No, but seriously. Am I going to have to do this for another 200 days? Leicester has retracted to lockdown again. I went looking for trend graphs for the UK today. As far as I can understand it -- and why isn't the World Health Organisation the canonical source? -- is that the UK is on approximately the same trend line as Italy. National trends seem quite odd in a scenario like this, don't they? 

The post What’s Next? Assessing Emerging COVID-19 Challenges and Opportunities appeared first on Innosight.

Apple is reportedly shifting its strategy surrounding Apple Arcade in an effort to retain more subscribers, according to a new report from Bloomberg.

The report goes on to state that Apple has cancelled several contracts for games that are still in development, and that an Apple Arcade creative producer told several developers that their upcoming titles don’t meet the tech giant’s “engagement” expectations.

Apple reportedly now wants Arcade to feature games that will keep users subscribed to the platform beyond Arcade’s free trial. This likely indicates that the service hasn’t yet met Apple’s expectations as far as maintaining subscribers beyond its one-month trial period.

Apple has reportedly spent between $1 million USD and $5 million USD on several Apple Arcade titles, and also set aside “tens of millions of dollars” to support the development of games for the platform. It’s unclear what specific metric for engagement Apple is using, but the story cites a recent call with Arcade developers mentioning Toronto-based Capybara Games puzzle title, Grindstone, as an example. Grindstone is a colour-matching action-oriented puzzle game that features several levels and relatively slow progression.

This shift in strategy has likely led to apprehension among developers that release their games on Apple Arcade, particularly amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It’s still unclear how developers are paid for titles featured in Apple Arcade, though Bloomberg’s report says that Apple pays studios to build games for the platform.

Apple has consistently added several new titles to Arcade nearly every week. While it’s still unclear, this shift in strategy will likely result in fewer new games hitting the subscription service.

Apple Arcade still holds tremendous promise slightly over a year after its initial release because it’s an avenue for developers to move away from the often frustrating microtransactions that are rampant in the mobile gaming space. That said, it’s important to note that the platform isn’t open to all developers, which means that only a select few can benefit from the service’s monetization model.

Most Apple Arcade titles are available across iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac. The service costs $5.99 per month and offers a free one-month trial.

You can read Bloomberg’s full story about Apple Arcade’s shift in strategy at this link.

Source: Bloomberg 

The post Apple reportedly shifting Apple Arcade strategy to focus on retaining subscribers appeared first on MobileSyrup.

This post lists all of the upgrades to be found in the new Garmin Edge 1030 Plus vs the GPS bike computer it replaces, the Garmin Edge 1030. At the end of the post we include a video that showcases the new features.

The post Garmin Edge 1030 Plus vs Garmin Edge 1030. What’s New About the Garmin Edge 1030 Plus? appeared first on Average Joe Cyclist.

mkalus shared this story from internetofshit on Twitter.

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Jeff Leigh of HUB reports:

My wife and I rode Stanley Park last Monday, and stopped in at the Prospect Point Café.  We spoke with the staff at the concession, who advised they had been very busy serving people on bikes through the weekend.

We typically do not stop at the top of the hill, but head right on down.  Now we have a reason to stop.

Jeff and his wife haven’t been alone.  Here’s the scene last Sunday:

Here’s the line-up just for ice cream:

Prospect Point Cafe was literally surrounded by bikes and riders – most of whom looked to be in the demographic that any restaurant would find rather attractive.  And since these were all Vancouver residents (no tourists, remember), they’re also the ones who, when out-of-town guests return, will be looking for a good place to take them, whether for ice cream or sit-down meals, whether by bike, car or bus.

Honestly, what it is going to take for businesses people to catch on?  Who can they turn to for advice?

Oh yeah, HUB.  Jeff again:

HUB Cycling is already working on promoting businesses in the park.

HUB has a program called Bike Friendly Business,  which has just the type of offerings that businesses new to dealing with people cycling can use, from Business Development services, to certification, to marketing to people who cycle.  If you have a business and want to talk, please reach out.

There are other HUB Cycling programs and events that can help businesses with marketing to people on bikes as well.  Bike to Shop comes up later in the summer.  Volunteers lead group rides to participating businesses, helping those new to transportation cycling learn how to bike to shops, restaurants, and so on.

It is important that businesses who believe their business is solely dependent on motor-vehicle traffic see that there is a whole community of people who cycle for transportation, and who spend money at local businesses.

 

A 52 year old female cyclist was struck and killed on Tuesday, June 23 while crossing an onramp to the QEW from Third Line in Oakville. She has subsequently been identified as Helen Xiang.

Today we installed a ghost bike at the crash site.

