It has been 10 days since the DAO was hacked on Friday June 17th, when someone moved around $53M USD worth of ether to an object now nicknamed the “Dark DAO.” The mechanics of the attack have been discussed extensively. The hacker further stalked investors who were splitting from The DAO, obtaining the right to attack them as well, initiating an attack that we had cautioned about. A group of whitehat hackers responded by using the same exploit to drain the remaining funds from the DAO, originally worth around $100M USD, to a “Whitehat DAO.”

This is where things sit today. The hacker cannot start the process to extract the funds in the Dark DAO for at least another 17 days, so for now, the funds are not going anywhere. In the meantime, the Ethereum community has spoken resoundingly in favor of a soft fork to freeze all further movement of funds in the Dark DAO. If all goes well, the soft fork will activate on Thursday, June 30th, 2016, and buy the community some additional time to debate longer term strategy.

In this post, we make the case that the soft fork itself can introduce a new attack vector for denial of service (DoS) attacks on Ethereum. We describe how these DoS attacks would work, what effect they would have on the network, and what alternatives we might have. Interestingly, if the community understands and expects such attacks, then any DoS attack is actually much less likely to achieve its aims, and might not be mounted in the first place.

With that in mind, let’s look at the DoS scenarios.

for(uint32 i=0; i < 1000000; i++) {
   sha3('some data'); // costly computation
}
DarkDAO.splitDAO(...); // render the transaction invalid

The Province reported this morning on a follow up analysis of ICBC’s 1998 Gradated Licensing Program. The authors’ determination, after selectively gerrymandering some original data, was that fewer “young people” were getting their drivers licenses. This fits with a friendly narrative of ‘the impending end of motordom’, but neither the data they present nor the story they tell back this up.

The article relies almost exclusively on personal testimonials of a few of them who’ve decided to forego – or forestall – getting their licenses.

I can appreciate having to personalize a story, but this is clearly just fill. It isn’t proof in support of anything. You could just as effectively claim that “more and more” Metro Vancouver teens are worshiping the devil, then interview some goth kids at the mall. Boom. Proof.

It is not merely my cantankerousness. Lazy puff-piece articles such as this are so easily picked apart and dismissed that they cast illegitimacy on the very notion of societal change. It’s not difficult to see why the right casts the entire narrative of ‘fewer cars’ and ‘sustainability’ into suspicion when this stuff is part of a reputable paper’s drumbeat of truth.

It comes across as propaganda. It’s not; at least intentionally. It’s just very lazy journalism: a few selectively-framed half-facts packaged to tell a little story that we want to be true. Fabricating a trend, and then over-implying its significance, does more harm than good.

And there is some truth in there. Some portions of teens – the 16-18 year olds – really are getting fewer licenses, according to the data. However, this is quickly offset by equal increases in licenses from 19-21 year olds. The result is a minor net increase in the numbers of these “young people” getting licenses between 2003-2013.

“Our future will be carbon-neutral (because young people are getting fewer licenses)!”. “US abandoning suburbs for city living!”. These narratives carry a lot of weight, and a lot of people would like them to be unreservedly true. But at present they’re not. They’re not even trending towards those absolute ends.

“Twirling! Twirling! Twirling towards Freedom!”

Minus the bombast, there are some relative truths. There are fewer young drivers of certain ages than before. The ratio of suburban-to-urban home construction is slightly less exaggerated than in previous decades. This is good news.

But middle class white flight has never abated in the US, especially in the northeast. New highway construction still wildly outpaces new transit, especially in Alberta. A lot more new homes are still built in the suburbs than in the city, especially everywhere.

It’s good to recognize sustainable trends, but better not to overstate or misrepresent their significance. Our problems aren’t solving themselves, no matter how badly two reporters from The Province are in need of a paycheque.

" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" />✉" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" />✋" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" />" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" />" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /> " class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" />" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" />" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" />" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" />" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" />

The above message may seem like a random string of emoji. But not so: When decoded, it reads: “Encryption Matters.”

Today, Mozilla is launching Codemoji, a fun, educational tool that introduces everyday Internet users to ciphers — the basic building blocks of encryption — using emoji.

Try Codemoji »

How it works

Codemoji is a Web-based platform that allows users to write a message, encode it using emoji, and then send it to a friend.

A friendly reminder: Codemoji is intended as a learning tool, not a platform for sharing personal data. Thankfully, modern encryption is much stronger than simple emoji ciphers. If you are going to be sending sensitive information, best to use a more sophisticated security tool .

Why we built Codemoji

Mozilla built Codemoji alongside our friends at TODO, the Turin, Italy-based design and creative agency. Our goal: To educate everyday Internet users about ciphers and the basics of encryption.

Says Mark Surman, Mozilla’s Executive Director:

“When more people understand how encryption works and why it’s important to them, more people can stand up for encryption when it matters most. This is crucial: Currently, encryption is being threatened around the world. From France to Australia to the UK, governments are proposing policies that would harm user security by weakening encryption. And in the U.S., the FBI recently asked Apple to undermine the security of its own products.”

Mozilla believes encryption is the most important tool we have for building a more safe, secure Internet. And building a more secure Internet is critical to our users, our economy, and our national security.

Encryption is also a part of everyday life and everyday commerce. The things we do with it are things we value, like bank and shop. If encryption is weakened, these things become risky.

We believe Codemoji is a first step for everyday Internet users to better understand encryption. To learn more about encryption’s importance, and how you can stand up for encryption, visit advocacy.mozilla.org/encrypt.

Thanks for reading. Or, in Codemoji, " class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" />" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /> " class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /> " class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" />" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" />" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /> .

Blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin’s public ledger, is one of the hottest topics in fintech, and one of the technology’s biggest fans are banks.

“You see these banks that really get excited about blockchain and fintech,” says Zennon Kapron, the founder of Kapronasia, a research and consulting firm that focuses on Asia’s financial industry.

“At some point over the next year, banks are going to wake up and realize that blockchain is a great, sexy technology for a problem that doesn’t exist,” he says.

At TechCrunch Shanghai on Monday, Mr. Kapron and Bobby Lee, the founder of BTCC, one of China’s first bitcoin exchanges, discussed the future of Bitcoin and blockchain technology. According to a report by KPMG and CB Insights,  venture capital investments in Bitcoin and blockchain-related startups rose from $3 million in 2011 to $474 million in 2015. Though blockchain technology was originally developed for Bitcoin, the technology is applicable to other assets as well, from diamonds to stocks.

For banks, blockchain technology has the potential to speed up transaction times, minimize fraud, boost security and transparency, and slash costs. It’s also less risky than adopting a cryptocurrency and betting on the value of Bitcoin. However, so far, blockchain technology has not been widely adopted outside of Bitcoin.

“For there to be a good and suitable blockchain for companies, banks, [and] financial institutions to use, there has to be a very good blockchain that is immutable, global, open source, [and] public,” says Mr. Lee. “Today, there is only one such ledger – it’s called the Bitcoin blockchain.”

One of the core strengths of blockchain technology is the distributed and decentralized nature of its record-keeping. A blockchain is made up of a network of computers or “blocks”, each containing a copy of the whole ledger. Thus, safeguarding against unscrupulous attempts to rewrite or alter parts of the ledger depends on how large and distributed the blockchain is. For banks or startups that want to create smaller or private blockchains, many of the benefits of the technology could be lost.

“A lot of the things that blockchain was designed to solve, those aren’t benefits of these smaller, private blockchains,” says Mr. Kapron. “If you have five banks using one blockchain…how secure is that blockchain? How much do you trust those other players that are there?”

The enthusiasm behind blockchain technology from financial institutions is part of a rising interest in fintech in general, as banks grapple with disruptive fintech startups in mobile payments, P2P lending, and more. Many banks, such as Standard Chartered, have taken the approach of partnering or investing in fintech startups, many of which target financial institutions as their customers and clients, not necessarily their competitors.

However, financial regulations and policies will shape and can make-or-break the future of many fintech applications, such as Bitcoin. At the end of 2013, the Chinese government cracked down on Bitcoin, prohibiting banks and payment companies from dealing with the cryptocurrency. Still, the regulations left room for optimism as individuals were still allowed to sell and and buy Bitcoins. As regulations around blockchain continue to develop, how banks and startups will implement blockchain for their own purposes remains to be seen.

For various occupations, the difference between the person who makes the most and the one who makes the least can be significant. Read More

Me: the glass is full – half tomato juice, half air.

When in 2015 Greece decided by referendum to reject Brussels’ austerity plans, the European Union’s antidemocratic response took no one by surprise: To deny the people’s will had become a habit. In a flash of honesty, the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, unabashedly declared, “There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties.”

Brexit may not have been the first cry of hope, but it may be the people’s first real victory. The British have presented the union with a dilemma it will have a hard time getting out of. Either it allows Britain to sail away quietly and thus runs the risk of setting a precedent: The political and economic success of a country that left the European Union would be clear evidence of the union’s noxiousness. Or, like a sore loser, the union makes the British pay for their departure by every means possible and thus exposes the tyrannical nature of its power. Common sense points toward the former option. I have a feeling Brussels will choose the latter.

When designing forms, there’s a pretty deep chasm between the needs of the developer, and the needs of the user. Developers want structured, normalized data. Users want to enter data in whatever format suits them best.

Forcing people to enter structured data causes usability problems.

