicated piece of software that no one gets joy out of using.
On the other hand, ‘view-inspired; model-driven’ means picking a general-purpose model, with a rich algebra, right from the start, and then crafting views (or letting users craft views) that fetch data from and allow various interactions with the model. There are no ‘features’ to add, no feature creep, and the implementation can be much much simpler.
A groundswell occurs when a large number of people each do something very small. Those people don’t even realize they’re part of a movement until they see something to get behind, and to share. If you’re against bullshit, I’d like to give you something to get behind, and a way to make a difference quickly. Here’s … Continued
“I think we have a reasonable basis to believe right now that impact is material,” Verizon General Counsel Craig Silliman told a small group of reporters, as reported by The Washington Post. “And we’re looking to Yahoo to demonstrate to us the full impact if they believe it’s not. They’ll need to show us.”
Even though U.S. officials have said privately that the Federal Bureau of Investigation believes that Russian government hackers were behind the breach, the state-sponsored nature of the attack doesn’t affect the analysis of materiality, he added. A material event could be anything that affects an organization’s strategic direction, mission, or business operation.
“From a legal perspective,” he said, “the question… ‘is it a state-sponsored attack’? isn’t really relevant in terms of what we’re looking at. The question is whether this [had] a material or an adverse effect on the asset we are buying.”
Yahoo says the investigation — still ongoing — has not turned up any evidence that any ant payment card data or bank information was included.
Normally I'd be celebrating a Nobel for peace or physics or something, but this year's Nobel prize in Literature speaks to me. "Dylan has released album after album, decade after decade, that showcase his unparalleled wordcraft in various song forms. And some of his finest work has appeared only in recent years, when it seems his career might have come to a close."
This is not a coherent post - not even close. But there is something interesting going on here. The core metaphor of 'digital sunscreen' is not defined (except for the fact that it lasts two hours). Meanwhile there is an undercurrent about teachers and tech leaders becoming part of the problem we're trying to solve. Then there's this: "I’ ve been using the term edumedia sarcastically. The proper term is mission-driven marketing – a way to turn awareness into action with those new to your product or to engage already-supportive people in deeper ways. It uses teachers, enlists paid and unpaid teachers and ex-teachers – to present itself as ‘ the future’ in a duplicity of discussions and forms." Lovely.
There's a follow-up post today that helps a bit. Dean Groom writes, "I think I’ ll actively promote two hours a day (school+home) is an essential contract between parents and teachers." So I think the point is to limit screen time to two hours. Groom admits "Two hours a day is going to sound ridiculous to kids and adults alike." And the concern underlying the limit is this: " is dominated by the commercial agendas and belief of a few mega-brands – Apple, Google, and Microsoft. The ‘ social stream’ of edumedia is seduced and propositioned by brands." He's not wrong - but the remedy needs to be fixed.
Before Google had its announcement event earlier this month for the Pixel and Pixel XL, it was rumored that the company would also be unveiling brand new Android Wear-based smartwatches.
Continue reading →
Health Canada has issued an expanded recall posting for the Samsung Galaxy Note 7, revealing the full stock numbers of the Note 7 in Canada.
The posting states that approximately 39,000 of all recalled devices were sold or distributed in Canada, of which 22,000 were included in the initial recall. The majority of the difference between the two numbers likely consists of stock that went unsold.
The posting also says that while Health Canada did not receive any reports of consumer incidents or injuries related to the use of Note 7s in the nation, Samsung Canada received four reports of phone batteries overheating with one incident resulting in a “minor burn injury to a consumer’s forearm.”
The recalled smartphones were sold or distributed from August 19th to October 10th, 2016.
Google Photos uses faces in your most recent photos to suggest older photos with with the same person in them;
If you take a lot of photos of the same subject, like a child, Google Photos will create a card of the best ones from the past month;
Animations, which Google Photos already creates using photos, are also generated from videos now; and
If Google Photos detects that there are sideways photos in your collection, it will present a card with the photos that it thinks should be rotated.
This is what Google Photos does best. It finds connections and photos that would be like searching for a needle in a haystack if you did it manually with a big photo library.
Each of the new features are available on iOS, Android, and the web.
We slept on 15 different sleeping pads on a total of five car-camping and backpacking trips, as well as on the floor in our own living rooms, before concluding that the Therm-a-Rest NeoAir XLite is the best sleeping pad for backpackers and the thicker Therm-a-Rest LuxuryMap is the best choice for car campers. We also have picks specifically for side sleepers, occasional backpackers, and anyone on a tight budget.
Normal releases are consistent and predictable. Scheduled releases benefit developers, testers, support and PR. Unpredictable releases can cause communication problems, stress and fatigue. Those can lead to poor software quality and developer turn-over.
Sometimes we need to deal with unexpected issues that can’t wait for a normal release. Some examples include:
High volume crashes
Broken functionality
Security issues
Special date-based features
Anyone should be able to suggest an off-cycle release, so make sure there’s a straightforward, simple process for doing it. Identify that a special release is really necessary. Maybe the issue can wait for the next normal release. Consider using an approval process to decide if the release is warranted. An approval process creates a small hurdle that forces some justification. An off-cycle release is not cheap and has potential to derail the normal release process. Don’t put the normal release cycle at risk.