The ride starts at Bronte GO station.

Joey and I start the short ride to the Third Line overpass.

Lots of high speed traffic at the crash site.

Others had already placed flowers here.

Joey holding the lock.

I’ve installed flowers on the bike.

We decided to place the bike off to the side of the offramp. It would definitely have been more visible just underneath the large green sign, but there was some concern about it being removed by the city as a potential obstruction for people trying to cross the very onramp where the cyclist was killed.

During COVID-19 it is difficult to do a regular memorial ride with social distancing. ARC has been installing ghost bikes without prior notice, but with the permission of the families when it can be obtained.

Many thanks to Geoffrey Becarich for providing the ghost bike, and to Joey for being very patient with me during the long ride back from Oakville. Of course we had headwinds all the way back.

Postscript: off for another Tuesday night delivery run with the Toronto Bike Brigade, on behalf of #FoodshareTO and in support of #notanotherblacklife.

I must say that the cargo bike just flies after I finish dropping off the seven boxes of produce. I did get myself a little reward on the way home.

On the other hand, this last stop brought home to me the income disparity between parts of Alexandra Park, and just a short bike ride away, Trinity Bellwoods.

Ride safe everyone!

Update: the victim has been identified as Helen Xiang.

Update #2: no charges will be laid in this case.

It’s been a long while since I last wrote about my state of mind during the pandemic and almost as long since I posted some data, so I think this is somewhat overdue. And since today is also the last day of our fiscal year and I’m done with work for a few hours, I might as well use them for something that matters.

What The Data Tells Me

This is the simplest (and easiest to understand) chart I have put together. It smooths out the erratic raw data with a 7-day moving average and only covers mainland Portugal, but that’s where the action is regardless:

The Government is (understandably) concerned with the economic impact, and lifted containment too soon and in the wrong regions. I found it especially telling that cases in the Lisbon area started growing steadily from the 15^th of May onwards (that’s the local minima between May and June), two weeks (to the day) after the State of Emergency was canceled and shops re-opened (there’s a pretty decent summary of this in Wikipedia that is only missing a few minor things).

And as restrictions were further lifted in May 18^th and June 1^st (plus a spate of bank holidays starting on the 10^th), many people went further afield and the infection spread both in the Lisbon area and towards Algarve.

There were some localized hotspots (some companies, construction works, a few nursing homes), but I blame the spread on warmer weather, the emphasis on tourism (the Government is still trying to paint Portugal as a “safe” holiday destination), and, overall, lax behavior and early de-confinement without things like public transportation being able to cope properly.

And there is a noticeable shift in demographics as younger people start contracting COVID-19 in larger numbers (especially in the 20-29yo segment, which seems especially immune to common sense).

In general, we should have locked down Lisbon, regardless of consequences to tourism, and it was internal tourism that caused the spate of cases in Alentejo and Algarve.

But that didn’t happen, and we’re paying the price–today one of Lisbon’s key hospitals reported a new internal hotspot, with 11 doctors, 8 nurses and 12 patients infected.

About The Data

Before going further, let me get something off my chest.

For 127 days now, practically every day, I’ve gone out to the National Health Service website, grabbed the manually generated PDF they put out at semi-random times¹, copied the data by hand to this Excel sheet and refreshed this PowerBI dashboard (in Portuguese²), from which I took the chart above. And yes, I tried various approaches at screen scraping, the URLs are all over the place and it’s all hopelessly ad-hoc.

And I’m tired of it. And frustrated that, for one hundred and twenty-seven days, the Health Ministry has shown itself utterly unable to not just perform accurate automated reporting (because I keep finding errors and inconsistencies in the data almost every day), but also publish a proper API to let us get at the numbers.

All they have is a dinky Wordpress site and a dashboard that is a direct carbon-copy from the original OMS ArcGIS dashboard (they haven’t even kept up with the OMS redesigns), and which is also updated manually (and I know that for a fact because we keep catching it in mid-update, with incomplete values or duplicate rows).

I get that doctors have better things to do with their time. I get that the reporting chain is broken six ways from Sunday, and I most assuredly get that there are (or rather, were) other priorities.

But I don’t get that four months later they haven’t gotten their act together from a purely technical perspective, when it took me two whole hours to use free services to build that data table and that dashboard.

What I’ve Been Doing

We haven’t left the house for anything non-essential in months, which is taking its toll. Now that logistics and deliveries have normalized (and that we have a decontamination routine in place), there is much less need to, but it is impossible to stay indoors all of the time and I, for one, have found it near impossible to work for some days due to not having air conditioning in the office.

