Heather Daugherty@gerbsch78
Here's my (apparently) unpopular opinion - not every event that has to be cancelled needs to be moved online. It's… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Hunters: When I heard about this -- "So, Inglorious Basterds was good, but what if we upgrade that Tarantino to a Jordan Peele?" My reaction was, "Shit, that's all you had to say." And it starts off very, very strong -- but then it kinda loses its way. There's a bit of that Grindhouse weirdness, but they never lean in to it, and the ending is just... pretty dumb. You already had a gang of old Jews extracting violent revenge on actual Nazis -- just inject that right into my veins. Trying to spice that up with another goofball conspiracy because Operation Paperclip wasn't spicy enough? Anyway, I enjoyed it, but it really went off the rails in the last 2 or 3 episodes.
Lovecraft Country: This is absolutely amazing. Best thing on TV right now. It's only up to episode 4 and they've already blown through half the book (which was very good too). The book was more of a collection of several novellas, so I guess that lends itself to episodic TV pretty well.
Bill and Ted Face The Music: This is everything it should have been. It's a triumph. It has all the goofiness of the first one and not a mean-spirited bone in its body.
Star Trek Lower Decks: This is just The Orville.The Orville already met its goal of debasing Star Trek. Why is Star Trek now taking a sarcastic shit on itself? What if Star Trek, but cynical, barely-competent dimwits? If Star Trek is The West Wing, this is Veep.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: I really enjoyed this, it's very funny. But a lot of it is, "Oh, these rich people are so unhappy at their boring lives." Speaking of Star Trek, it has a weirdly post-scarcity feeling to it. All of their problems are that they could do anything but they don't want to.
The Wretched: A very 80s-feeling monster movie. Good effects without dumb jump-scares, and a twist or two that I didn't see coming.
VFW: This feels like it was made in the 80s, thematically: a bunch of old former soldiers fight a bunch of "young punks" who are all hopped up on goofballs. It's got that weirdly classist fear of cities that you saw a lot back then. Probably Giuliani's fault.
Super Mario Bros. (1993): This movie is nuts in kind of the way that Tank Girl was nuts. I wouldn't say it's good, but it sure is... very much its own thing. We should have shown this movie at a Cyberdelia that nobody would have come to!
The Night Before (1988): I hadn't seen this since it came out, so I was worried. Teen Keanu blacks out and accidentally sells his prom date to a sex trafficker, then tries to piece the night back together, Memento style. It's actually pretty funny, though it does contain the expected "80s comedy" level of low-key racism and sexism. One big surprise: the pimped prom date is Lori Loughlin, currently more famous for failing to bribe her kids' way into college. Also, that scene in every 80s movie where they go into a dive bar and nobody's paying any attention to the super famous band playing? Usually that band is Oingo Boingo, but this time it was George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars.
True Romance (1993): I had fond memories of this movie, but that must have been from before additional decades of exposure to Tarantino and his creepy ticks. This movie is crappy and mean! And the whole time I was watching it I was constantly thinking, "This scene would play as a bunch of horrifying psychopaths without this perky steel drum score behind it." So chalk that up to the power of music I guess.
Stargate Universe: I re-watched the whole series, and it's still really good! I always say that my favorite Star Trek series is Stargate Universe. It was obviously a reaction to Voyager, which should have been a show about "how bad do things go when a starship has no supply lines" but instead Voyager was the same old garbage, including firing all all 121 of their 38 photon torpedoes.
Stargate Universe was all about scarcity. The first few episodes were literally climbing the hierarchy of needs: EP1: "We're venting atmosphere." EP2: "We're out of water." EP3: "Getting hungry." There's a throwaway gag where someone wistfully says, "So, that was the last of the coffee, huh?", and someone replies, "You should see the smokers." At some point they lose the shuttlecraft, and that's it: now having no shuttlecraft becomes a major plot point for the rest of the season.
I also loved how, for the first half of S1, they mixed up who the antagonists were. It started off as "The military are doing their best but these crazy scientists keep trying to get us all killed" and then a few episodes later they flip the narrative to "the smart people are doing their best but these fascists keep trying to get us all killed."