What do you mean, it’s not a valid phone number? Looks valid to me - except that the backend wants just numbers, no special characters, and isn’t smart enough to strip out all of the characters that the user has entered.

Commonly, designers try to solve this by telling people what kind of format data needs to be in. This can be done using placeholders that show example data in the correct format.

The problem here is that the placeholder disappears as soon as people start typing, so exactly when they actually need this information, it’s no longer visible.

Another approach is to try to be as liberal as possible when accepting input values. So maybe the backend strips out all special characters, and only retains the numbers. But that’s difficult to do; what if I enter an international phone number?

Stripping out the plus sign results in an invalid phone number. So getting the backend right can be hard, and getting it wrong means that the form accepts (or produces) invalid data, which is never a good idea.

Worse, people have become so accustomed to inconsiderate text fields that they may be confused when they encounter a text field that doesn’t offer any guidance about how its contents should be formatted.

Yet another attempt at solving this problem is to use input masks. Instead of showing a simple text field, the field is split up into multiple fields, or contains logic that applies correct formatting while the user is entering text.

As the user starts entering text, that text is automatically formatted correctly, and the mask is changed to indicate what kind of text remains to be typed.

This satisfies the needs of backend developers by forcing people into entering data in a very specific format, and also help users by providing clear, interactive guidance.

These fields are quite common on web forms. Because they are not part of many widely used UI libraries, but are implemented with custom JS code, there are few commonly accepted UI guidelines. There are no standards outlining how they should work, and as a result, most of these input masks work differently in slightly perfidious ways.

In order to implement input masks, designers have to make a lot of small interaction design decisions that don’t have universally accepted correct answers. Regardless of which decisions designers make, there will be users who will be surprised by these decisions.

So whatever you do, you’ll end up annoying or confusing some of your users.

In fact, I think I’ve never encountered an input mask that didn’t annoy me.

Let’s take a look at some examples.

Input masks for serial numbers often split the one field up into multiple fields.

Once the user has entered the first four letters, focus is automatically shifted to the next field:

Unfortunately, no other text field works like this. If you do usability tests on these fields, you’ll find that a large portion of your users won’t notice that the caret was moved to the next field, possibly because they’re typing a serial number that’s printed on a physical card, and aren’t paying much attention to what’s happening on the screen. They’ll hit tab…

…enter the next four characters, and end up with this:

Clearly, that’s not the intended outcome.

A similar problem occurs with single-field input masks. Let’s go back to the phone number example. Let’s say the user enters the first six letters. At this point, the input mask will automatically type the dash, so that the user doesn’t have to.

However, the user might not notice that the dash was typed automatically, and might type the dash, resulting in this:

Now think about deleting. Let’s go back to the previous situation:

If the user hits the delete key, what should happen? The field (probably) filled in the dash, so a lot of input fields ignore the dash, and delete the character before the dash.

But this is kind of crazy. No other text field on your computer deletes two characters if you hit delete once. In fact, the user probably hit delete twice quickly in succession, thinking that it would take two deletes to get rid of the one character before the dash, and thus inadvertently deleted two characters instead of one.

Clearly, not what the user wanted.

Conclusion

Avoid Magic

Because there are no standardized, widely accepted behaviors for input masks, it’s best to avoid «magical» behaviour (e.g. automatically entering characters that the user did not type), or, if you do need magical behavior, also account for user behavior that does not expect magical behavior.

For example, if the field auto-tabs to the next field, and the user also tabs right after filling in a field, it might be best to ignore the user’s tab.

If it looks like a duck, make it walk and quack like a duck

if there’s a UI element that looks pretty much like a text field, has the same function as a text field, and behaves very similarly to a text field, maybe it’s best not to change how basic features like the delete key work.

If you create a new control that kind of looks like an existing control, the new control should not violate people’s expected behavior of the existing control. In other words, text fields with input masks’ behavior should be as close to a normal text field’s behavior as possible.

Don’t be clever

Don’t be too clever for your own good; if a simple, easy to understand interaction works, it’s often better to go with that than to go with a clever, possibly hard to predict interaction.

Do no harm

Follow the principle of least harm. If there are multiple ways a user interface can behave, pick the one that does the least harm (e.g. deletes the fewest characters when the user starts a destructive action).

Test it

To find out how users actually expect your user interface to work, it’s always best not to be too smart, but to run some usability tests, and find out.

If you require a short url to link to this article, please use http://ignco.de/751

But wait, there's more!

Want to read more like this? Buy my book's second edition! Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web is now available DRM-free directly from The Pragmatic Programmers. Or you can get it on Amazon, where it's also available in Chinese and Japanese.

It can be hard to make kids focus on the task in front of them at the best of times. Making them focus in front of a computer screen is even harder.

That’s part of the reasoning behind Google’s newest educational initiative, Project Bloks, which lets kids learn the basics of coding by connecting together physical code blocks to create sequences that control devices such as toys or tablets over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

The project is a collaboration between Google, Stanford University’s Paulo Blikstein and global design firm IDEO. It’s built on educational research that indicates young children will be more likely to enjoy learning computer science principles through playing with tangible toys and learning with their hands.

The bloks system is made out of three specific types of hardware. First off there are the “pucks,” which can be programmed with different instructions through the use of paper and conductive ink. The pucks’ instructions are then read by the “base boards,” which can be connected together in sequence. Finally, powering the whole system is the “brain board,” or processing unit, built on a Raspberry Pi Zero.

While Google itself isn’t planning to create its own retail version, it has developed an example kit with IDEO to show how designers, developers and researchers might make use of the system.

Those interested in the bloks system can register their email to receive updates on the project or even be part of Google’s upcoming research study by signing up on its website.

Related reading: The man who inspired Google’s Project Ara pens critical blog post

Today, P.M. Dawn exists as a faded memory for most music fans, if they’re remembered at all. But Attrell Cordes made songs like nothing that came before. Beautiful, sweeping melodies paired with lyrics of regret, remorse, heartache and profound loss. And then there were those surreal, recurring images of water.

To casual fans, P.M. Dawn was “the big guy and the other guy.” The big guy was Attrell Cordes, known as Prince Be, who passed away yesterday. The other guy was his brother Jarrett, who usually went by DJ Minutemix until scandal pushed him from the group in the mid-90s. They grew up in Jersey City, which may be the only part of their story that sounds like a regular rap group. The standout moments of the group’s history are like no other group in hip-hop — enormous pop hits and groundbreaking production work, a deep catalog of songs suffused not just with pathos but often with genuine despair, a notorious and absurd run-in with a hip-hop legend, and a stream of profound moments of personal and professional tragedy.

P.M. Dawn’s unique mix of extraordinary success, deep influence on current sounds, and a relentlessly heartbroken outlook raises the question: What on earth inspired Attrell Cordes in the first place?

It’s easy to forget, nearly 20 years after they faded from view, that P.M. Dawn enjoyed both enormous commercial success and broad critical acclaim. The conventional narrative of the early 90s in mainstream hip-hop is of a time when the genre transformed from a rebellious and challenging upstart artform to the dominant musical force in culture, maturing from golden age boom bap to globally-dominant gangsta rap with only a brief detour into the Native Tongues.

The works we associate with that moment of transition in the early 90s are still respected as classics —albums like 36 Chambers and The Chronic. But in 1993, those legendary albums sat on the charts and the critics’ lists right next to The Bliss Album…? Or, to respect the full title of P.M. Dawn’s sophomore effort: The Bliss Album…? (Vibrations of Love and Anger and the Ponderance of Life and Existence). The name alone does a good job of explaining exactly why P.M. Dawn was both beloved and mocked.

So what is P.M. Dawn‘s rightful legacy in hip-hop history? Are they sidelined today because they were hippies? Maybe, but so were De La Soul until De La deaded the D.A.I.S.Y. age. Was it because they were too soft? After all, P.M. Dawn‘s catalog is full of overtly romantic songs suffused with heartbreak, as likely to be sung as rapped. But in a world where Drake dominates and everybody from Kanye to Lil Wayne gets some of their biggest pop hits by singing moody songs about their feelings, it seems as if history has come down decidedly in favor of the styles the group pioneered. So how did P.M. Dawn end up sinking into obscurity?

The answer to P.M. Dawn may lie beneath the surface.

[Content notice: This piece includes references that may be troubling to readers sensitive to abuse/violence.]

1. Making Waves

Baby you send me, baby you send me
Set adrift on memory bliss of you

Though they billed themselves as a group, P.M. Dawn was barely even a duo — Attrell was always the creative force behind the work, the lead voice on every song. Those songs typically matched samples of very white, very pop artists to thick layers of Beach Boys harmonies. More than half a decade before the artist intermittently known as Puff Daddy would become one of the biggest stars in pop (and earn the ire of hip-hop purists) with tracks built entirely around top 40 hits, P.M. Dawn was riding a Spandau Ballet song to the top of the charts. Indeed, when SoundScan was first used to calculate music sales in 1991, the very first song to be certified #1 in sales was “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss.”

It’s hard to imagine now, but at the turn of the 90s, before the echoes of the Biz Markie suit would change sampling culture forever, many hip-hop heads policed each other’s use of samples. While the prior year’s “U Can’t Touch This” had been similarly brazen in lifting Rick James’ work in service of creating an MC Hammer hit, nobody in 1990 defied convention so profoundly as P.M. Dawn did in lifting the entire hook of a sleepy adult contemporary staple that had only faded from radio only a few years earlier.