I also haven’t had a full nights’ sleep in quite a few weeks, due to a mixture of heat, allergies and various work-related topics that I might write about some day. I don’t really know when I’ll have vacations and am likely to keep working 10-hour days (or 12+ hours’ worth of “swiss cheese” meetings and useless 30m gaps between them), so most of my personal projects are stalled and I’ve focused on various home improvement doodads in order to feel productive.

(It’s really weird to use a 30-minute slot in the middle of a day crammed with wall-to-wall video calls to assemble IKEA furniture for your kids, but when that is the highlight of your day, believe me that you’ll feel entirely justified.)

Since normal TV is dismal and shows like Snowpiercer seem to have been serendipitously timed to coincide with the pandemic (and mirror a lot of the nastiness that has surfaced during it), I’ve kept playing games to relax around dinner time, but am trying to shift towards reading, since right now all I seem to manage is leafing through The Economist every Saturday and it’s just as depressing as the rest of the news.

Realistically, I expect this to take another year to shake itself out, and I fully expect things to get significantly worse–not in the next quarter, perhaps, but definitely about the time we swing into the New Year.

But at least things will be looking up by then, because we’re sure to hit rock bottom sometime soon.

Looking Forward

For starters, I intend to use July to recover from the past six months. Especially where it concerns the past week or so.

And I mean that in more ways than one, which is also why I’m posting this today–I’m drawing a line in the sand, as it were. Despite good progress at work in my new role (which is moderately good news for someone like me, who used to live for creative work and delivering actual product instead of dollops of slide-ware and high-brow strategy consulting), the overall situation is weighing me down a lot, and something has to give.

Where it regards putting my brains to good use (i.e., compensate for work with decent hobbies, preferably creating something), the situation is a bit different. I can’t practice music because it requires contiguous free time (and inspiration), and our podcast has filled in for that somewhat, but I need to do something new.

So I’ve been investigating things off my beaten track with some creative bent (mostly video production and VR, which are logical follow-ups to to games) and pondering taking up the challenge to develop a “serious” application for the Oculus Quest that was suggested to me the other day. I have the Android and Unity chops for it, but have yet to commit (it would certainly be “different” enough for me to enjoy it).

Besides that (and outside in general), the current plan is for the kids to have short outings (it’s impossible to keep them inside now that they’re on vacation as of this week), and as Summer progresses we will try to have some semblance of normal weekends. Far away from people, if at all possible.

That said, Portugal seems to have very few fundamentally stupid people (at least when comparing with daily news bulletins and reports of anti-mask, “freedom” protests hailing from the US) but is (by nature) a friendly and lax sort of environment.

That laxness (and the way the Government has managed the pandemic after the first 50 days, which were rather promising) means that Portugal is currently quite far from being mostly harmless…

mkalus shared this story from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow.

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Today's links

• Impossible Music: Sean Williams's superb novel of Deafness and music theory.
• Yanis Varoufakis on capitalism's self-destruction: And what to do about it.
• India bans Chinese apps: Chekhov's Law, China-India cyberspace sovereignty edition.
• Post-Trump trumpism: What will the right do after Trump's defeat?
• Gilead's $3k covid med should sell for $10: And the research was funded by the US public.
• This day in history: 2010, 2015, 2019
• Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing projects, current reading

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Impossible Music (permalink)

One of my favorite novel formulas is for the author to take two subjects they're incredibly passionate about and use them as a springboard for their characters' problems and growth.

Sean Williams's Impossible Music is right in that sweet-spot.

https://www.impossiblemusic.info/

It's the story of Simon Rain, an 18-year-old Australian noise-rock kid whose hearing is permanently, totally wiped out overnight when he suffers a rare stroke that obliterates the brain structures that process sound. That's the curtain-raiser for a superb coming-of-age novel.

It's the tale of Simon's coming to grips with his new Deafness, and how this affects his obsession with the outer bounds of what music is: when noise is musical, when music is noise, and even whether music has to be audible.

Williams himself was a promising and award-winning young composer who never stopped playing and writing, and like many of the musicians of my acquaintance, he can explain experimental music like John Cage's 4:33 in ways that make it sensible, even to musical dumdums like me.

As Simon struggles to convince a famous musicologist that he should be admitted into her elite composition program at a local uni, Williams takes us on a compelling and edifying journey through the meaning of music itself.

Meanwhile, Simon is also coming to grips with being deaf, and deciding whether he is willing to become Deaf – that is, whether he can make his deafness into part of his identity, a fact of life rather than a disability.

He's aided – and hindered – on this journey by the medical specialists, sign teachers and counsellors assigned to him, and by his girlfriend, who he meets in Deaf class after brutal, unstoppable tinnitus renders her unable to hear.