The thing I HAAAATED about the show, though, was the magic "telepresence stones". They relied on them as plot elements SO heavily and SO often that the show was almost about those. They were more overused than -- and as bad as -- holodeck episodes. (All holodeck episodes are bad. Fight me.) It also didn't make a lot of sense, especially in season 2, why SGC was so eager to get access to Destiny. Sure, they wanted to rescue their people, but it went way beyond that. They almost started a war over it. It's not like they didn't have access to tons of Ancient ships and tech already, e.g. the entire Atlantis facility.
Overall, though, a great show that deserved a third season.
“This year, wildfires have now burned over 2.2 million acres across all fire jurisdictions. This is a record for the number of acres burned in California, and this year’s fire season has another four months to go.”
My brain doesn’t like to visualize acres at that scale. It works out to about 3,500 square miles or almost 9,000 square kilometers. That’s roughly the size of Yellowstone National Park, Puerto Rico, Cyprus, or Lake Titicaca, for some geographical references.
I’m continuing to listen to Season 4 of Scene on Radio, entitled The Land That Never Has Been Yet. As I mentioned in a previous post quoting from another episode in the series, the hosts bring a clarity to some of my muddled political thoughts.
This time, they’re talking about neoliberalism, the idea that markets can fix everything. It’s gone from being a contested idea when I was young to pretty much orthodox thinking in 2020.
John Biewen: Yeah and despite these inconsistencies and logical problems with the theory, another thing that Wendy Brown has pointed out is that neoliberalism has become so pervasive. People like Buchanan and Hayek and Milton Friedman wanted us to accept the market as the guiding metaphor for pretty much everything in our lives.
Chenjerai Kumanyika: Yes. And we were talking about an example of this in our pandemic episode. The problems with this idea that everything should be run like a business. But neoliberalism is really this on steroids, right? It’s like society should just be a marketplace, in fact, Margaret Thatcher famously said there’s no such thing as society. Just a collection of individuals. So in that picture, we’re not even citizens, right, we’re just kinda like, independent contractors.
John Biewen: And notice that language, the way so much of our language now is borrowed from the financial world and from markets. We’re not caring for ourselves, we’re developing our humanity, we’re investing in ourselves. We’re not sharing our gifts, we’re building our brands. We don’t have responsibility to take care of each other, we’re out here competing.
That line from Kumanyika that we’re “not ever citizens… just independent contractors” really stopped me in my tracks (literally, as I was running at the time). In the UK, we don’t have a written constitution so, despite the government’s mention of us as ‘citizens’ we’re actually subjects of the Crown. The term may no longer be in popular use, but it doesn’t make it any the less true.
Part of the reason we don’t think about this is probably because how subjugated we are to the market forces of neoliberalism in every area of our lives. True democracy, as Biewen and Kumanyika discuss towards the beginning of the episode, deals in power dynamics, trying to make society more equal over time. Neoliberalism instead entrenches privilege and hierarchy, which is why I’m against it and everything it entails.
Ich mag die Eve Energy und sie funktionieren hier auch einwandfrei, weil ich viele HomePods als Hub haben. Die stellen automatisch das Gateway zwischen Bluetooth und WLAN her. Wenn man eine schlechtere Abdeckung hat und Schaltsteckdosen lieber über WLAN in Homekit integrieren will, dann bieten sich diese Zwischenstecker in ähnlicher Bauform an. Man verzichtet dabei allerdings auf die Strommessung, die bisher von HomeKit nicht unterstützt wird. Eve System greift diese Informationen mit der eigenen App ab. Wenn man ohnehin eine HomeBridge für anderen Shellys betreibt, dann kann man auch zum Shelly Plug greifen. Kleiner geht es wohl derzeit nicht.
Die meross Homekit-Schaltdosen werden im Pärchen günstiger angeboten als der eigentliche Zielpreis von 20 Euro. Mit dem angezeigten Rabattcode L2ME3VVH kosten zwei Dosen nur 30,51 Euro. Das liegt praktischerweise genau über der Schwelle für einen kostenfreien Standardversand ohne Prime.
Storytelling, however, is much more abstract — it’s not merely a technical matter of creating an image of a map, or designing the right chart; rather, it refers to the broader universe of considerations that impact nearly every decision you make in the way you frame and present a project. The focus is much less on the technical “how,” like in the first two installments of these guides, but on the “why” of designing the narrative. It certainly doesn’t help that technical tools are inherently more concrete: they’re ways of solving specific problems (e.g., “how do I show the locations where people are concentrated on a map?” or “how do get this visual element to move through this specific path?”), while storytelling is much more of a nebulous concept. Thus, in this guide, I’ll be focusing on the relevant questions and considerations that we, at The Pudding, tend to consider when creating data-driven projects.
