As a journalist that strives always to be taken seriously, I often opt to cover the news of the day that truly matters the most.

In this instance, I’ve finally uncovered a truly useful purpose for Apple’s MacBook Pro Touch Bar. While I once was once optimistic about the thin strip of touchscreen featured above the physical keyboard in the MacBook, at this point it’s clear Apple’s lofty ambitions for the interface haven’t really panned out — at least not until now.

If you’re a child of the late 80s to early 90s like myself, you likely have fond memories of virtual pets. Touch Bar Pet, a work-in-progress virtual pet created by developer Grace Avery (@gracecondition), aims to bring back the concept of a virtual pet, but in Apple’s pricey MacBook Pro.

twitter did someone want a touchbar tamagotchi? pic.twitter.com/Z44uxbOtge

— Grace (@gracecondition) November 18, 2019

‘Version 0.5’ of Touch Bar Pet includes several features pulled directly from one of the most iconic virtual pets, the Tamagotchi. For example, the pet starts as a child and grows into an adult, all while requiring you to feed it, clean up after it and of course, pet it. Just make sure you don’t pet it while it’s napping or it’ll get grumpy.

To feed your digital pet, you tap on the Touch Bar to drop it food. The same actions clean up its poop, while tapping on the creature allows you to pet it. TouchBar Pet is compatible with macOS 10.14 and higher. Avery says there are plans to add more features to the virtual pet in future updates.

The major downside to the all-important Touch Bar virtual pet experience is the app’s window needs to be open and visible for it to run. This means I was unable to clean-up virtual poop while writing this story, which truly is a shame. Hopefully, this issue gets fixed in the future.

If you want to test out the true purpose of Apple’s Touch Bar, you can download Touch Bar pet at this link.

Source: @gracecondition

The post This clever app turns the MacBook Pro’s TouchBar into a virtual pet appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Google Canada is offering some tips on how Torontonians can avoid the holiday rush.

Using Maps data, Google says these are the best times to go out during the holidays:

Best times to visit the below businesses in Toronto:

• Bakery: Bakeries are least crowded on Christmas Day at 7am, while they’re most crowded on Christmas Eve at 1pm
• Grocery store: Grocery stores are least crowded on Christmas at 7am and busiest on Christmas Eve at 2pm
• Liquor store: Liquor stores are quietest at 10pm on Christmas Eve, but most crowded at 3pm
• Movie theatre: Movie theatres are most packed at Christmas Eve at 6pm, but wait until 8pm and they’ll be at their quietest
• Shopping centre: Christmas Day at 7am is the best time to visit a shopping centre and Christmas Eve at 3pm is when they’re at their busiest

Additionally, Google says the three top trending attractions in Toronto are the Toronto Christmas Market, The Bentway and
Earl Bales Ski & Snowboard.

Where are you planning to go this holiday season? Let us know in the comments.

Image credit: Flickr — Roozbeh Rokni

The post Google reveals quietest times to visit Toronto’s public places during the holidays appeared first on MobileSyrup.

mkalus shared this story from Latest topics for ZDNet in Microsoft.

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Many people have lost trust in the tech industry, but there’s a concrete step we can take to do something about it.

Most people who use technology don’t stop to wonder, “Who’s on the board of directors of the company that made this product?” But in a moment when tech is increasingly leaving us feeling uneasy, or even creeped out, unsure if we can trust what’s happening with our data or whether a company has our best intentions in mind, it turns out this is a question that matters.

So today, at Glitch, we’re doing something unprecedented in pushing for accountability and inclusion for a tech company: We’re making an open call for a board member for our company. It’s just one step toward ensuring that we build a lasting, successful business that does right by everyone we serve.

Now, if you like Glitch and just want to use it without thinking about the company behind it — great! Make awesome stuff, we’re glad to have you in the community. But many of you have told us you appreciate that we’re trying to ensure that Glitch isn’t just a company that makes an awesome product, but is thoughtful about being responsible to the communities we serve. And this is our next big step.