Simon's journey into adulthood, into Deafness, and into a new kind of musicianhood twine around each other, the familiar trappings of teen romance providing a sturdy, easily grasped scaffold for some deep, philosophical nerding out about two seemingly contradictory subjects.

It's a book that's hard to finish with a dry eye, but it's also a book that'll have you thinking about communications, music, Deafness and accommodation in new ways.

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Yanis Varoufakis on capitalism's self-destruction (permalink)

Here's an admirably compact diagnosis of the malady afflicting capitalism and a suggestion for a cure from Yanis Varoufakis:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/06/yanis-varoufakis-interview-with-lea-el-azzi-on-capitalism-after-the-pandemic-europe-greece-lebanon-the-imf.html

In 2008, we had an "endogenous" crash, caused by the finance sector itself. Governments gave them trillions, but "this liquidity did not turn into actual investment in the real economy."

"Banks recovered, the oligarchy found themselves with appreciating assets, the majority our there had to face harsh austerity. This boosted the disconnect between the world of money (that was doing well) and the world of the real economy (which was not)."

Now we face an "exogenous" crash, caused by the pandemic, but, "when Covid-19 arrived on the scene, it acted like a pin that bursts a gigantic bubble. Reflating this bubble, in the absence of public investment, will not be possible however much money Central Banks pump in."

All this is by design. Capitalism is supposed to produce technologies that undermines capitalism itself: "new machines come into play that cut down the content of labour per unit of output. New jobs are created lower down the hierarchy of work. This means that machines play an increasing role in producing great new products which the machines will never want and which humans are decreasingly able to afford."

Capitalism defenders argue that average standards of living has been improving for 150+ years. But income increase is a bad proxy for standard of living improvement, and actual living standard increases (as in China) are largely attributable to public investment, not markets.

Meanwhile, capitalism's banker-socialism and worker austerity " led to discontent, which then breeds fascism, xenophobia, nativism, ultra-nationalism."

Varoufakis is cofounder of a movement called Progressive Internatioanl, which has 2 goals:

1. "Putting together a global plan for shared green prosperity"

2. "Organising global actions in support of local causes (eg a global campaign in support of striking women workers in, say, India)"

(Image: Pedro Ribeiro Simões, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en)

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India bans Chinese apps (permalink)

India's Ministry of Information Technology has banned 59 Chinese mobile apps, ordering app stores to block them and ISPs to interdict communications with their servers.

https://www.wired.com/story/smartphone-apps-weapon-international-disputes/

This follows a fatal "skirmish" between Chinese and Indian troops on the Himalayan border, and while the banned apps are justifiably suspect on privacy grounds, the unilateral ban of major communications channels without due process has human rights campaigners worried.

In some ways, this kind of ban is inevitable, stemming from the twin monopilistic forces of:

• App Stores: highly centralized repositories of software for the most personal and ubiquitous computing platforms; devices can be configured to ban switching to alternative stores;

• Concentration in telcoms, which makes it practical to enforce national censorship rules because you need only deputize a handful of giant ISPs to follow the rules you've set down.

Anywhere these forces are present is at high risk of this kind of unilateral censorship.

Included in the ban are some of the most popular apps in India, and Indian audiences are crucial to those apps' success. For example, India leads the world in Tiktok downloads, and Wechat plays a major part of the country's messaging activity.

Meanwhile, Indian online spaces are filling up with some pretty dank national cyberspace sovereignty memes, as Bruce Sterling documents here:

https://brucesterling.tumblr.com/post/622355066558595072/memes-erupt-as-india-bans-chinese-smartphone

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Post-Trump trumpism (permalink)

It's hard to predict how the world will look on Nov 3, but if the election were held today, Trump would be slaughtered.

With that in mind, John Quiggin engages in some shrewd analysis of what the US and global right will do when Trump is trounced.

https://crookedtimber.org/2020/06/29/trumpism-after-trump/

Quiggin is sanguine about a peaceful transition between administrations, betting that there won't be enough denial and motivated reasoning either from Trump's base or from party bigwigs to sustain any kind of electoral-fraud/rigged-game attempt to delegitimize the outcome.

Not least because Trump's policies are going to murder people by the tens of thousands in Red State strongholds filled with at-risk elderly veterans, and those same policies mean there is zero chance of an economic recovery in time for election day.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/28/politics/lincoln-project-trump-coronavirus-deaths-greatest-generation/index.html

What will the right do when they are routed?

The big power block will be "hard neoliberals who controlled the party before Trump, attempting to reassert themselves, breaking with Trump’s explicit racism while still trying to keep the Repubs white voting base behind them."