Apple has officially announced that its next iPhone event is set for September 15th at 1pm ET/10am PT.
The tech giant is expected to announce its 2020 iPhone lineup, a new Apple Watch, a refreshed iPad Air and a release date for iOS 14. It’s worth noting that this year’s Apple event is taking place a little later than normal, likely due to delays caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
During an investor’s call following Apple’s Q3 2020 earnings report, the tech giant confirmed that its new iPhone models would start shipping in early October. Rumours also swirled earlier today indicating that the iPhone 12 will start entering mass production soon, followed by the entire 2020 iPhone lineup later in September and in the first weeks of October. A special hashtag for ‘#AppleEvent‘ with a September 28th end date appeared earlier today, too.
Apple is expected to release four iPhone models, including a 6.1-inch and 5.4-inch OLED iPhone 12 with two rear cameras. On the other hand, the iPhone 12 Pro models feature 6.1-inch and 6.7-inch OLED displays, as well as a triple-camera system and the same 3D LiDAR system as the iPad Pro (2020).
Other rumours suggest that all of Apple’s 2020 iPhones will feature squared-off sides similar to more recent iPad Pro models. Additionally, all iPhone 12 devices are expected to sport 5G connectivity, with the two higher-end models featuring 120Hz ProMotion displays.
MobileSyrup will have more on Apple’s upcoming iPhone 12 event in the coming week.
da sich die Kritik auf eine ganze Berufsgruppe und nicht auf Einzelpersonen bezieht. Die Polizei ist zudem eine gesellschaftlich anerkannte Berufsgruppe, die nicht unter den Diskriminierungsschutz nach Ziffer 12 des Pressekodex fällt, anders als etwa Angehörige von religiösen oder ethnischen Minderheiten.
Ah, ach so. Gesellscahftlich anerkannte Berufsgruppen darf man ungestraft auf die Mülldeponie wünschen? Ob die Damen und (wahrscheinlich viel mehr) Herren Pressevertreter (Was hattet ihr denn geglaubt, wer da sitzt? Das ist ein Organ der freiwilligen Selbstkontrolle der Presse!) im Presserat das auch so sehen würden, wenn das nicht gegen die Polizei sondern gegen Journalisten gerichtet wäre?
Ich finde das erbärmlich, so schnell wie die Journalisten immer nach der Pressefreiheit schreien. Legt dann bitte auch mal einen ähnlich hohen Anspruch an euch selbst an.
Update: Ich möchte bei der Gelegenheit darauf hinweisen, dass die Rüge die dritte Eskalationsstufe ist, die die haben. Und die hat schon keinerlei Auswirkungen in der Praxis. Die "Bild"-"Zeitung" kassiert regelmäßig Rügen. Keine Auswirkungen.
Aber nicht mal die beiden kleineren Stufen haben sie hier gezogen. Das ist echt armselig.
Apple’s latest retail store looks sort of like a glowing floating lantern.
The unique design features a glass dome that sits right on the water in Singapore’s Marina Bay. While images of the floating orb popped up a few weeks ago, Apple has now shared official photographs of its 512th worldwide Apple Store, marking its third location in Singapore.
The sphere itself is made of 114 pieces of glass held together by 10 vertical support bars. The tech giant says the dome is a first-of-its-kind construction given it’s all-glass and entirely self-supported. Inside, the walls feature baffles that create shade the tech giant calls a “nighttime lighting effect.” The top of the sphere is also an oculus that lets in sunlight.
Standard Apple Store features are present as well, including a shop floor, and a giant video screen with a seating area for hosting talks. There’s even a lower level featuring what Apple calls the tech giant’s “first underwater boardroom” — which might be the first boardroom in the world I’d actually want to spend time in.
The Apple Marina Bay Sands Apple Store is located in a luxury district that features high-end stores, restaurants and the Marina Bay Sands hotel and casino.
Based on widespread speculation, Apple is expected to introduce its new lineup of iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches. Rumors also point to the possibility of headphones and so-called AirTag location trackers. It’s also possible Apple will take the opportunity to preview upcoming Apple Silicon-based Macs, which the company said at WWDC are coming before the end of the year.