What we’re looking for

At Glitch, we’re a rapidly-growing, deeply innovative startup that serves an incredibly broad and brilliant community. Currently, our board consists of our co-founder and chair Joel Spolsky and me, Anil Dash, as CEO.

We’re looking to add at least one more voting board member, as well as potentially one or more non-voting board observers, with the goal of broadening corporate oversight and accountability, helping inform and shape company strategy, expanding the company’s network of relationships, and assisting in key tasks like high-level recruiting or partnerships.

Conventionally, these kinds of seats on a board of directors are apportioned through a closed private backchannel, or are simply negotiated by investors as part of the fundraising process. We think we have a chance to make a fundamentally more innovative strategy and a dramatically more inclusive company culture by making our call for board members as open as everything else we do at our organization.

Standard expectations for a board member include a deep familiarity with the communities, customers and audiences Glitch is looking to serve, experience growing and scaling a meaningful business, and the highest personal and ethical standards for a steward of our company.

That being said, we’re open to unconventional and unexpected candidates as well! This new board member does not necessarily have to have prior experience on the board of an early-stage startup, and naturally we want to explicitly welcome people who belong to underrepresented groups to nominate themselves.

We’re particularly interested in people who can complement or expand the skill sets that Joel and I are familiar with. If you’ve got deep experience with how to grow a high-scale B2B SaaS business, or a strong background in building large-scale creator communities, or fluency in how to build a world-class consumer brand in media and culture, or any other particular expertise that would take Glitch to the next level from a corporate standpoint, please do get in touch.

How the process will work

Reach out and send us a message to openboard@glitch.com to get in touch. Tell us a bit about yourself, and what things inspire you on the web or in your favorite creative community, and of course which parts of building a thriving, meaningful business are most compelling to you. And you can suggest others for the board — so don’t be shy about passing this call along, or even just letting us know about someone to contact.

Once you do, we’ll get in touch with you with any follow up questions and to schedule a call so we can get to know each other. (And just like everything we do at Glitch, everyone will get a response.)

What are the board’s responsibilities?

Obviously, the core responsibility of a board member is to ensure our business is run successfully, effectively and responsibly, and to encourage corporate accountability. You’ll be there to make sure we’re doing right by our community, our users and employees. Your responsibilities will include attending quarterly board meetings, typically in person in NYC, but remote can work as well. Naturally, we’ll cover expenses related to participating in any board responsibilities, and compensation for this role will be in the form of equity.

If you have special skills or qualifications that are pertinent to our work, we’re happy to accommodate those in your responsibilities as a board member, and we’ll work with you to strengthen any necessary skills as well.

We are excited to bring our company and our community to a new level by inviting a new board member to help guide our growth and evolution, and we can’t wait to welcome a new leader to our team.

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An Open Board: A new step toward tech accountability. was originally published in Glitch on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Tight black pants apparently.  Granville near Pender.

If y’all haven’t caught up recently with my podcast Distributed, this is a perfect moment to do so—the past several weeks have been full of insights from folks like InVision CEO Clark Valberg, attorney and advocate Lydia X. Z. Brown, Stephen Wolfram, and some of my own Automattic colleagues in-person at our Grand Meetup.

You can subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Google, Overcast, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. 

The Importance of IRL in a World of Screens (Automattic Grand Meetup)

“When you work in a distributed company, every time that you interact with your colleagues via text… you are taking out of your social bank account with them. So when you get people together, that’s when you have the opportunity to see each other face-to-face, and remind everybody that you’re all human beings. And fill that social capital back up because it’s so hard to communicate via text.”

Building the Tools That Bring the Screen to Life (Clark Valberg, InVision) 

“We needed it as a talent hack, as a talent arbitrage. Hire the best people wherever they happen to be, figure everything out later, hire them quickly, get them in the ship as early as possible and start seeing results. How can I just hire the best people no matter where they are?”