But they will be countered by "more competent Trumpists, in the mould of Viktor Orban, keen to push an ethnonationlist, racist and authoritarian policy program without Trump’s clownish demagoguery."

Globally, a Trump defeat will mean little for dictators in Trump's mold, but it will make some of the right wing of the political class "outside the bounds of legitimate discussion…while others will engage in some quick reinvention."

So look for a battle between "competent Trumpists" and "hard neoliberals," with the neolibs in trouble due to the "massive unpopularity" of "just about everything that is identified with hard neoliberalism."

In particular, it's hard to sell under-40s on finance and trickle-down, because they "never experienced the illusory prosperity of the 1990s, or the crises of the 1970s."

Which means…future dominance of the right by competent Trumpists, I guess?

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Gilead's $3k covid med should sell for $10 (permalink)

Oh, Gilead. No sooner do you stop demanding corporate welfare to help you price-gouge on a covid drug developed at public expense; then you step in a pile of greedy dogshit again, and insist it tastes great and we should try it!

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/19/shared-microbial-destiny-2/#remdesivir

At issue: your decision to charge Americans $3,000 for a five-day course of remdesivir, a drug developed with public money that experts say you could profitably sell for $10.

https://icer-review.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/ICER-COVID_Initial_Abstract_05012020-3.pdf

Now, this isn't all your fault. We can (and should) also blame the finance-friendly, pharma-dependent politicians, many of the Democrats, who paved the way for this, as David Sirota reminds us.

https://sirota.substack.com/p/gilead-is-profiteering-off-a-covid

There's a bipartisan consensus on blocking the reinstatement of a rule that would require pharma companies to charge a fair price for drugs developed at public expense.

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=106&session;=2&vote;=00168

In 2016, Obama blocked Democratic Congressional calls to enforce the existing laws against pharma price-gouging.

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/272065-hhs-rejects-house-dems-request-for-drug-pricing-step

In 2020, GOP Senators blocked reforms that would have allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices, something that (incredibly) they are currently prohibited from doing, forced to pay whatever price pharma companies name

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/477604-drug-price-outrage-threatens-to-be-liability-for-gop

This rare bipartisan unity on transfering public funds to lazy, monopolistic pharma giants is hard to understanding. Maybe its the millions of dollars that pharma companies give to both Republican and Democratic campaigns?

https://khn.org/news/drugmakers-funnel-millions-to-lawmakers-a-few-dozen-get-100000-plus/

The result is that Americans – who financed the R&D; for remdesivir – will pay more for it than anyone else in the world.

Your $29m/year CEO Daniel O'Day earned every penny when he published an open letter defending this practice, on the basis that the US system is unique in the world.

https://www.gilead.com/news-and-press/press-room/press-releases/2020/6/an-open-letter-from-daniel-oday-chairman–ceo-gilead-sciences

He's right! The US system is uniquely broken.

He should know.

He broke it.

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This day in history (permalink)

#10yrsago Fox News advocates shutting down public libraries https://web.archive.org/web/20100711102442/http://www.myfoxchicago.com/dpp/news/special_report/library-taxes-closed-20100628

#10yrago Lost steampunk coaster of Disneyland Paris https://3dconceptualdesigner.blogspot.com/2010/03/project-review-e-ticket-paris-1997.html

#10yrsago Toronto cops justify extreme G20 measures with display of LARPing props, weapons from unrelated busts https://web.archive.org/web/20100702002151/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/weapons-seized-in-g20-arrests-put-on-display/article1622761/

#10yrsago ACLU: America is riddled with politically motivated surveillance https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/Spyfiles_2_0.pdf

#5yrsago Shadowshaper: outstanding supernatural YA contemporary fantasy https://boingboing.net/2015/06/30/shadowshaper-outstanding-supe.html

#5yrsago On Big Data's shrinking returns https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/30/the-shrinking-of-the-big-data-promise

#5yrsago Scalia insult-generator https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/06/antonin-scalia-insult-generator/

#1yrago Police cameras to be augmented with junk-science "microexpression" AI lie-detectors https://finance.yahoo.com/news/face-reading-ai-tell-police-145927474.html

#1yrago Billionaire newspaper monopolist family cancels editorial cartoonist after anti-Trump drawing https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2019/06/29/brunswick-news-inc-cancels-michael-de-adder/

#1yrago Debunking Microsoft's anti-Right-to-Repair FUD https://securepairs.org/microsoft-tells-ftc-repair-poses-a-cyber-risk-it-doesnt/

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing:

• My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 564 words (32922 total).