P.M. Dawn was different from the start. They followed in the footsteps of one of their idols, Jimi Hendrix, by beginning their career in earnest in England. Signed to Gee Street records, they didn’t come up in the hip-hop tradition of selling records out of the trunk of their car, but rather rode the “Ashley’s Roachclip” beat out of the clubs in London, perhaps never to better effect than on their debut hit, “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss.” Built from a sample of Spandau Ballet’s “True”, but draped in even more layers of ethereal vocal harmonies, the song illustrates perfectly that all of P.M. Dawn’s obsessions and brilliance were fully formed from the start.

The structure of the song exemplifies Attrell’s hit formula during the rise and peak of the group’s commercial success. There’s a classic break beat, which today sounds like pure dance but which was at the time just as evocative of serious hip-hop in the Eric B. and Rakim vein. Over the beat, that Spandau Ballet sample, which promised crossover success while still being undeniably catchy enough to bring along reluctant hip-hop fans. And then there’s the rhymes. At the same time that LL was screaming his way through “Mama Said Knock You Out”, Prince Be delivers his lyrics just above a whisper. And not LL’s sexy and urgent “I Need Love” whisper, but the murmur of someone thinking aloud while nobody else is home.

In their signature hit, like all their songs, P.M. Dawn’s lyrics are vivid, evocative, inscrutable.

The camera pans to a cocktail glass
Behind a blind of plastic plants
I find a lady with a fat diamond ring
And then you know I can’t remember a damn thing

The scene described is hard to place, but it does seem to loosely fit one scenario: The words can be read as a recapitulation of the opening moments of Prince’s 1986 cinematic flop, Under the Cherry Moon. Ordinarily, it’d be absurd to think the lyrics to a Top 10 pop hit include a Prince reference so obscure that Questlove would struggle to recall it, but this is from Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience, an album where one of the other songs (“Reality Used To Be A Friend Of Mine”) actually samples dialogue from the movie Under the Cherry Moon. Similarly obscure cultural references continue throughout the song, with almost deliberately inaccessible moments like the Tribe Called Quest-meets-Married With Children nod, “Christina Applegate, you gotta put me on.”

But of course, the song dates to a time when Dennis Miller was still funny; obscure references were an even more meaningful way of signifying social belonging in the pre-Wikipedia, pre-Google, pre-Genius era. And rather than signifying street realness, Prince Be was signifying catholic cultural tastes that were unapologetically middle class, as likely to be white as black, more likely to be wounded than boastful.

Even in an era where the Spandau Ballet sample was widely considered too brazen and too prominent to be legitimate hip-hop, the song’s charm was undeniable, and set a pattern not just for the group’s future work, but for pop radio overall. When one-hit-wonder Gerardo wanted to follow up his signature “Rico Suave”, he was shamelessly ripping off Set Adrift in his song “Love”; by the time mega-popular boy band Color Me Badd was searching for a new sound a few years later, they would go to the same well with their song “Choose”, under the guidance of hands no less gifted than super-producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.

Prince Be himself would revisit P.M. Dawn’s signature song just a few years later, when he was asked to produce a track for the Backstreet Boys’ eponymous 1997 album—which would go on to become one of the most successful albums of all time.

The effort yielded a revamped version of the song, complete with new lyrics, along with what was likely one of the most lucrative production gigs of Prince Be’s career.

But at the dawn of the 90s, P.M. Dawn enjoyed a brief moment where they captured a truly new sound and the attention of the world and it seemed they would be able to ride that wave of success almost indefinitely.

2. Got Me Floating

I drift along in a sea of compulsion
Whether or not I’m dead
I have no idea

Those lyrics pop up in the middle of “The Beautiful”, a standout on the first P.M. Dawn album, which evolves a brief segment of the Beatles’ “Baby You’re a Rich Man” into a full-fledged song, ethereal and funky and appropriately titled. It’s striking that even when starting from a Beatles hook, Prince Be finds himself afloat.

When it came time to create their followup album, though, Prince Be began with the formula that had yielded their biggest hit to date. On “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss”, the group sampled a white artist’s pop hit from half a decade earlier and added cascading layers of harmonies on top, along with a soft-spoken and inscrutable rap. For “Looking Through Patient Eyes”, they went back to the well, using the bulk of George Michael’s “Father Figure” as the basis for their own Top 10 pop hit, albeit with lyrics that were even more abstract and challenging than “Set Adrift.”

The only familiar element for fans to hold on to in “Patient Eyes” was Prince Be’s omnipresent obsession with water imagery in the lyrics.

Oil and water, lust and sympathy
I life and death my way through the sun
Where originates all the pain
That leaves my memory a traumatic sponge
And sings to you

Though that first single from The Bliss Album…? followed a familiar formula, the rest of the album challenged listeners at almost every opportunity. As Tom Breihan put it when revisiting the album a few years ago,

It’s soft, frilly, nebulous, willfully feminine. On the album’s first chorus, Prince Be croons, “I cry when midnight sighs,” whatever that means. The only guest on the whole LP is Boy George, gently wrapping his voice around Prince Be’s on “More Than Likely.” There’s a cover of the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” that flirts with the Beatles’ starry-eyed psych-rock the same way the Beatles, at the moment they recorded the original, were flirting with Eastern modalities. Entire songs waft by without any drums, and when drums do show up, they’re breakbeat shuffles that, in 1993, signified house music as much as they did rap, especially with the pianos P.M. Dawn loved to pair them with.

Part of the challenge that Prince Be took on in his work was introducing his listeners to his most important influences, typically by recontextualizing their work in his distinctive style. Musical influences surrounded the Cordes brothers right from the start; the stepfather who raised them had been an early member of Kool and the Gang, their mother had sometimes sung gospel, and several of their aunts and uncles were DJs. By the time Prince Be had become a famous artist in his own right, he was legendary amongst serious collectors for the breadth of his record collection and his knowledge of sampling history.

Despite that access to a deep and eclectic record collection, outrageously mainstream acts like the Beatles were near the top of the list of P.M. Dawn’s influences. Building on the brilliance of “The Beautiful” on their first album, P.M. Dawn decided to do a full cover of “Norwegian Wood”, ending up with a version more evocative of Prince Paul’s productions for De La Soul than reverent to the original. What was left unchanged? Well, the lyrics, of course—giving Prince Be the chance to say he “crawled off to sleep in the bath.”

Just as important in the list of psychedelic influences on P.M. Dawn is Jimi Hendrix. In 1993, they were asked to contribute a track to Stone Free, one of the first prominent multi-artist Hendrix tributes. P.M. Dawn provided one of the highlights of the collection with what must be the only Hendrix cover that samples the Jungle Brothers’ “Jimbrowski.”

The song? “You Got Me Floating”, naturally.

P.M. Dawn soon became popular enough to actually work with artists they admired. One of those artists was Boy George, who duetted with Prince Be on The Bliss Album…?’s “More Than Likely.” It was George who got the standout lyric in the first verse.

What’s the use in floating if all it does is tell
You someone’s under you

That duet with Boy George was followed a few months later by a duet with Elton John on his Duets album. Prince Be was saying, as clearly as possible, that he cared a lot more about his musical influences than his hip-hop credibility.

3. A Sea of Doubt

I can understand that the stakes are high
But I’d really like to know what I’ve done and why
I’m floating in a sea of doubt when it comes to that

Like so many of P.M. Dawn’s songs, “Even After I Die” covers Prince Be’s insecurities and self-loathing in a context that’s deeply mortal. He seems to be reckoning with his legacy, a fixation that only increased after the birth of his children.

One part of that legacy was unfortunately too clear. Even people who know nothing else about P.M. Dawn know that KRS-One bum-rushed them onstage at one of their shows. The context was deeply stupid, even in the lengthy annals of stupid hip-hop beefs. Prince Be, while doing an interview for Details in January 1991 to promote The Utopian Experience, started to ramble about not believing in reality. It wasn’t a particularly effective or clear way to argue his point, but context makes clear that he was riffing on not wanting to obey conventional social labels. From that interview:

With years of hindsight, it reads as a particularly poor form of album promotion, but given that these were the words of an obscure and introverted 20-year-old artist who was dealing with press for the first time, it’s not that egregious. A few days after the article came out KRS revealed his great offense to Prince Be’s slight (and demonstrated the full hypocrisy of his “Stop The Violence” movement) by throwing Prince Be from the stage of an MTV concert at the Factory in New York.

Legendary hip-hop journalist and critic Bill Adler wrote up the full story at length on his site, but context makes clear that KRS had been embarrassed by attacks from rappers like Ice Cube and decided to prove his toughness by…going after the softest rapper in the game.

It’s hard to overstate how huge the reaction was. At at time when hip-hop was too scary for most of mainstream media, USA Today put the story on the front cover of their Life section.

But while traditional media condemned KRS for his attack, the response from the hip-hop community was nearly unanimous. The Source (then at the peak of its credibility and authority in hip-hop) convened a panel of attendees of the show to discuss the attack, and T-Money got the last word on P.M. Dawn.

Chris Wilder, then the managing editor of The Source, revisited the attack a year later, summarizing his reaction to KRS taking the stage: “The whole Bronx was on stage and all of Brooklyn and Uptown was on the floor screaming, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ and jumping as high as I’ve ever jumped at a party.”