Making Work Accessible, Wherever It Happens (Lydia X. Z. Brown)

“I have believed from a very young age that every single one of us has a moral obligation to use whatever resources we have — time, money, knowledge, skills, emotional energy, access to physical resources — however that might be defined — that we each have a moral obligation to use those resources in service of justice, and fighting against injustice and oppression and violence in all of its forms, structural and individual, subtle and overt.”

Inside Toptal’s Distributed Screening Process (Taso Du Val) 

“I was going into an office but not seeing anyone or interacting with anyone except myself. So it almost was this zombie-like walk to the office every morning where I’m going to the office because I go to work, but I don’t see anyone who I work with. [laughs] And so I actually started waking up and just working on my computer at home. And then I said to myself, ‘Well, why am I even working from home?'”

The Machine That Turns Ideas Into Real Things (Stephen Wolfram) 

“You can do things that are very commercial, but a little bit intellectually boring. And it tends to be the case that you’re doing a lot of rinse-and-repeat stuff if you want to grow purely commercially, so to speak. Or, you can do things that are wonderful intellectually, but the world doesn’t happen to value them and you can’t make commercial sense that way. And I’ve tried to navigate something in between those two where it’s where I’m really intellectually interested and where it’s commercially successful enough to sustain the process for a long time.”

Welcome to the Chaos (Sonal Gupta, Automattic)

“I like to trust people and give them autonomy. But I keep in touch with them very regularly and I think it becomes clear pretty quickly if somebody is not doing work. We look at performance, and we look at communication at a distributed company. Communication is oxygen.” 

Observe, Don’t Surveil: Managing Distributed Teams with Respect (Scott Berkun)

“To work at a remote company demanded great communication skills, and everyone had them. It was one of the great initial delights. Every corporation has the same platitudes for the importance of clear communication, yet utterly fails to practice it. There was little jargon at Automattic. No ‘deprioritized action items’ or ‘catalyzing of crossfunctional objectives.’ People wrote plainly, without pretense and with great charm.” 

How to Build and Strengthen Distributed Engineering Teams (Cate Huston, Automattic)

“A senior engineer makes the whole team better, but we don’t want to be prescriptive about how people made the team better. That was up to them. There were options, but that was the expectation for everyone on the team. You come in, you’re an experienced engineer, we expect you to be making the whole team better in some way, and what that looks like is up to you.” 

How to Stay Connected in a Distributed World (Leo Widrich) 

“I started to feel like I was hitting a wall. This thing that I always dreamt of, to have a profitable company, to be financially secure, to have a team… I felt that having that success, having some of that financial security — it left me unfulfilled in a lot of other areas. — in the sense of deep lasting connection and also a lack of emotional resilience to deal with the ups and downs that startup life comes with.”

Helping Creativity Happen from a Distance (John Maeda) 

“My point is blogging is good for you. It’s mental health, it’s expression, it’s sharing your process with the world. And when you relate to the world, your standard of quality floats to that value of the world. It’s a market economy of ideas and by putting ourselves out there, you become relevant.”

Engineering with Empathy (Han Yuan, Upwork) 

“We really want to encourage empathy in general. And so a key part of empathy is being able to try to see the other person’s point of view. And in an organization as distributed as ours where people come from all around the world, we view it as an essential ingredient to developing deep and meaningful collaboration.”

How to Do HR in a Blended Company (Zoe Harte, Upwork) 

“That means saying, ‘Okay, our entire organization will connect this many times a year in this many ways. There will be an all-department meeting once a month, once a quarter — whatever is appropriate — and that we will cover these three priorities and in broad progress and how it’s impacting the business overall.’ And then the expectation would be that the smaller subsets of teams are meeting in this way.”

On Building Automattic (Me)

“Our distributed roots did not come from some grand vision, but instead emerged from cold realities. Colocation (being in the same place, at the same time) is expensive!”

Is Remote Work Bulls—t? (Arianna Simpson)

“I think having people come and interrupt you every 25 seconds, as is often the case in open floor plans, is definitely not the most productive situation. So the model I’ve seen work well, or the model I lean towards, is having an office where people are working from, but having private offices or spaces where people can plug in their headphones and just do work alone while still being in the same place as, hopefully, all of their colleagues.”