• A short story, "Making Hay," for MIT Tech Review. Yesterday's progress: 350 words (4272 total)

Currently reading: Anger Is a Gift by Mark Oshiro

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 07) https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/06/22/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-07-2/

Upcoming appearances:

• In Conversation with Hank Green, Jul 10, https://www.magersandquinn.com/product_info?isbn_id=26578312&products;_id=163359157

• 'What Big Tech does to discourse, and the forgotten tech tool that can make tech less big', Jul 1, Oxford Internet Institute https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/6015930181073/WN_MnlH5x2XTRqiKKmhU0QPAg

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

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This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commerically, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

mkalus shared this story from Price Tags.

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Jeff Leigh of HUB reports:

My wife and I rode Stanley Park last Monday, and stopped in at the Prospect Point Café.  We spoke with the staff at the concession, who advised they had been very busy serving people on bikes through the weekend.

We typically do not stop at the top of the hill, but head right on down.  Now we have a reason to stop.

Jeff and his wife haven’t been alone.  Here’s the scene last Sunday:

Here’s the line-up just for ice cream:

Prospect Point Cafe was literally surrounded by bikes and riders – most of whom looked to be in the demographic that any restaurant would find rather attractive.  And since these were all Vancouver residents (no tourists, remember), they’re also the ones who, when out-of-town guests return, will be looking for a good place to take them, whether for ice cream or sit-down meals, whether by bike, car or bus.

Honestly, what it is going to take for businesses people to catch on?  Who can they turn to for advice?

Oh yeah, HUB.  Jeff again:

HUB Cycling is already working on promoting businesses in the park.

HUB has a program called Bike Friendly Business,  which has just the type of offerings that businesses new to dealing with people cycling can use, from Business Development services, to certification, to marketing to people who cycle.  If you have a business and want to talk, please reach out.

There are other HUB Cycling programs and events that can help businesses with marketing to people on bikes as well.  Bike to Shop comes up later in the summer.  Volunteers lead group rides to participating businesses, helping those new to transportation cycling learn how to bike to shops, restaurants, and so on.

It is important that businesses who believe their business is solely dependent on motor-vehicle traffic see that there is a whole community of people who cycle for transportation, and who spend money at local businesses.

 

mkalus shared this story from moodvintage on Twitter.

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mkalus shared this story from phreakindee's YouTube Videos.

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You can’t come to an agreement about a topic unless you share the same definition of the topic.

Communities fall victim to this all the time.

You and I, for example, might share different definitions of what we mean by ‘community’. Your colleagues might too.

Does ‘community’ mean your entire set of stakeholders? (staff, customers, investors etc?)
Does ‘community’ only mean your audience?
Does ‘community’ only mean people who visit a specific community platform?
Does ‘community’ only mean people who visit and participate on our platform?
Does ‘community’ only mean people who visit, participate, and feel a sense of community with one another on your platform?
Does ‘community’ include or exclude people who engage with you and each other on social media?

Until you have a shared understanding of what ‘community’ means, you can’t discuss goals, strategies, or what it means to be a ‘member’ of the community.

This is a great workshop exercise. You can facilitate a session with colleagues (and, yes, members/customers). Provide a few options, let people share how they would define community, and explain the implications of each definition. Then bring people to an agreement on how to define a community.

Once you’re done, create a simple diagram showcasing what community includes (and doesn’t include). Then share this with your team and include it in any document you send out.

Notably, JPMorgan found that 'card-present' transactions in restaurants (meaning the person was dining in, not ordering online) were “particularly predictive” to a later spread of the virus.

And interestingly, the JPMorgan study also found that increased spending in supermarkets correlated to a slower spread of the virus. Analyst Edgerton wrote that the correlation hints that "high levels of supermarket spending are indicative of more careful social distancing in a state."

Big data at its best. Correlate credit card spending with virus spreading.

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Every morning, I use an app on my smartphone called Brain.fm to get into the zone. In the afternoon, I switch to Spotify playlists that I find particularly helpful.

Check out the video below to find out more!

What do you use? Why?

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This post is day seven of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com

Analog is a simple and beautiful tool to help you prioritize and focus on your most important tasks.

I can’t help but feel like this is the PERFECT analog companion to my digital to do-app TeuxDeux.