In a 1996 interview for Addicted To Noise, Prince Be discussed why he had moved to largely singing on his albums, instead of rapping:

A lot of hip-hop artists say that P.M. Dawn can’t rhyme. So I said, OK, I won’t rhyme. All criticism I take in. It either builds me up or breaks me down. I take things people write about me totally seriously. It is me, so to speak. And when I hear that people hate me, it really affects me as well. So the reason why I’m not rapping is that the hip-hop industry told me not to.

4. Raining Cats and Dogs

So when it’s raining cats and dogs
I won’t complain and I won’t mind
When it’s raining cats and dogs
I’ll understand the reasons why…

From the start, P.M. Dawn was presented as a duo. But what was clear was that Attrell, as Prince Be, was the driving creative force behind P.M. Dawn; Jarrett, as DJ Minutemix, seemed to be a junior partner, whose onstage role was primarily as a hype man and backup singer. Prince Be also determined their strategy for reaching fans.

Despite a series of massive hits, P.M. Dawn had taken a blow from both the KRS-One attack and the changing style of mainstream hip-hop. By the mid-90s, the group was clearly in a situation where they would either make a hit record or fade away. Their strategy with Jesus Wept, their third album, was unconventional and bold: They would embrace a sound that might fit on alternative rock radio, which was then ascendant, and stop trying to win hip-hop credibility. Helping them was the fact that P.M. Dawn were early adopters of Internet technology, nurturing a fanbase that had started to create early fan sites and forums that connected the community.

The Jesus Wept album had strong material, but getting alternative outlets to embrace the lead single “Downtown Venus” was a leap. The effort didn’t quite work. In an online chat for MTV a week after the third album’s release, Prince Be was morose even by his own typically pessimistic standards, as these excerpts show.

VIIdeadsi: When did you first realize that your music made a strong impact on the current generations?
PRlNCE BE: When I realized that there was an immense amount of people that hate me. People either really love P.M. Dawn or really hate P.M. Dawn
JZito1364: Do you like being a role model for thousands of young people?
PRlNCE BE: It depends. What is a role model? You tell me JZi. Is it someone that people can look up to? Or is it someone that is continuously crucified? Knows it, likes it, and takes it.
Editor8: How do you expect your record sales from “JESUS WEPT” to compare to your previous records?
PRlNCE BE: I don’t expect anyone to buy it. Which is pretty much what’s happening.

The chat continued in that vein, culminating in openly hostile questions making it past the moderators.

Jayj43: do you enjoy living as a sellout to other rappers?
PRlNCE BE: Very much so, I mean… What’s your definition of a sell-out? A sellout is someone who does music that they hate and music that they can’t feel simply for the purposes of making money. As I’ve been saying all nightk, I’m too emotional of a person not to be in my music. I love my music, if I were making hardcore hip-hop, then I would really be a sellout, a-hole.
Micdawg: So what do you want to have achieved when it’s all said and done?
PRlNCE BE: I don’t know, and that’s the chicken shit answer. But it’s the truth. I’m in this game because I don’t know what else to do with my emotions. With my spirituality. And with my passion for escapism. I love you all because I hate you all because I love you all because I hate you all. Because I love you all because I hate you all. See what I mean? I don’t know diddly. When someone finds out what existence is, please let me know. I’m at the end of my rope. Peace.

The cause for Prince Be’s despair was dramatic: His brother Jarrett, who should have been participating in these promotional activities and performances for the new album, was nowhere to be seen.

Word filtered out just as the album was released that Jarrett had been arrested for sexually assaulting one of the brothers’ 14-year-old relatives.

Though Jarrett had been second fiddle in the group, his arrest on such sensational charges overshadowed any chance that the music had of being evaluated on its merit.

Prince Be was characteristically cryptic in commenting on the situation, and didn’t clearly distance the group from his brother’s arrest. It would be another decade before he unequivocally declared that Jarrett was no longer part of the group.

But the damage was done. P.M. Dawn’s attempt to redefine its sound and maintain its relevance was completely derailed by the charges against Jarrett. The charges were later dropped, but by then Jarrett had been quietly dismissed from the group. No subsequent P.M. Dawn album received any real attention from radio or retail.

5. Comatose

Maybe it’s the undertow of what the tide took
The put together scenes
Make it all seem clean

The song “Comatose” from The Utopian Experierence ended up being eerily prescient; In late 1992, Prince Be entered a 3-day coma right in the midst of their biggest run of hit songs. He was diagnosed with diabetes, and its complications would dog him for the rest of his life. For years, it seemed Prince Be’s worst health issues world arise each time P.M. Dawn released new work that had the potential to return them to prominence.

Despite their commercial decline, Prince Be never stopped making music that was every bit as compelling as their work during their peak. In late 2000, they used the web to promote an upcoming album, Fucked Music, which ended up containing some of their strongest songwriting. But the release was botched and only a handful of fans got copies of the album directly from the website. Prince Be had a minor stroke not long after, and the planned proper commercial release never happened.

A few years later in 2003, a new single called “Amnesia” popped up, this time with real distribution on legitimate outlets. It was meant to promote an upcoming album, The Jim Sullivan Syndrome, but the same pattern followed—the album never got a proper release, and health issues along with business complications kept the music from all but the most diehard fans. Though P.M. Dawn had long been influenced by Prince, it seemed entirely unintentional that they mirrored Prince’s decades-long habit of having some of his best material remain unreleased in a private vault, with fans forced to circulate illicit copies of the work. Even when considering their released work, some of the best P.M. Dawn songs were strewn across obscure b-sides, out-of-print soundtracks and as production jobs for other artists, just like one of their biggest heroes.

In 2005, a reality TV show called “Hit Me Baby One More Time” held a competition where formerly-popular groups competed to see which could still win over the audience. For P.M. Dawn’s appearance on the show, Prince Be even went so far as to reconcile with his brother DJ Minutemix, at least enough to bring him onstage for the duration of the taping. P.M. Dawn triumphed, winning over the crowd with a strong performance of “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss” and Puddle of Mudd’s “Blurry.” Coming on the heels of some live performance dates the year before, where they had at times joined their early-90s alt-rap peers Arrested Development, the group seemed poised for a potential comeback.

Just before their triumph on the show, Prince Be endured a massive stroke that left him partially paralyzed. But as his condition worsened, he was unable to capitalize on the promising new bout of attention; from that point on, P.M. Dawn’s few live performances were handled by Gregory Carr, one of Attrell and Jarrett’s cousins who had begun backing up the group in the 90s under the name Doc G. Today, most of P.M. Dawn’s social media presence is maintained by Doc G, who also put out a handful of unremarkable releases using the P.M. Dawn name, with no apparent input from Prince Be.

In the final half decade of Prince Be’s life, Doc G carried on the P.M. Dawn name (perhaps not entirely with the blessing of Prince Be’s family, depending on the accuracy of online rumors), while Prince Be endured a further series of health setbacks. Another stroke, dialysis, and a leg amputation all took a heavy toll.

Though his body was challenged, Prince Be’s work was undergoing a renaissance. The obvious influence and foresight of his work inspired a new wave of young creators to reappraise P.M. Dawn’s catalog.

In 2002, Brandy and Ray J covered “I’d Die Without You” on her album Full Moon. Then in 2013, Alicia Keys released her own version of “Die Without You”, recorded in 2007 during sessions for her As I Am album. Perhaps most dramatic was Childish Gambino’s 2014 cover of the song, which led to Donald Glover performing the song live a number of times in some of his most prominent media appearances.

A new generation of artists had declared their appreciation for P.M. Dawn, and started to undo nearly two decades of disrespect.

6. Now I’m Underwater

Oh, I apologize for all the things I’ve done
But now, I’m underwater and I’m drowning
Is it my turn to be the one to cry?
Isn’t it amazing how some things completely turn around?
So take every little piece of my heart
Yeah, take every little piece of my soul
Yeah, take every little bit of piece of my mind
Cause if you’re gone, inside, I’d die without you

Though “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss” may be P.M. Dawn’s biggest hit by raw numbers, the group does enjoy the good fortune of being best remembered for their best song. “I’d Die Without You” was a standout even on the all-killer, no-filler Boomerang soundtrack where it debuted. (How good was that soundtrack? Another of its biggest singles was Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road.”)

Lush, vulnerable, and idiosyncratic (the song opens with a 20-second-long meandering piano instrumental) it captures all the wonderful contradictions of P.M. Dawn in one song. As in so many of his lyrics, Prince Be is both deeply in love and deeply apologetic. Musically, the vocals are as ethereal as pop gets; the background vocal here is Prince Be’s sister Cheryl Cordes, not DJ Minutemix. But the pulsing bass fits right into the Jeep Beats sound of hip-hop of the era. It’s one of the greatest love songs of the decade.

But it’s not a regular love song. Indeed, it’s easiest to understand P.M. Dawn’s catalog as largely a collection of love songs, but almost none of them are romantic love songs. As the title of 1998's Dearest Christian, I’m So Very Sorry for Bringing You Here. Love, Dad makes clear, Prince Be was not afraid to write love songs that were about love toward his son, or his children, or as odes to those long lost. While the elliptical lyrics of course make it hard to be sure, it’s likely that most of P.M. Dawn’s songs aren’t written with an eye toward a romantic partner.

So who are all these love songs written to?