Some things to keep in mind:
Clearly identify the need. If you can’t, you probably don’t need the release.
Limit the scope of work to just what needs to be done for the issue. Be laser focused.
Make sure the work can be completed within the shortened cycle. Otherwise, just let the work happen in the normal release flow.
Choose an owner to drive the release and a set of stakeholders that need to track the release.
Triage frequently to make sure the short cycle stays on track. Over-communicate.
Test and verify the code changes. By limiting the scope, you should also be limiting the amount of required testing.
Be ready for the unexpected. Get really good at it. The best releases are boring releases.
Canadians did not vote for this. The expectation they had was that electing a Liberal government would produce a rapid, radical change of direction from the Conservatives. Instead of that we have seen what is apparently always the way with Liberals: campaign on the left, govern on the right. It was certainly my bitter experience in the first Canadian election I was able to vote in after I became a citizen in 1992. I read “The Red Book” which set out a Keynesian agenda for the country, so I voted Liberal. Then Paul Martin became Finance Minister and we went on with all the conservative policies I had voted against. Of course I did not get caught twice: I voted Green last time. Not nearly enough people did that, so we are forced to repeat history.
The opponents to the Massey Tunnel replacement have long held the view that real reason for this megaproject is further port expansion. Once the tunnel has been replaced by a bridge, the tubes will be removed from the river bed, and dredging will commence. Of course, the Environmental Assessment for the project ignores this completely. And ports are a federal responsibility. We now have confirmation from federal agriculture minister Lawrence MacAulay:
“We do not want to lose agricultural land but it’s no good producing products that you can’t move, either,” MacAulay said, answering a question from Country Life in BC following a presentation to Greater Vancouver Board of Trade members on September 12. “So it’s one way or the other – the port in Vancouver has to be efficient to move the products to market. The Asian market is a big market, only going to get larger, and we want to be there.”
So we can now add loss of land from the ALR to the Site C project, the Lelu Island LNG project and the almost certain federal approval of the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion to the “sunny ways” of our new Prime Minister. Yes, I am sure he looks very appealing to many when he takes his shirt off. But I do not think that is nearly enough to justify his policies.
Of course I am risking a lot by openly opposing this government. We have already seen how the practice of the Conservative Government
audits of the environmental charities for political activity, ignoring the Fraser Institute far more blatant flouting of the same law;
removal of Canadian citizenship with no right to an oral hearing, no right to have the matter referred to a judge, and no right to even know the extent of the case against them
continued by this government. Of course, if I do find myself without citizenship I will not actually be able to prove that it was environmental activism that was used to brand me a terrorist – but that is already happening.
We had an idea the new Massey Bridge and associated Motordom infrastructure was going to impose a significant footprint on Delta and Richmond, but the release of preliminary design concepts for the corridor seemed to have even caught Richmond mayor Malcolm Brodie off guard. Brodie describes his shock when viewing images for the new interchange at Steveston Highway…
“When I saw the highway and the interchange I was literally breathless,”
Its easy to justify his reaction when taking in the Los Angeles-style stacked interchange, but perhaps not so easy to understand why municipal officials are either kept in the dark up until this point or just haven’t engaged in the initial phases of the design process. Here are more of Brodie’s comments in a segment with CTV Vancouver:
Images courtesy MAG-LEV Audio
Kate Rubins wears a space suit decorated by patients at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in the International Space Station. All images courtesy of NASA
HOPE on display
A patient decorating COURAGE with acrylic paint
HOPE being quilted together
A detail of HOPE
Kate Rubins and an MD Anderson patient decorate COURAGE with acrylic paint
The Galaxy Note 7 was probably among the best, if not the best, Android smartphone released this year. It packed a beautiful design that was also resistant to water, a great 12MP rear shooter with OIS, iris scanner, and a large and beautiful 5.7-inch Quad HD curved Super AMOLED display. However, thanks to the handset exploding randomly across the world, the device is no longer in production and on sale.
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Image via Android Experiments. Thumbnail via
Following another global recall of the Galaxy Note 7, which includes the replacement units, Samsung has come forward with some numbers.
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Consumerist.
There's a follow-up post today that helps a bit. Dean Groom writes, "I think I’ ll actively promote two hours a day (school+home) is an essential contract between parents and teachers." So I think the point is to limit screen time to two hours. Groom admits "Two hours a day is going to sound ridiculous to kids and adults alike." And the concern underlying the limit is this: " is dominated by the commercial agendas and belief of a few mega-brands – Apple, Google, and Microsoft. The ‘ social stream’ of edumedia is seduced and propositioned by brands." He's not wrong - but the remedy needs to be fixed.
Before Google had its announcement event earlier this month for the Pixel and Pixel XL, it was rumored that the company would also be unveiling brand new Android Wear-based smartwatches.
Continue reading →