FMTA @TorontoTenants
Toronto makes health and safety standards in apartment buildings mandatory during pandemic thestar.com/news/city_hall… via @TorontoStar

PicPedant @PicPedant
This is a tidal barrier where water from the Fraser River meets the Strait of Georgia in British Columbia, Canadian… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Josh Marshall @joshtpm
A copious political science literature says that the presidential approval “LOL zone” exists below 40% approval and… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Ewan McIntosh, Jul 01, 2020

Ewan McIntosh is beginning to hit a new stride this week as he comes out with this expressive vision for learning: "Every child will have the entitlement to make music, to peace and quiet, to space and technology to learn what they need to, in the time it takes them, with access to great mentors, teachers and peers who talk about the stuff that matters, teach each other new tricks." Sounds good to me. A vision worth working toward.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Monica Chavez, ALT, Jul 01, 2020

This article looks at new methods for creating and using documents, referencing especially Notion, Coda, and Airtable. "What they do is create fully integrated and dynamic documents that combine the features of a word processor, database, spreadsheet and project management system." The author refers back to Google Wave, a great idea hat never went anywhere, but the new formats also draw inspiration from projects like Jupyter Notebooks, a system that embeds functing software in digital documents, and also collaborative authoring tools, including Google Docs.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Many startups, ours included, have operated in an exclusively remote capacity from the start. Yet many organizations hadn’t embraced a work-from-home culture, due in part to the cost associated with establishing the infrastructure to make it work, as well as the cultural shift that running a remote team requires.

Covid-19 instantly changed that, and because the novel coronavirus has no known cure or vaccine at this time, the path back to “normal” will likely be a long one. When it does finally come time to return to the office, it likely won’t resemble anything we would recognize from before. Here’s why.

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Oh, wie geil. Marshall Headphones spendiert meiner Lieblingsreihe noch ein ganz kleines Modell mit dem Namen Emberton. Gummiert, wasserdicht, 20 Stunden Akku, Bedienung über einen Knopf. Und der wippt so wie der Control Knob an den Marshall Monitor Headphones. Ich habe ihn noch nicht gehört, aber das klingt alles sehr vielversprechend. Verfügbar Ende Juli für 149 Euro. Und etwas später sicher auch für weniger. Weil es für weniger als 149 Euro auch diesen gibt und der ist sehr gut.

mkalus shared this story from Michael Kalus.ca.

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A bit over 24 hours in the Westend. Looking north towards the mountains.

Music courtesy of Chillhop Records. Check them out on your favourite music streaming service or buy their stuff on Bandcamp.

Gianfranco Chicco, editor of The Craftsman, speaks with Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino about ”craftsmanship, repairability and design for longevity” on the Catastrophic Candour video series (via Peter Bihr).

Way back in the first post of this series I mentioned that part of the motivation for Cesil was to get familiar with new C# 8 features, and to use modern patterns. This post will cover how, and why, Cesil has adopted these features.

The feature with the biggest impact is probably IAsyncEnumerable<T>, and it’s associated await foreach syntax. This shows up in Cesil’s public interface, as the returned value of IAsyncReader<TRow>.EnumerateAllAsync(), a parameter of IAsyncWriter<TRow>.WriteAllAsync(…), and as a returned value or parameter on various CesilUtils methods. IAsyncEnumerable<T> enables a nice way to yield elements that are obtained asynchronously, a perfect match for serialization libraries that consume streams. Pre-C# 8 you could kind of accomplish this with an IEnumerable<Task<T>>, but that’s both more cumbersome for clients to consume and slightly weird since MoveNext() shouldn’t block so you’d have to smuggle if the stream is complete into the yielded T. IAsyncEnumerable<T> is also disposed asynchronously, using another new-to-C#-8 feature…

IAsyncDisposable, which is the async equivalent to IDisposable, also sees substantial used in Cesil – although mostly internally. It is implemented on IAsyncReader<TRow> and IAsyncWriter<TRow> and, importantly, IDisposable is not implemented. Using IAsyncDisposable lets you require that disposal happen asynchronously, which Cesil uses to require that all operations on an XXXAsync interface are themselves async. C# 8 also introduces the await using syntax, which makes consuming IAsyncDisposables as simple for clients as consuming IDisposables. Pre-C# 8 if a library wanted to allow clients to write idiomatic code with usings it would have to support synchronous disposal on interfaces with asynchronous operations, essentially mandating sync-over-async and all the problems that it introduces.