Certainly Attrell Cordes loved god, as he understood gods and religions to work, and it’s clear a few of his songs were about loving god. Some of P.M. Dawn’s work seems to be directed to the memory of Prince Be’s father, who is said to have died of pneumonia when the boys were very young.

But then there’s the sad footnote that shows up in many of the earliest interviews with Prince Be. He recounts a story of having watched his younger brother Duncan Cordes drown when Duncan was only two years old. Understandably, most interviewers of the time didn’t press too hard on the subject when simply trying to write a story about a new album release, so little was said about how the incident happened. The only hint of something deeper lay in an Associated Press story that came across the wire on May 10, 1978.

Attrell Cordes is survived by his wife Mary, and their three children: Christian, Mia and Brandon.

What is done is done regardless of where you were on the referendum—or like most of us, outside the UK. The two questions that grab me now are what lessons can be learned and how to salvage the moment for an anti-racist, anti-austerity coalition. Instead I’ve seen too many tears shed for the EU, which after all is no huge friend to migrants (see the mass graves under the Mediterranean or the camps in Greece) and a cudgel for neoliberal reforms, combined with too much smug condescension at the “stupid” Brits.

The choice between options represented by the upper class ninny Cameron and his upper class ninny foils Johnson and Farage was always a false one. It’s eerily similar to the choice between Clinton and Trump. Smug elitism gets us nowhere beyond the right’s version of internationalized neoliberalism or nationalist xenophobia. Only a strong alternative that looks the middle finger UK voters sent elites in the face can take ground away from the political reactionaries and xenophobes who have punched above their weight.

The referendum took place after four long decades of stagnant incomes, falling expectations and austerity from successive governments. It wasn’t just evil Tories, but New Labour as well, that gleefully transformed the UK economy away from the post-war class compromise (one breaking by the 1970s) towards today’s highly unequal version drunk on globalized finance. In many ways, this wasn’t a referendum on Europe—especially since the UK is out of the Euro, the biggest stick European elites can wield—but on UK elites and the damage they have done to working people.

The problem is that the most retrograde section of those same elites, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and the rest of their sniveling crew, took advantage of the vacuum and made their xenophobic program the political expression of this anger. Labour’s long foray into enforcing austerity and capping living standards for the many left a long window to build and spread reactionary forces. I hope Corbyn and those around him can push a genuine alternative and pull those who can be pulled away from this misdirected anger without talking down to them. This moment cannot belong to a racist gang of Etonians like Johnson and Farage who have no interest in reversing any of the attacks on regular people and will only pit people against one another, spreading racial hatred. But that will take real work.

Q&A with Sergei Lekoutovich, owner of Cycle Couture

Photos by Claire McFarlane

dandyhorse recently caught up with Sergei Lekoutovich, owner of Cycle Couture at 926 College Street to talk about the perks and pitfalls that come with the job of running a bike shop in Toronto.

Cycle Couture donated a beautiful Public bike for our "Bee Scene" photo shoot (photo by Mike Ford below) in our current issue. We are very pleased to announce that we will be raffling THIS bike at our upcoming launch party!

Q: What do customers get at Cycle Couture that they might not get at other Toronto bike shops? 

Urban cycling can be challenging. I went from not cycling at all to spending thousands of hours on the road as a bike messenger. I think this affords me a unique perspective that helps me empathize with cyclists of all levels of experience.

It's easy for cyclists and bike commuters to feel intimidated when walking into a bike shop, I felt that way too. But we're here to help everyone, and we hope to create an environment that encourages people to come in and feel comfortable. We are happy to offer advice and repair any ride that comes through our doors.

We provide quality work with our repairs and builds – attention to detail and bike fit is key. We're big on empowering people with mechanical information alongside their repair while creating a real rapport.

Our commitment to quality extends into the products we carry. We specialize in high quality urban cycling bags and apparel. Durability, comfort and functionality - without the lycra. Our merchandise works as good as it looks. With years of experience on the saddle delivering packages and in the shop as mechanics, we know which gear is actually going to withstand whatever you throw at it (or in it!)

Public brand bikes on display. We will be raffling a Public bike off at our dandy launch party later this summer!

Q: What kind of cyclist does your store cater to?

We cater to the discerning urban cyclist whose bike is their primary form of transportation around the city.

Q:What are your best-selling products this spring? 

We've been seeing a lot of people come in for repairs and tune ups early in the season, which has been amazing.

Our C7 from Public Bikes has been doing really well, it's a seven speed step-through cruiser with sporty riding characteristics. Public will be announcing new colours in July and we're excited to see what they'll come up with.

The Chrome Kadet day bag is a favourite. It's a sling bag with enough room to store day trip essentials like a camera, tablet, lock, snacks and more, while staying compact. Our Mission Workshop bags are always in demand – they're a San Francisco export that has really zeroed in on exceptional craftsmanship.

Related on the dandyBLOG:

Dutch Dreams: Step-through reviews

dandySHOPS: Sweet Pete’s

Bike Spotting Bike to Work Day 2016

Staying Visible with Style: Q&A With Fashion Designer’s Twiss and Weber

I’m redesigning this blog. The top header is coming off (wasted space). I’ll be highlighting the book and the blog posts. What else needs fixing (from a design perspective)? Your comments appreciated.

The post Fix this blog appeared first on without bullshit.

Republished from August 2014

Sure, Siri on the iPhone makes for a fun way to ask what the weather is like outside, but Apple’s polite personal assistant can also do a heck of a lot more for you.

Here are seven great Siri features that you’ve probably never used.

1. Opening apps. If you don’t learn to use Siri for anything else, for the love of Mike, learn this one.

You can say, “Open Calendar” or “Play Angry Birds” or “Launch Calculator.”

Result: The corresponding app opens instantly. It’s exactly the same as pressing the Home button, swiping across the screen until you find the app you’re looking for, and then tapping its icon — but without pressing the Home button, swiping across the screen until you find the app you’re looking for, and then tapping its icon.

2. Change your settings. This one’s new in iOS 7, and it’s excellent. You can make changes to certain basic settings just by speaking your request. You can say, for example, “Turn on Bluetooth,” “Turn off WiFi,” “Turn on Do Not Disturb,” and “Turn on Airplane mode.” (You can’t turn off Airplane mode by voice, because Siri doesn’t work without an Internet connection.)

You can also make screen adjustments: “Make the screen brighter.” “Dim the screen.”

Result: Siri makes the requested adjustment, tells you so, and displays the corresponding switch in case she misunderstood your intention.

3. Read full emails to you. In iOS 7, Siri can actually read full messages to you — not just the header information (to, from, and subject line).

For example, if you say, “Read my latest email” or “Read my new email,” Siri reads aloud your most recent email message. (Siri then offers you the chance to dictate a response.)

Or you can use the new summary-listing commands. When you say, “Read my email,” Siri starts walking backward through your Inbox, telling you the subject of each, plus who sent it and when.

While this recitation is going on, you can tap the microphone button to interrupt with “Read that email” or “Read the third email” (for example)—and Siri will read a summary of the email (not the whole body).

She once again invites you to dictate a reply; if you say no, she picks up from where she left off, reading the rest of the subjects.

Result: Siri reads aloud.

You can also compose a new message by voice; anytime you use the phrase “about,” that becomes the subject line for your new message. “Email Mom about the reunion.” “Email my boyfriend about the dance on Friday.” “New email to Freddie Gershon.” “Mail Mom about Saturday’s flight.” “Email Frank and Cindy Vosshall and Peter Love about the picnic.” “Email my assistant and say, ‘Thanks for arranging the taxi!’ ” “Email Gertie and Eugene about their work on the surprise party, and say I really value your friendship.”

(If you’ve indicated only the subject and addressee, Siri prompts you for the body of the message.)

You can reply to a message Siri has just described, too. “Reply, ‘Dear Robin (comma), I’m so sorry about your dog (period). I’ll be more careful next time (period).” “Call her mobile number.” “Send him a text message saying, ‘I got your note.’ ”

Result: You get miniature Mail message, showing you Siri’s handiwork before you send it.

4. Search and play music. Instead of fumbling around in your Music app, save yourself steps and time by speaking the name of the album, song, or band: “Play some Beatles.” “Play ‘I’m a Barbie Girl.’ ” “Play some jazz.” “Play my jogging playlist.” “Play the party mix.” “Shuffle my ‘Dave’s Faves’ playlist.” “Play.” “Pause.” “Resume.” “Skip.”

If you’ve set up any iTunes Radio stations, you can call for them by name, too: “Play Dolly Parton Radio.” Or be more generic: Just say “Play iTunes Radio” and be surprised. Or be more specific: Say “Play some country music” (substitute your favorite genre).

Result: Siri plays (or skips, shuffles, or pauses) the music you asked for — without ever leaving whatever app you were using.

5. Find My Friends. You see this category only if you’ve installed Apple’s Find My Friends app. “Where’s Ferd?” “Is my dad home?” “Where are my friends?” “Who’s here?” “Who is nearby?” “Is my mom at work?”

Result: Siri shows you a beautiful little map with the requested person’s location clearly indicated by a blue pushpin. (She does, that is, if you’ve set up Find My Friends, you’ve logged in, and your friends have made their locations available.)

6. Search movie facts. Siri is also the virtual equivalent of an insufferable film buff. She knowseverything. “Who was the star of Groundhog Day?” “Who directed Chinatown?” “What isWaterworld rated?” “What movie won Best Picture in 1952?”