In addition to hardware, Apple is expected to announce release dates for updates to its operating systems, including iOS and iPadOS 14, macOS 11.0 Big Sur, and watchOS 7. As in the past, Apple should release a Gold Master of the OSes shortly after the event with a public release date within approximately 10 days.
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the purpose of open data is to save us from ourselves
One day I am going to write about the problem of museum website footers...
Some time in the last couple of weeks the digital team at the Cooper Hewitt disabled the "random object" page on its collection website as well as the corresponding cooperhewitt.objects.getRandomObject API method. This follows the disabling of the search by colour webpages last year, even though they were consitently the most popular way to browse the collection.
While this is disappointing to me personally, since I implemented these features and many of us thought they were both a fun and genuinely useful way to introduce visitors to the collection, these decisions are the discretion of the museum and the current digital team. They are free to do whatever they want.
What is genuinely disappointing to me, though, is the fact that the API methods were disabled without any notice or warning. We have grown accustomed, in the last decade, to the practice of companies and platforms changing or disabling their services with little or no regard to the external users of their services. One only has to look at the flip-flopping around who can use which parts of the Twitter API, and under what conditions, since it was first launched in 2006.
To the extent that the cultural heritage sector, and specifically museums, have a long history of riding the coattails of the private sector when it comes to technology decisions the fact that we're starting to see similar behaviour when it comes to our own APIs should be no surprise.
In fairness, the terms of service for the Cooper Hewitt API state:
This Application Programming Service (API) is provided as-is and you agree to play nicely and not abuse abuse it and that we, the API service provider, reserve the right to change things at our discretion with or without notice. This includes disabling access to the API if your applications starts misbehaving.
Basically: Play nicely and don't be creepy.
I wrote that text sometime in 2012 or 2013 and it really should have been revised, when the museum reopened in 2014, to offer a little more clarity and guarantees around the service. Live and learn. In 2019, speaking at the Museums and the Web conference about the work SFO Museum is doing on the Mills Field website I said:
We have changed the order of things to publish the open data representation first and then, from there, to build our own websites and services on top of that.
Everything I've described so far has been built using the same raw materials that we've made available for you to do something with. This introduces a non-zero cost in the build process for the public-facing museum efforts but we believe it's worth the cost.
But why, right?
First of all we want other people to build new interfaces and new services, new "experiences" even, on top of our collection so this is a way to keep ourselves honest. If we can't build something with this stuff why should we imagine you will?
Second, we want to ensure that the data we release and the manner in which it is published, is actually robust and flexible enough to engender a variety of interfaces and uses because we need that variety. It is important to the museum because I don't believe there is, or should be, only one master narrative in to the collection.
There is a long and celebrated tradition in the museum sector of digital teams scraping their own websites to provide unofficial API access to their own collections. While this kind of can do spirit is laudable it is mostly, I think, a damning indictment of the sector as a whole. This sort of thing shouldn't be necessary and the fact that it is shows either that we've learned nothing since the idea of public service-level API methods became commonlace or, worse, that we were never serious about open and accessible APIs in the first place.
The immediate consequence of the Cooper Hewitt disabling the cooperhewitt.objects.getRandomObject API method is that it breaks the wunderkammer application that I've been working on since June of this year. As consequences go that's pretty low. I am probably the only person using the application. If the wunderkammer application were distrubuted through the app store with users, maybe even lots of users, the consequences would be pretty high.
Micah Walter's Cooper Hewitt Random Button Pinterest board
Best practice dictates that you should always write your programs defensively when using third-party APIs, assuming for one reason or another that they will eventually fail. Calling the cooperhewitt.objects.getRandomObject or any other API method should be considered a brittle operation and ideally an application will trap those failures accordingly. That's very different than suddenly introducing a deliberate and consistent failure in to one or more applications which may have lengthy or burdensome update procedures and that require user-action (downloading a new application) to remedy the situation.
It's just rude. There might be a valuable debate to be had about whether or not rudeness is actually a core value in the cultural heritage sector but, at least publicly, we say it's not and I believe that same commitment should extend to the things we do digitally.
My argument here is not that I have been adversely or negatively impacted, in any serious way, by the Cooper Hewitt's decision to remove a single API method. As I mentioned scraping museum websites and building bespoke databases is not very complicated. I had to do that recently, compiling all the image URLs for objects published in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access Initiative dataset. I think I could do the same for the Cooper Hewitt collection in an afternoon. My argument is that I shouldn't have to, especially not after the fact.