For Years, VR Promised to Replace the Office. Could It Really Happen Now? (John Vechey, Pluto VR)

“The technology forces you to be present — in a way flatscreens do not — so that you gain authentic experiences, as authentic as in real life. People remember VR experiences not as a memory of something they saw but as something that happened to them.”

Mary Stuart, Liz Shutt, Wonkhe, Nov 27, 2019

The authors are a Vice-Chancellor and Director of Policy at the University of Lincoln. The core for their short manifesto is  that "permeability should be the new lens which reframes the historic, core activities of universities; across organisational and national boundaries, between different groups and communities, technologies, and disciplines." I think that 'permeability' is a great work to represent the concept of being able to say that the university is open and interactive, without it really being so. And I'm afraid that the manifesto doesn't reach far beyond the existing conception of the university (after all, what can be said of a call to "slow things down" and "partnerships between policy makers, societal interest groups and researchers."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Med Kharbach, Educational Technology and Mobile Learning, Nov 27, 2019

What drew me to this post (first posted in 2017 and just reposted) was the really nice image of a graph (view it here) created by the first of the four tools listed, Lucidchart. Notice how the illustration of a process diagram is not just a fancy way to create a hierarchy (like this, this, and this, maps from the other three tools mentioned in the article), but actually shows a web of connections and flows. Such illustrations do a lot more to enhance understanding than do taxonomies or categorizations (despite the prevalance of taxonomies and categorizations in educational research). If you're on a Chromebook, get Lucidchart here. It works fine on other systems through a browser window, and might become a staple in my repertoire.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

As your community grows, you eventually spend more time removing content than creating it.

This requires archiving content, discussions, and even members.

Your goal is to encourage members to more easily find the most relevant (up to date) content they need with the minimum possible effort.

There are a few useful steps here.

1) Archive ‘no visit’ and ‘low visit’ content. If few people have visited an item of content in the past year, consider archiving it. However, be careful of removing highly useful, but niche, long-tail content (generally 3+ visits of 20+ seconds is worth keeping). Don’t delete it entirely as this will impact gamification scores of veteran members.

2) Archive out of date content. You can usually safely archive discussions that are 5+ years old – especially when new products have been released in that category. Sometimes you can archive discussions that are 2+ years old.

3) Archive unpopular content. If some discussions are clearly unpopular by rating/votes – consider archiving this too.

4) Remove no-visit members. If members haven’t visited in 3+ years, consider removing them too. Don’t delete their contributions (this could break a lot of discussions) but send out an email letting them know their account and data will be anonymised within 3 months.

It’s tempting to hoard as much content as possible. But this creates a tougher experience for members who want to find the best information right now. Instead, develop a system to automate the archiving and removal of low-value content and inactive members.

Apple’s own Smart Battery cases for the iPhone 11 family have a dedicated camera button. That sounds neat, but, wait– there’s no camera button on the iPhone itself. We wanted to solve this (minor) mystery, so we called in some help from the X-ray wizards at Creative Electron.

More >

Brett O'Connor @logoninternet
perhaps Twitter should measure the account's logged-on-ness, and if it has ever been extremely logged-on at any tim… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Canada made the list of offering a ‘Very Good’ mobile video experience along with 22 other countries that have significantly improved in one year, according to OpenSignal’s new report.

The State of Mobile Video Experience report was released on November 27th. The study indicated that out of the 100 countries analyzed, 59 nations changed their Video Experience category. 21 countries also moved into the Good category.

Canada, which ranked third in download speed in a previous OpenSignal report on the State of Mobile, ranked 22nd for quality of Mobile Video Experience.

South Korea, which ranked first in download speed in the other report, ranked 21st for quality of Mobile Video Experience.

“This contrast between results in part reflects the way wireless operators routinely manage mobile video traffic differently to file downloads in order to prevent the vast quantities of video data hurting the experience of other mobile apps and services,” OpenSignal said in the report.