It’s not just about old movies, either. Siri also knows everything about current showtimes in theaters. “What movies are opening this week?” “What’s playing at the Watton Cineplex?” “Give me the reviews for Titanic 2: The Return.” “What are today’s showtimes for Monsters University?”

Result: Tidy tables of movie theaters or movie showtimes, displayed on a faux movie marquee. (Tap one for details.) Sometimes you get a movie poster filled with facts — and, of course, a link to rent or buy it on iTunes.

7. Post to Twitter or Facebook. iOS is a red-blooded, full-blown Twitter companion. So you can say things like, “Tweet, ‘I just saw three-headed dog catch a Frisbee in midair. Unreal.’ ” “Tweet with my location, ‘My car just broke down somewhere in Detroit. Help?’ ”

Facebook is fair game, too. You can say, “Post to Facebook, ‘The guy next to me kept his cellphone on for the whole plane ride,’ ” or “Write on my wall, ‘I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.’ ”

Result: Siri offers you a sheet (a miniature dialog box) where you can approve the transcription and then, if it all looks good, send it off to your Twitter or Facebook feed.

Excerpted with permission from David Pogue’s “iPhone: The Missing Manual,” Seventh Edition from O’Reilly Media.

Yaphi Berhanu, CSS-Tricks, Jun 30, 2016

One of the major reasons I use AdBlocker is that it blocks many third party scripts. These are bits of code web page owners place on their pages to display the advertisement - and to do a lot more. I don't really care about the ad. It's the rest that concerns me. For example, as this post notes, "eavesdroppers can track things like your email, username, full name, home address, purchases, location, history, IP address, and preferences." Additionally, "Third-party scripts frequently cause pages to load slower. For example, Business Insider's actual site loads in about 1 second, while third-party scripts account for the majority of the 7 to 15 seconds of load time." This includes scripts that impact the performance of the page even after it has been loaded; for example, some scripts slow down page scrolls. That's why I'm back on Firefox (Chrome was having difficulties loading AdBock Plus). That's why I'll keep the adblocking software running.

Near 2nd and Brunswick in Mount Pleasant.  Had a pleasant little chat with one of the owners, who told me there was a tussle with others in the building who wanted to paint these red areas black.

Cailynn Klingbeil in the Globe writes about changing attitudes within the world of transportation and local street-front retail businesses.

There’s been a sea change in the attitude about cyclists and frankly the value that the cycling community and the cycling consumer is bringing to the marketplace,” says Charles Gauthier, president and chief executive officer of the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association. “Businesses are responding by making it clear they’re catering to them.” . . . .

. . . . Mr. Gauthier’s own organization has shifted its stance on bike lanes. In 2010, the BIA raised concerns over the loss of 170 on-street parking spaces and how that would affect area businesses’ bottom lines. But an assumption held by many merchants – that most customers arrive by car – turned out to be false, Mr. Gauthier says. A 2011 economic impact study commissioned by the city and other associations, including the Downtown Vancouver BIA, showed most people walked, cycled or took transit to get downtown. Just 20 per cent of customers on Hornby and Dunsmuir arrived by car.

Mr. Gauthier’s reference to a 5-year-old economic impact study refers to the Stantec Business Impact Study on bike lanes — largely ignored by our local press when it was published on July 20, 2011.  After all, there was a juicy populist, negative and divisive angle to be pursued — good old “us” vs. “them”.

How things change.  And don’t change, as is the case on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive.

Shops more often; spends more per month

When was the last time you backed up all your important documents and photos? Last month? Last year? Never? Everyone should back up their data, but setting up a good backup system can seem time-consuming and intimidating. As a result, some people (including me) put off this daunting task indefinitely, hoping nothing goes wrong. Rather than stress out or delay it any longer, take 15 minutes and set up a system that will back up your files automatically—both to an external drive and to encrypted cloud storage—without any regular action from you. Let’s get it done!

What makes a good backup?

Image: Elizabeth Brown

Experts recommend the 3-2-1 rule for backup: three copies of your data, two local (on different devices) and one off-site. For most people, this means the original data on your computer, a backup on an external hard drive, and another on a cloud backup service. With this system, you’re highly unlikely to lose all your data, even if your laptop gets stolen, your hard drive crashes, your house burns down, or the Internet as we know it dies. (If all of those things happen at once, well, you probably have bigger problems.)

Moving your important files to a hard drive or a flash drive does not constitute making a backup. Hard drives fail—it’s not a question of if, but when—and flash drives and SD cards are small and easy to lose. A good backup system requires redundancy, with multiple copies of your important data so that the data isn’t lost forever if disaster strikes.

In this guide we’re focusing on creating an automatic incremental backup (one that backs up only the files that have changed since the last backup), because once you set it up, you don’t have to worry about it again. The system will automatically back up all of your past and future data according to the 3-2-1 rule, and you’ll also be able to go back to see previous versions of your files in case you overwrite something important.

The tools you need to back up your computer

We’ve put hundreds of hours of research and testing into our storage and cloud backup guides to find the best tools for the job. This is the gear that numerous Wirecutter staffers rely on to back up our own data. If you already have drives or a backup service that works for you, we’re not saying you should switch—that could be time-consuming and costly, for little benefit—but if you’re starting from scratch or looking to replace a piece of your setup, our picks are for you. Most people are best served by an external hard drive plus a cloud backup service subscription.

Our pick

$133* from Amazon

Buy from Amazon

$190 from Amazon

Buy from Amazon

¥26,704 from Amazon

Buy from Amazon

¥894 from Amazon

Buy from Amazon

INR 17,210.00 from Amazon

*At the time of publishing, the price was $130.

A desktop hard drive

Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive

Desktop drives are cheaper per terabyte and faster than portable ones, but they require a power brick.

The first line of defense for most people is a USB desktop hard drive. Desktop hard drives are the most cost-effective external storage option, plus they’re fast and easy to set up. We recommend the 5TB Seagate Backup Plus, because after 20 hours of research and testing, we found that it has the fastest speeds and the best price per terabyte.

Our pick

$86* from Amazon

*At the time of publishing, the price was $90.

A portable hard drive

2TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim

Portable drives are small and light and run on USB power, but they’re more expensive per terabyte and slower than desktop drives.

If you travel often or use your laptop in multiple locations and need to take your external storage with you, get a portable hard drive instead. They aren’t available in capacities as large as desktop hard drives; they’re also more expensive per gigabyte and a bit slower. But portable drives don’t require a power cord, so you can use one with your laptop wherever you are. After spending 80 hours researching and testing portable drives, we recommend the 2TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim, an inexpensive and fast model that’s thinner and lighter than other portable drives.

Our pick

$300 from Amazon

Buy from Amazon

$422 from Amazon

¥2,010 from Amazon

INR 49,965.00 from Amazon

A good NAS choice

WD My Cloud Mirror

A NAS allows you to stream backups within your home wirelessly, but the setup can be complicated.

If you have multiple computers to back up, you can use a network-attached storage device instead of an external drive. A NAS is more complicated to set up, and most people don’t need such a thing for backing up. (You can also use one to stream media, set up a private server, and more, but we’re focusing only on backups for this guide.) We recommend the WD My Cloud Mirror for file backups. It’s easier to set up than our top pick, the QNAP Turbo NAS TS-251, but it offers the same data protection, media streaming, and remote data-access features.

Our pick

$60 from CrashPlan (or $5/month)

An online backup service

CrashPlan

An online backup service is the simplest way to create an off-site backup.

The easiest way to protect your data in case of robbery or disaster is to complement your local backup with an online backup service. Such services charge a monthly (or yearly) fee in exchange for storing your encrypted data on their servers. With their software, you can customize your preferences and retrieve your data whether you’ve lost everything or just misplaced or overwritten a single file. After researching 20 online backup services and testing six, we recommend CrashPlan because it has the most useful features for the best price. It lets you back up to a local drive using the same interface as the cloud backup, so you don’t need to buy separate software for your local backups. And if you don’t trust the cloud, the desktop app allows you to back up to an off-site computer (instead of to the company’s servers) for free.

The fastest, easiest way to back up your files

The easiest, most reliable backup plan for most people is to use CrashPlan to back up to an external hard drive and to the cloud at the same time. We recommend this option over the backup tools built into your operating system, such as Windows’s File History or OS X’s Time Machine, because you can use the same app to back up to both your external drive and the cloud rather than needing two separate apps. CrashPlan also has handy features that built-in tools lack, including the capability to back up multiple computers, the option to restore files to computers running different operating systems, and mobile apps that can access your backups.

Downloading the CrashPlan app.

Once you have your hard drive and a CrashPlan subscription (currently $60 per year for unlimited storage for a single computer or $150 per year for up to 10 computers), connect your hard drive to your computer and download and install CrashPlan. (The company offers desktop applications for Windows, OS X, and Linux.) Launch CrashPlan, and then log in to your CrashPlan account.

Figure 1: CrashPlan’s dashboard defaults to the Backup screen.

You’ll be greeted by the CrashPlan dashboard (Figure 1). Click the Change button (under the Files header) to choose which folders on your computer to back up. In both Windows and OS X, most of your important documents and files reside in the Users folder, but if you have files elsewhere—say, on an external drive—make sure to select those folders, too. (If you have a cloud storage service like Microsoft OneDrive or iCloud, note that CrashPlan can back up only the files stored on your computer, not the ones that exist exclusively in the cloud.)