Which brings me to the point of writing this blog post in the first place: I don't have to.
That's the good news. I also can't help but feeling like, at the same time, this is really the bad news.
Whatever the theory says about the value of cultural heritage institutions publishing open data, the practice appears to be one where the immediate benefit is shielding people from the constant indecision, churn and lack of long-term commitment in the cultural heritage sector itself.
We have changed the order of things to publish the open data representation first and then, from there, to build our own websites and services on top of that.
We can and we should do better than having to build in safeguards to protect the things we do as a sector, for our own institutions and the public that we claim and some of us are mandated to serve, from ourselves. There should be no celebration in that, only disappointment.
USB ports — especially the newer, slimmer, faster USB-C ports — are the charging connector of choice for most modern laptops, tablets, phones, wireless headphones, and other everyday electronics. To make it even easier to charge these devices in any room of your home, you can replace your standard wall outlets with models that have built-in USB ports, eliminating the need for a separate charger.
The Leviton T5635 is the wall outlet we’d buy ourselves. It has two USB-C ports with a combined output of 30 watts, which is enough to power a small laptop or to charge two phones simultaneously while still leaving two AC outlets free for larger appliances. It has a clean, minimal look that blends in with most home decor, and it comes in six neutral colors.
Nicholas Ramdeyall was killed on Sept 1, 2020 by a tractor trailer rig in Mississauga. He was only sixteen years old. The collision was on Dixie Rd, the third cyclist fatality in that general area in the past two months. Today was the ghost bike installation in his memory.
Here is the group at Bloor and Runnymede, turning towards the lake.
Biking down Ellis Ave, we pass a cyclist that has been pulled over, presumably for blowing through the stop sign halfway down the hill.
Regroup at the north side of the bridge. We are joined by former BWV resident John.
Approaching the crash site. Geoffrey normally doesn’t ride while on his phone, but apparently he is talking to a reporter from the CBC.
The ghost bike arrives.
There was already a large memorial here from a candlelight vigil a few days ago.
Friends and relatives of Nicholas were also present.
Installing the ghost bike.
Nicholas’ parents put flowers on the bike.
A minute of silence in his memory.
The parents talking with Dorothy and Jonathan about hopes for changes that must be made to present further tragedies.
Friends had put this white bike up on a fence across the street.
Ironically, a large tractor trailer drives by, demonstrating once more that having trucks of this length making turns at this corner is problematic.
Rest in peace, Nicholas Ramdeyall. Deepest condolences to his family and friends. His obituary is here.
Next, we took the opportunity to ride down to the ghost bike for Ahmed Kamal to update the sign.
Paying our respects once again.
Thanks to Yvonne Bambrick for providing the new sign.
On the way home, we pass an artscape installation on the south side of Lakeshore, just west of Haig Blvd. It is a beautiful field of sunflowers that were planted on Canada Day.
Eighth ghost bike in the GTA this summer. No more please.
Ride safe everyone.
IMEPTUS FOR CHANGE: The parents of Nicholas Ramdeyall were strong, gracious at #GhostBike installation today, looking positively to the future for change that is *already* coming, inspired by the spirit of their son & community support. We'll all work to this end R I P pic.twitter.com/CR0rDuNxbM
EVEN AS the #GhostBike for Nicholas was being installed at Dixie & Blundell, a tractor trailer (same company!) came through the intersection, demonstrating how little turn space there is, despite a large green swath which could make the turn safer in #bikeMississaugapic.twitter.com/ssANOI1owY
Ok, so I wasn’t expecting this tweet to get (checks numbers) 865 likes and 93 retweets:
Honestly, screw commuting and screw Pret. I love working from home
But why not have a coffee truck that drives around the suburbs like an ice cream van? I’m sure we could come up with a “flat white” jingle for it to play.
The context is that we’re all being told to get back to the office, and that it’s selfish to do otherwise because coffee shops, etc, in cities are suffering. See, in Grazia: When Did ‘Save The NHS’, Get Overtaken By ‘Save Pret’?
But going back to exactly what we were doing before seems like a pretty unimaginative way to save the economy. It turns out that many people love working remotely, and we’re learning how to be good at it.
Perhaps, rather than struggling to preserve old businesses, we can let them evolve and build new ones too?