The rest of the features introduced in C# 8 mostly see use internally, resulting in a code base that’s a little easier to work on but not having much impact on consumers. From roughly most to least impact-ful, the features adopted in Cesil’s code are:

• Static local functions
  • These were extensively used to implement the “actually go async”-parts of reading and writing, while keeping the fast path await-free.
  • The big benefit is having the compiler enforce that local functions aren’t closing over any variables not explicitly passed into them, which means you can be confident invoking the function involves no implicit allocations.
• Switch expressions
  • These were mostly adopted in a tail position, where previously I’d have a switch where each case returned some calculated value.
  • Using switching expressions instead of switch statements results in more compact code, which is a welcome quality-of-life improvement.
• Default interface methods
  • These let you attach a method with an implementation to an interface. The primary use case is to allow libraries to make additions to an already published interface without that breaking consumers.
  • There’s another use case though, the one Cesil adopts, which is to attach an implemented method that all implementers of an interface will need. An example of this is ITestableDisposable, where the AssertNotDisposed method is the same everywhere but IsDisposed logic needs to be implemented on each implementing type.
  • In older versions of C#, I’d use an extension method or some other static method to share this implementation but default interface methods let me keep the declarations and implementations closer together. Just another small quality-of-life improvement, but there’s potential for this to be a much bigger help in post-1.0 releases of Cesil.
• Indices and Ranges
  • These simplify taking elements or slices of strings, Spans, and so on. Cesil also supported reading and writing the new Index and Range types.
  • Another small quality-of-life improvement, though I have seen this one catch some bugs when changing foo[something.Length – 1] to foo[^1].
• Readonly Members
  • You use these when you can’t make an entire struct readonly, but want the compiler to guarantee certain members don’t mutate the struct.
  • I only did this in a few places, there aren’t that many mutable structs in Cesil, but having the compiler guarantee invariants is always a useful safety net.

Readers who closely follow C# are probably thinking “wait, what about nullable reference types?”. Those were the big new feature in C# 8, and Cesil has adopted them. However, unlike the other new C# 8 features, I intentionally deferred adopting them until Cesil was fairly mature as I wanted to explore converting an existing code base. My next post will go into that process in detail.

There aren’t really any Open Questions around the C# 8 features in this post. There were so many in the previous post on flexibility, that I think it’s probably best to just go and leave your thoughts on them instead.

As a reminder, they were…

1. Are there any missing Format-specific options Cesil should have?
2. Is the amount of control given over Cesil’s allocations sufficient?
3. Are there any interesting .NET types that Cesil’s type mapping scheme doesn’t support?

Following rumours last week, Google has confirmed its acquisition of North, the Waterloo, Ontario-based startup behind the Focals smart glasses.

Both Google and North have published blog posts detailing their side of the acquisition, but overall, this seems like an ideal end for the company.

North’s engineering department has overcome several technical hurdles surrounding smart glasses, including making its tech compatible with different prescription lenses and its unique ring controller that allows the wearer to interact with the Focals’ AR user interface.

Today we’re excited to announce our acquisition by @Google. By combining the talents of North and Google, we’re going to continue making the impossible possible right here in Kitchener-Waterloo. Learn more at https://t.co/7kCQDU39IJ pic.twitter.com/89rs398Y6n

— North (@focalsbynorth) June 30, 2020

Notably, the North team will remain in the Kitchener-Waterloo area given the region is a hotbed for tech talent and Google has an office there.

However, if you were hoping to get your hands on North’s second-generation Focals 2.0, you’re unfortunately out of luck.

“We are winding down Focals 1.0 and we will not be shipping Focals 2.0, but we hope you will continue the journey with us as we start this next chapter,” reads North’s press release.

There’s also no mention yet of how North’s technology and expertise will be utilized at Google. While there are several possibilities, it seems likely the company will work on existing Glass projects or help Google develop a pair of consumer-facing smart glasses similar to the Focals.

If you want to learn more about the first generation Focals, you can read our deep dive here. 

Google’s purchase of North follows its acquisition of Fitbit last year. It’s worth noting it will likely be several years before we learn more about what the North team will be working on from within Google.

Source: North, Google 

The post Google confirms acquisition of Canadian smart glasses startup North appeared first on MobileSyrup.

I know, I know – a million Zoom meetings draining the marrow out of life, right?

Anyway, here’s a free & open email course crafted by the We Are Open Co-op to teach you things you already know (or do you?) about successful online video meetings:

7 Habits of Highly Successful Virtual Meetings

The post Skills for the New Normal appeared first on Open Visual Thinkery.

Parallel zur Neuaufsetzung der IT 550 Rechner und das gesamte zuvor in Eigenleistung verwaltete Rechenzentrum mussten entsorgt werden wurde das noch auf Word95 basierende Fachverfahren Aulak zugunsten eines moderneren Programms ausgetauscht. Aulak gilt unter Experten als Einfallstor für den Emotet -Virus, wie insgesamt die IT-Sicherheitsstruktur des Kammergerichts in den Wochen nach dem Angriff verheerende Bewertungen bekam.

Wenn man seine IT unter Kostendruck partout selbst basteln will, kommt eine irrsinnig teure Tragikomödie heraus.

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