Figure 2: CrashPlan’s Settings screen.

Head over to the Settings screen (Figure 2). Here you can name your computer and configure how much processing power the program can use when you’re actively using your computer and when the system is idle. The default settings (shown here) are fine for most people.

Figure 3: The settings for backup frequency and versioning.

Remaining on the Settings screen, click the Backup tab at the top, and then click the Configure button next to “Frequency and versions.” Here you can configure how often CrashPlan backs up new files—from as infrequently as every day to as often as every minute. You can also configure how frequently CrashPlan will save new versions of a file, and when (from every day to never) the app should delete from your backups any files that are no longer on your computer. The default settings in Figure 3 are fine for most people.

Figure 4: CrashPlan’s security settings.

In the Security tab (Figure 4), you can choose your encryption settings. The default Standard setting is good enough for most people because it provides strong encryption, and you have to remember only your account password to retrieve your data. Be warned that adding extra security (via the “Archive key password” or “Custom key” options) makes it more likely that you’ll lose access to your data—the other encryption settings require remembering more passwords, customer service can’t help if you forget or lose your password, and you cannot lower the level of security on your account once you’ve upgraded.

Figure 5: You choose your backup destinations here.

Click Destinations on the left (Figure 5) to choose where to store your backups. Click the Folders tab and then select your backup hard drive from the list of available folders; if it doesn’t appear, click Select to navigate to it manually. Click Start Backup. Ta-da! Now your computer is backing up to your external drive.

Figure 6: You start your cloud backups on the Backup screen.

Now that you’ve selected folders for the backup and configured the settings, backing up to the cloud is easy. Return to the Backup screen (Figure 6). Next to the CrashPlan Central label, click the button that says Start Backup. Give yourself a pat on the back, you’re all done!

Depending on how much data you’re backing up, as well as your Internet upload speeds, CrashPlan can take a long time to finish your initial backup. (Uploading my 1.4TB backup to the cloud took about 20 days, though my local backup finished in a matter of hours.) But once that initial upload is complete, CrashPlan will hum along in the background, keeping your files backed up to your external drive and to the cloud without requiring your attention.

Another method: Built-in tools for local backup and easier restores, CrashPlan for cloud backup

CrashPlan is one of the few cloud-backup providers that let you back up to a local drive as well as to the cloud, and we recommend taking that approach. But if you prefer a different cloud backup provider such as BackBlaze, if you have only one computer that needs backing up, or if you don’t mind putting a bit more time and effort into arranging your backups, you can use your operating system’s built-in backup feature (Time Machine for OS X, File History for Windows) to back up to an external drive and use your cloud-backup service’s software just for online backups.

Because Time Machine and File History are integrated into their respective operating systems, restoring individual files through these apps can be easier than restoring files from CrashPlan or other cloud backup services. Time Machine is particularly useful for Mac users because transferring your files, apps, and settings from a Time Machine backup to a new computer or drive is easy; CrashPlan and File History can restore your files but not your apps and settings. So if you are in a Mac-only household and don’t need CrashPlan’s cross-operating-system restore capabilities, and if you’re willing to put in a bit of extra effort, we recommend pairing a local Time Machine backup with CrashPlan’s cloud backup.

That said, the initial setup can be more complicated, so you might have difficulty motivating yourself to sit down and do it. And depending on your setup, it can be a bit easier to screw up than if you had merely added a local backup to your CrashPlan cloud backup. Restoring an entire backup to a new drive or computer via File History can also get pretty messy compared with doing so in Time Machine or CrashPlan. Still, any backup at all is better than nothing. (If you do choose to use File History or Time Machine for your local backup, you have no need to use CrashPlan’s local backup option too—doing so would just take up hard drive space unnecessarily.)

Local backup for Macs

Figure 7: You might see this dialog box when connecting a new backup drive to your Mac.

To set up an external drive as a Time Machine backup, you might simply need to connect the drive to your Mac: At that point OS X usually displays a dialog box asking if you want to use the drive to back up with Time Machine. Choose whether to encrypt the drive, click Use as Backup Disk, and you’re done. (If you checked the Encrypt Backup Disk box, you’ll see a prompt to provide a password.)

Figure 8: If you need to configure Time Machine manually, you can do so in System Preferences.

If you don’t see that dialog box upon connecting the drive, you can set up the drive manually. Open the Time Machine pane of System Preferences (Figure 8), click Select Disk, and then choose your external drive from the list. (If you want to encrypt your backup, check the Encrypt Backup box after selecting the drive. You’ll see a prompt to enter a password and a password hint, but be warned that if you forget or lose your password, you lose your data forever.) Under Options you can choose to exclude any folders you don’t want backed up. Finally, turn on Time Machine using the toggle on the left, and wait for your initial backup to complete.

Local backup for Windows PCs

Figure 9: The Windows File History app.

To set up a File History backup to an external drive, open the File History app (Figure 9) by typing “File History” into the Windows search bar or by opening the Start menu and then navigating to Settings, Update & Security, Backup. Click Add a drive and select your external drive from the list. Under More options you can add more folders to your backup (by default Windows 10 backs up all the folders within the Users folder), exclude folders, and change your backup settings. File History backs up new files every hour and saves backed up files forever; these default settings are fine for most people, but you can change them if you like.

Cloud backup for both operating systems (to pair with your built-in backup)

After you’ve created your local backup, follow the detailed instructions in the previous section to set up your CrashPlan cloud backup (but skip the step about backing up to a local drive, since you’ve already done that).

An important note about your cloud backup: Don’t back up your Time Machine or File History backups. CrashPlan warns against backing up external-drive backups, because doing so can result in the cloud service backing up multiple copies (rather than versions) of the same file. Since CrashPlan already tracks file versions, you get no advantage from backing up your File History or Time Machine backup, and attempting to do that can cause issues.

If you don’t want to pay for (or don’t trust) the cloud

You really should use a cloud backup service. It’s encrypted, and you can customize the settings to make it even more secure (though at the risk of losing your data if you forget your encryption key). And arranging a cloud backup requires less time and effort than setting up and maintaining a secure off-site backup without the cloud.

But if you still prefer not to back up to the cloud—either because you don’t want to pay for a cloud backup service or you don’t trust any service to keep your data secure—you’ll need to have one backup at home and another off-site. (Yes, that means buying an additional hard drive.)

First, create your local backup. On Windows, use CrashPlan; on Mac, use Time Machine. (For Mac users, if you’re not using CrashPlan’s cloud component, we recommend Time Machine over CrashPlan’s local backup because Time Machine offers an easy restore process and creates a sort of system image. It also isn’t much more complex to set up.) For your off-site backup, you’ll need another drive stored at a different physical location—say, at work or at a friend’s house. CrashPlan provides helpful walkthroughs on how to back up to another computer you own, to a friend’s computer, or to a local drive that you then move off-site. No matter which option you choose, it’s a pain in the ass, it likely requires mooching off your friend’s or your office’s bandwidth, and you may run into frustrating network errors.

How to restore your files from a backup

Backing up your files is only half of the equation. Now we’re going to explain how to restore your files using CrashPlan, File History, or Time Machine if something goes wrong. Restoring individual files is easier through Time Machine and File History than through CrashPlan, but we’ll start with CrashPlan, for those arrangements that involve only one app for easier setup.

Restoring from CrashPlan

Figure 10: CrashPlan’s Restore screen.

To restore individual files using CrashPlan, open the app and go to the Restore screen. Select the computer backup you want to restore from (if you have more than one on your CrashPlan account), as well as the backup location you want to restore from (local, cloud, or off-site, if you have more than one). You can navigate folders in the backup or use the search bar to find a specific file, and if you need to see hidden files (you probably won’t) or deleted files (you might), check the corresponding boxes. Select which files you’d like to restore using the checkboxes along the left side of the file and folder list.

By default, CrashPlan will restore the most recent version of each selected file, with original permissions, to your desktop, and it will rename any that have the same name as existing files. To change any of those settings, click the blue links near the bottom of the Restore tab. Instead of the most recent version of a file, you can select a date and time for the version you want—say, if you’ve accidentally overwritten a document or made changes to an image that you’d like to undo. If you’re restoring to a different computer, you might want to select current permissions instead of original permissions to avoid difficulty with user security settings. You can change the location to which CrashPlan will restore the file, and you can choose to replace files with the same name instead of renaming them—but if you do that, you might overwrite files you don’t want to, so proceed with caution.

Once you’ve selected the files as well as how to restore them, click the Restore button in the bottom-right corner and wait for the operation to complete.

If instead of restoring individual files you want to restore an entire backup—for example, to a new hard drive after a failure, or to a brand-new computer—CrashPlan has a helpful step-by-step guide on how to do that.

Restoring files with Time Machine (OS X)

Figure 11: Restoring an earlier version of a file from within Pages.

In OS X, you have a couple of ways to restore an earlier version of a file. The first method doesn’t involve Time Machine—OS X automatically saves versions of files that you open in certain supported apps, such as Pages (Figure 11). To retrieve an older version of a file you’re viewing, Go to the File menu and choose Revert To, Browse All Versions. You can explore previous versions of the file using the arrows to the right; once you find the item you’d like to restore, click Restore.

Figure 12: Restoring a file from within Time Machine.