By which I mean:
We’re used to office perks and the benefits of working in a business neighbourhood: free snacks (if you’re lucky), a comfy chair, good lunch spots nearby… what future working-from-home perks can we invent, if we’re in this for the long term?
Like, is there remote work facilities management that can come set up my desk and give me a sound baffle/backdrop for my video calls? (Has Ikea launched a Zoom kit yet?) If I were a manager, could I expense desk beers on Fridays for my team, and is there a company that can sort that out? Is there a startup which will organise virtual movie nights, or a surprise snack box in the post, or streaming event once every couple of weeks? Could my local train station get itself a suburban WeWork for the times I actually need a meeting room?
It would be unrealistic for even a sizeable firm to run all these perks itself. But if they were all services that were contracted out? That’s our new economy right there.
Then there’s good coffee and the social life. It can feel pretty distant sometimes at home. But while it’s nice to have face-to-face banter, does that really need to be with co-workers? I’d just as soon have my water-cooler moments with the people who live on my street.
All of that was going round in my head.
I also have a refreshed love of my neighbourhood.
We couldn’t get online grocery delivery slots at the beginning of lockdown, and our local shops really stepped up. I’ll never forget that. One nearby cafe flipped its model into selling flour and dried goods, the interior becoming an ad hoc storeroom.
That experience sparked me to write about local e-commerce back in May. In short: what if I could order and get same-day deliveries from the local businesses that I want to support, as an antidote to the usual faceless e-commerce giants?
So an ice cream van that pulls up, jingling out the MIDI version of Josh Wink’s Higher State of Consciousness at 11am, everyone on the street downing tools and heading out for a caffeine hit and to catch up with friends?
I’m maaaybe 50% kidding.
But the underlying provocation stands: what if we aimed to make remote working as great an experience as a fancy office, and what if we did it in a way that boosted both human contact and our local neighbourhoods, and what new businesses can we imagine that would enable this?
General Motors has announced that it’s investing in EV startup Nikola to help the company develop its electric truck and cars.
Nikola made a name for itself by revealing a hydrogen-powered semi-truck, but since then, the company has been working to develop more consumer-focused vehicles. So far, Nikola still has yet to get a vehicle on the road.
The EV automaker is now trading 11 percent of its stock to GM for help building its vehicles and access to the company’s certified parts lists.
Nikola’s first car is going to be the Badger truck, which has been revealed but won’t go into production until at least 2022, according to The Verge’s report.
As part of this deal, GM is also going to supply the hydrogen fuel cells to Nikola to help the company launch its semi-truck.
This investment brings to mind Ford’s investment in Rivian, another EV startup that’s focusing on Trucks as well. Both Ford and GM are lagging behind as more and more auto manufacturers begin to transition to electric fleets.
In order to help make up for their shortcomings in the EV space, it appears that both of these legacy manufacturers are bringing newer upstarts into the fold to hedge their EV bets. I’m not saying that GM is going to buy Nikola at some point, but the automaker is making sure to keep a startup electric vehicle company close.
Overall, this is probably a smart move for Nikola and GM, but it’s still tough to say for sure if Nikola is ever going to truly pop off and experience its own rapid period of growth like Tesla did.
So an ice cream van that pulls up, jingling out the MIDI version of Josh Wink’s Higher State of Consciousness at 11am, everyone on the street downing tools and heading out for a caffeine hit and to catch up with friends?
My workplace has not changed at all due the pandemic—it’s still just me and the machines in our underground church bunker—but I would welcome the chance to punctuate my day like this with all the other hidden toilers. As it stands, most days I don’t lay non-Zoom eyes on a single soul.
Google has rolled out the final version of Android 11 to its Pixel smartphones, signalling the final release of the latest version of Android.
So far, the update has only hit Pixel devices, but Google mentions that OnePlus is planning to roll out its final version of Android 11 today as well.
Beyond some of the highlighted communication and privacy controls Google has been teasing throughout Android 11 beta releases, there are a few more Pixel specific features that the company is pulling back the curtain on today.
Find your friends in a crowd
This new Pixel feature is tucked inside of Google Maps, but it should help people link up when they’re in crowded places.
This means if you’re going to meet up with someone and you’re already using Google Maps’ ‘Location Share’ feature, you can now enter an augmented reality mode that allows users to see where their friends are in AR. This should make it easier to find people in places where it’s easy to get lost.
App Suggestions
Another new feature is called app suggestions. This functionality is simple in practice but might make some people’s lives a lot easier. When you turn this setting on, it suggests a row of apps on your home screen. In my experience with the beta, this feature hasn’t been that useful for me, but if you like to run a minimal home screen layout, this might be super helpful for you.
If you tap and drag on one of these apps on your home screen, you can also select not to have it show up anymore. I had to do this with my settings app since Google thought I wanted to open it way too often.
Chat Bubbles
Chat Bubbles are a new feature in Android 11, but anyone that’s used Facebook’s Chat Heads over the last few years should be familiar with the feature.
In Android 11, you can tap on a new bubble icon on some app notifications to open them up as a persistent chat bubble. I found that replying via the actual notification shade better in my experience, but I’m sure some people will find this new chat interface convenient.
A new control panel
Holding the power button on your Pixel just got a lot more useful. Now, beyond the usual ‘Restart,’ ‘turn off’ and ‘lockdown’ options, users can also access their Google Home smart light controls and Google Pay wallets quickly.
This has to be the best part of Android 11 since it makes turning smart lights on and off a lot easier.
Screen recorder built-in
If you need to share more than a screenshot on a Pixel phone, you can now use a screen recorder. This feature works as you’d expect by recording whatever happens on your screen as you navigate around on your phone.
You can find this feature from the quick toggles in the notification shade.
Wireless Android Auto for all… sort of
All phones that get updated to Android 11 will now support the wireless standard of Android Auto, but there are still not many cars that include the feature.
One time privacy permissions
Now when an app asks to use sensitive data or hardware on your phone, like your location or camera, a new option appears that allows you to grant permission to that feature only once.
This means next time you use that app; it will need to ask for permission to use that data again.
Even more
Check out your Pixel or OnePlus devices’ ‘System’ settings to see if the update is available to you. At MobileSyrup, all of our Pixel phones can download the update.
Neither the OnePlus 8, 8 Pro or Nord have received an over the air update for Android 11 yet, but if you’re curious, we do have an explainer of all the changes you can expect from a OnePlus device running Android 11.
The fundamental disconnect, which I think Theresa May understood but could never state publicly, is that Brexit negotiations were always an exercise in damage limitation. While Brexiters saw them as some sort of lap of honour.
Over Labor Day weekend, Vanessa and I drove around Normandy. We admired the natural beauty and visited a few historical D-Day sites.
In June 1944, more than 150,000 American, British and Canadian forces landed on five beaches along the heavily fortified French coast. As we traveled the coast and overlooked the beaches, we saw the remains of artificial harbors, floating piers and bunkers. All powerful reminders of the atrocities that took place.
We stopped at Omaha Beach and Gold Beach, and visited the American cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer. The cemetery honors 9,000+ American soldiers that died in World War II. It was humbling to think about how many people lost their lives for our freedom.
We traveled in a Volkswagen California. Sleeping in a van for 3 nights made it the perfect "corona trip".
Because it was a short trip, we didn't get to all of the places we had hoped. It gives us a reason to get back on the road for another adventure.
Most people shouldn’t buy a high-end gaming laptop right now. Laptops with RTX 2070 or 2080 graphics cards cost more than $2,000 and don’t provide a worthwhile upgrade from a $1,200 laptop with a 1660 Ti, which is what most people should get. But if you’re looking for a laptop that’s thinner and lighter than those, fits comfortably into a laptop bag, and can play games at similar frame rates, get the Acer Predator Triton 500 PT515-51-75BH with RTX 2060 graphics.
It seems like a law of nature that we can't have something good without some other version of the same thing coming along. That's why we have Coke and Pepsi, Windows and Mac, Antz and A Bug's Life, Deep Impact and Armageddon. And so we have two video formats: MP4 and MKV. They are both containers, that is, they contain various encodings of audio and video tracks. They can both be used for different delivery formats (for example, Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) or Apple’s HLS streaming (except HLS doesn't work with MKV)). MKV has minor advantages (for example, it can store audio tracks in multiple languages, and is better for ripping CDs because it can keep tracks separated; a limited version, WebM, is used for in-browser streaming), while MP4 file sizes are smaller and more likely to work on your device.m If you have an MKV you need to convert to MP4 (it's rarely the other way around) your best bet is probably to use the open source VLC application. Here's another video format battle article, a versus article, a how-to choose article, and a comparison table.