You can access Time Machine by clicking the Time Machine icon in the menu bar or the Dock and choosing Enter Time Machine. (If the icon is missing from the menu bar, open System Preferences, click the Time Machine icon, and then check the Show Time Machine in menu bar box.) Using Time Machine, you have two ways to locate files to restore: You can browse all your files as you would in the Finder, or you can search for a specific file using the Spotlight search bar. After you’ve located a file or folder to restore, you can use the arrows on the right to travel through time to find previous versions. (Select a file and press the spacebar to see a preview of it.) To restore a file, select the version you want and click the Restore button.

If you want to transfer all your settings, apps, and files from a Time Machine backup to a new Mac or hard drive, skip ahead to the section on system images.

Restoring files using File History (Windows)

Figure 13: Restoring a file using File History.

With File History, the easiest way to restore a previous version of a file is within Windows Explorer: Right-click the desired file and choose Restore previous versions from the resulting menu. Here (Figure 13) you can preview versions of the file and restore one to either its original location or a new location of your choice.

To see previous versions of files and deleted files within a specific folder, navigate to the folder in Windows Explorer, click the Home tab in the top ribbon, and click History. File History will open a window of files that it has backed up; here you can right-click a file to preview versions, travel through time using the forward and back arrows, and restore a file by selecting it and clicking the big green revert button. (If you want to restore an earlier version of a file without replacing the most-recent version, right-click the big green button, choose Restore To, and navigate to the location where you want to save the file.)

Figure 14: You can browse within the File History app to choose files to restore.

You can also access and restore files using the File History app itself. Type “restore files” into the search box in Start or on the taskbar and choose Restore your files with File History. Here you can explore files and folders by clicking through them, and as with the folder view, you can preview and restore different versions of a file.

Using File History to restore an entire backup to a new computer or a fresh drive with a new install of Windows can be a pain. How-To Geek’s helpful tutorial says you can set up File History on your new computer and then select the drive containing your old backup; your previous backups should appear, ready to be restored. However, in testing this approach, we had difficulty accessing old backups from within different user accounts, and sometimes File History started backing up the new computer without giving us an option to restore.

What about a system image or a clone?

A system image is a snapshot of your drive that saves all your files, programs, and preferences, as well as the operating system, drivers, and more. If your drive fails, you—or a support technician or a computer-savvy friend—can restore your backup to a new drive or computer exactly the way you had it, without your having to redownload, reinstall, and reconfigure all your apps and settings.

Though you can create a system image of a Windows computer—PCWorld has a helpful walkthrough for Windows 10—most Windows users will be better off restoring files from an incremental backup onto a computer with a fresh install of Windows. A fresh install won’t have the bloatware that came with your computer, which can mean smoother, faster everyday use. This approach also avoids potential driver issues that can crop up when you’re restoring a system image made on a different computer.

Time Machine doesn’t create a complete clone of your drive—just your documents and settings—but it achieves a similar result. If you get a new Mac, or if you install OS X on a new hard drive, you can restore your entire Time Machine backup to that Mac or drive. The result is that you return to nearly the exact state of your computer at the time of your last Time Machine backup.

However, restoring your setup from a Time Machine backup can take hours (or even days), so a clone, an exact snapshot of your drive that you can boot from, is useful if you need to get back up and running on your Mac immediately. If your drive ever fails or some other disaster strikes, you can reboot from the clone and be back to work in minutes. But creating a clone requires the purchase of a separate hard drive with roughly the same capacity as the drive you’re cloning, as well as a paid-for third-party app, and both of those things add complexity and expense to your backup system. On top of that, a clone isn’t a substitute for a standard backup for keeping copies of older versions of files. Most people are fine with an autonomous, incremental backup of their files, but if you’d be devastated without access to your computer for a few hours, a clone can help. Macworld recommends Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper as the best cloning utility; you can read more about those software options and how to use them.

(Top photo by Michael Hession.)

VIZIO, a relatively new smart television manufacturer known for creating low-cost televisions with high-end specifications, has announced plans to launch its line of SmartCast TVs in Canada.

Unlike most smart TVs, VIZIO’s televisions fully integrate GoogleCast technology into their operating systems. This turns any smartphone or tablet into a remote and allows users to easily cast content from their smartphone to one of VIZIO’s SmartCast televisions.

Unlike LG’s WebOS operating system or Samsung’s Tizen, VIZIO’s SmartCast TVs are controlled directly through the company’s SmartCast app, allowing users to adjust television settings and navigate smart television apps from a greater distance, but also without the use of a traditional controller.

Whether or not this bare bones approach to a television operating system resonates with television owners remains unclear, but for those who opt for set-top boxes or game consoles when it comes to streaming applications, VIZIO’s SmartCast approach to Wi-Fi-enabled televisions is a refreshing change of base.

The TVs will be sold at Costco Canada and start at $1,499 for the P-Series 50-inch television, $3,199 for the M-Series 70-inch and $1299 for the E-Series 50-inch Ultra HD class.

Related reading: Smart TV interfaces push back against streaming boxes

Stan Evans

Who printed it?
Modern Postcard out of San Diego Printed it. Ture Lillegraven referred me to them. They are reasonable priced and efficient.

Who designed it?
I designed it. As far as the concept, I’ve been shooting a bit of motorcycling lately and it seems the market has been saturated with café racers, sunset shots and generic side of the road shots.  While some of those photos will always be timeless, I wanted to capture something that flew in the face of that. High-end motorcycles are precision machines and the apparel motorcyclists wear for protection at those speeds has many features and functions.  I wanted showcase a seamless connection between man and machine;  inspired by the work of artist HR Giger and director James Cameron did on the “Alien” series. It’s dark and moody but in a stack of sunset motorcycle work it sticks out.

Who edited the images?
I edited the images and did the post-production myself.  I had pretty clear vision of wanting to mix crisp product photography with dynamic action.  The photos themselves have very little photoshop.  Some of the on location photos had a bit of light spill because you are capturing things at speed but overall that it was getting the right mix of portraits and action so it flows nicely

How many did you make?
I made 200. I sent out about half of those. I handed out probably another fifty. I still have a few on hand to leave behind at meetings.  I’d be happy to send more out, shoot me an email if you are interested:  stan@stanevansphoto.com

How many times a year do you send out promos?
Usually 3 to 4 times a year. I do one larger one and 2-3 follow-ups.

How did this idea come about?
Originally I pitched this idea to a company for a shoot and they passed but the problem with good ideas is they stick, so I made this promo.  A promo is the best manifestation of what you can do with your own mind on your own time.  If you can get people to believe in that, they will believe in you and help manifest bigger dreams and ideas. People will say “no” to your ideas but you need to have the resilience to come back and define those ideas, shoot them and take them to fruition if need be.  Practice until you get to a point where people will take notice.

Later after they saw the promo they came back and commissioned a shoot. It also led to a recent work with Cycle World, which was pretty cool because I’ll be frank; I’m a portrait photographer that likes shooting motorcyclists and hearing their stories. I have an instagram (@upforadventuress) dedicated just my moto exploits but I separate the two because I don’t want to be stamped as just a “moto photographer.” It’s a great outlet to show that world as I see it without any constraints and it’s made my overall photography work better but I enjoy seeing and shooting many things.

Special thanks to Adey Bennett (model), Jeff Moustache (the assistant on the shoot but a talent photographer in his own right) and Yamani Watkins (an executive producer /co-founder of Karma Media Group  an amazing mentor for me in LA )  who all helped tremendously on this project.

------------------------

Visit our sponsor Photo Folio, providing websites to professional photographers for over 9 years. Featuring the only customizable template in the world.

------------------------

Eric Sheninger, A Principal's Reflections, Jun 30, 2016

In his monumental work  The Idea of the Holy Rudolf Otto wrote of the 'numinous' as mysterious, (mysterium) terrifying (tremendum) and fascinating (fascinans). This post seems to want to do the same thing for education. The key of the tremendous and fascinating is that it holds us in awe. "Awe is a driving force for learning that will not just benefit our students now, but also well into their future. However, traditional views and functions of school deprive many students from experiencing the joy and power of awe as a catalyst for meaningful learning." I am not troubled by a sense of awe - I get it every time I stare into the night sky or look at a butterfly, which is often - but I'm not sure it should be an objective of learning.

Requiem for a Headphone Jack

It used to be cool for smartphone manufacturers to purchase other smartphone manufacturers. As the industry continues to mature and reach its saturation point, however, consolidation is also happening in the accessory market.

Earlier this year ZAGG agreed to purchase Mophie for over $100 million USD. Similarly, Nokia acquired Withings, Fitbit acquired Coin, and Logitech snatched up Jaybird.

Now, the latest accessory manufacturer merger is between Incipio and Skullcandy.

The terms of the deal have the acquisition valued at $5.75 per share, or approximately $177 million, which is approximately a 29 percent premium over Skullcandy’s closing share price on Friday. The deal has been approved by both Skullcandy’s and Incipio’s boards of directors and is expected to close in Q3 of 2016. There is, however, a “go-shop” period until July 23rd that gives Skullcandy the option to seek a larger purchase price from another company.

“Skullcandy and Astro amplify our dynamic mix of products and brands, while bolstering the technical and operational capabilities that serve as the foundation of our platform,” said Andy Fathollahi, CEO and founder of Incipio, in a statement sent to MobileSyrup. “The team at Skullcandy and its international presence will also allow us to accelerate the global impact of our multi-brand offense.”