Just a quite note I sent to Feedly about it's AI tool Leo and my OLDaily workflow...
I've been a Feedly Pro user for many years and moved to Pro+ for the AI and Twitter support. I have two major comments:
- first, it's too expensive. I'm not going to pay $137 (Canadian) for a second year of Pro+, not without a significant increase in value.
- second, I'm still trying to work out a workflow that both preserves the usefulness of AI and allows me to manage content. There are some sub-issues to this:
- there's no point using 'what I read' as input to the AI since I read at least some of every post that comes in. Remember, my feed list is *already* curated
- similarly, the use of 'priority' keywords is of limited value, again because I've already curated (and organized) my feed list.
- in my workflow, I save items in 'read later' to, well, read later, and to potentially write about for my newsletter. This *is* useful information, but unfortunately Leo only collects items I save to a 'Board' (I've created my first and only Board, 'Leo', for that purpose, replacing my use of 'read later'. But:
-- I used to be able to use IFTTT to save items in the 'read later' folder to Pocket - that way I can *also* save items I've found from outside Feedly
-- As I reconsidered items in pocket, and either wrote about them or skipped them, I would delete them from Pocket, so I don't have to wade through stuff I've already looked at
-- I now import *from* Pocket (via RSS) to a folder in Feedly. so I can still get my non-RSS items into my workflow
-- But I can't delete them without demoting them in the eyes of the AI, which is the opposite of what I want to do
What I need:
- a way to get non-RSS content into Feedly from the web browser
- a way to highlight items for later review - and for Leo to learn from *that* selection, not reads or keywords
- a way to be able to remove items from the review pile without making Leo think I don't like them any more
I don’t have many photos of yesterday’s Not Back To School party. Because on a whim I put a wetsuit on and went to learn surfing alongside the kids. There, in the middle of the waves, after catching glimpses of all of them having fun and being turned upside down myself, I felt once again grateful to be able to see how they grow and change.
I also thought that the most important thing I do for the kids is “bringing them to the sea” – negotiating access to places, people and activities to learn from and with. I model the way into the depth, stay next to them as long as they need support, smile at their progress and let go. They find their own ways, more and more.
Of course, it is also the sea and the sun. Homeschooling has enough of uncertainties, hard work and gloomy days, and shadows of those lurk in the conversations with other parents. But we all share the ability to look beyond those shadows and our kids, learning from, with and around each other between the dunes and the waves only confirm that.
We don’t really need to mark the beginning of the school year, because learning doesn’t start and stop. Still, it is nice to have a moment to see each other, to appreciate how much has been done so far and to talk about plans and dreams.
The Guardian newspaper in the UK assigned GPT-3, an AI writer from OpenAI, to write an essay. The results are pretty good. But as long as writing requires creativity, AI won’t replace human writers. GPT-3’s essay, and how it was created Here’s the start of what you can now read at The Guardian: I am … Continued
It looks like Microsoft is going to retool its surface Laptop design to work as a lower-cost device.
Microsoft is looking for a new avenue onto students’ desks this season as it readies a $500-$600 USD (roughly $660-$800 CAD) 12-inch laptop, according to Windows Central.
Judging from the price leak, it should be more powerful as well. The leak says that it should feature a 10th gen Intel i5, but only 4GB of RAM and a 64GB hard drive. This laptop is likely going to be a better deal since users don’t need to buy the keyboard cover with it.
This laptop should also be a nice foil to Google’s Chromebooks, which have been exploding in popularity due to their cheaper price tag and simplicity.
This is a stretch, but as Microsoft pushes more into ARM-based machines, it might make sense to begin building out a full range of laptops across all price points to build the company’s brand out before it transitions to ARM. There is massive speculation that Apple is going to refresh the 12-inch MacBook as an ARM machine, so if Microsoft can do something similar, that might be a smart move for the company.
It seems likely that Microsoft is going to reveal it alongside some other new surface gear at an event in October, at least according to Windows Central.
jwz.
Fefes Blog.
sovietvisuals on Twitter.
IMEPTUS FOR CHANGE: The parents of Nicholas Ramdeyall were strong, gracious at #GhostBike
installation today, looking positively to the future for change that is *already* coming, inspired by the spirit of their son & community support. We'll all work to this end
R I P pic.twitter.com/CR0rDuNxbM
pic.twitter.com/ssANOI1owY
mrjamesob on Twitter.