Ranking first on that list was Norway, followed by Czech Republic, Austra, Denmark and Hungary, the report said.

Among the other larger markets that moved to the Very Good tier include Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and the U.K.

Canada was the only country in North and Central America to score Very Good. This means “our users experienced generally fast loading times with only occasional stalling,” according to OpenSignal.

“Canada’s 4G networks offer download speeds as high as 200Mbps to our users, which is a very high bar to attain,” OpenSignal wrote. “Although download speeds don’t necessarily correlate to good Video Experience, in Canda’s case they do.”

The U.S., in contrast, scored only in the Fair category, according to the report. OpenSignal said that the country’s score only slightly increased but “not enough to shift U.S. consumers up a gear into the Good category.”

“Americans had the lowest Video Experience score of any of the G7 economically leading countries as U.S. carriers struggle with the combination of enormous mobile video consumption and insufficient new spectrum,” OpenSignal wrote.

OpenSignal’s report is based on testing 37,671,772 total devices. The report added it took 94,086,045,513 total measurements and that the data was collected between August 1st and October 30th, 2019.

The post Canada first North American country to rank ‘Very Good’ in mobile video experience appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Last month my eldest daughter ran the Amsterdam marathon. She achieved her aim of running the 26.2 miles (42.2 km) in under her target of four and a half hours. A marathon is something you need to train for. The race was won by the spectacular Eliud Kipchoge, an extraordinary athlete and the world record holder, who has won nearly every race he's ever entered and who finished with a time of

Twitter will remove inactive accounts after December 11th, which means you might soon be able to get that username that you couldn’t because it was taken.

The rollout will be over “many months,” so it will take some time before a username is made available, Engadget reported.

Twitter is doing this cleanup in a way to “present more accurate, credible information,” which users can rely on.

Engadget explained that this might be helpful for those trying to search for a user or their tweets, without having to go through thousands of random or inactive accounts.

It also means those accounts belonging to deceased users or those in extended hospital stays might be deleted. That would mean that their tweets will be long gone. With respect to this aspect, Internet Archive software curate and digital preservationist Jason Scott launched an iniative to preserve tweets from deceased loved ones. Called Twittering Dead, the project will archive the accounts of deceased individuals.

At the moment, there is no way that an account can be memorialized.

“We do not currently have a way to memorialize someone’s Twitter account once they have passed on, but the team is thinking about ways to do this,” a Twitter spokesperson told The Verge.

You can be a part of the project by filling out this Google Form.

Source: Engadget, The Verge

The post Twitter to remove inactive accounts after December 11th appeared first on MobileSyrup.

At the monthly Island Storytellers session last week, the theme being “rebellion”, I clumsily told a two-part tale of the Yorkshire Luddites, the first part on the machine breaking activities of March and April, 1812, the second covering the murder of William Horsfall in April of that year, and the consequent Special Commission in York in January 1813.

Though there was way too much for the telling (and notwithstanding I’m still trying to find a storytelling voice), it’s helped me bed in some of the names and dates, certainly enough to start pulling together a set of stories around that should give me a tale of rebellion or murder should ever I need one again…

I’ve also started collecting books on the subject and, given this week is a strike week, an opportunity to start trying to find my way into the archives.

There are also lots of things to crib from…

Dave Pattern’s most excellent Huddersfield Exposed website contains a wealth of scanned resources on all matters relating to the history of Huddersfield, including several relating to the Luddites, including a scan of the second edition of Peel’s Risings of the Luddites, Chartists and Plugdrawers, Cowgill’s Historical Account of the Luddites of 1811, 1812 and 1813 , and, in direct response to a request for the same (thanks, Dave :-), a scan of the Proceedings at York — Special Commission 1813 on which the two aforementioned works draw heavily.

Rather more specifically, the Luddite Centenary blog is just an amazingly comprehensive retelling, recording on a daily basis, diary/calendar style, the unfolding history of 200 years before. Whilst some of the posts include literal transcripts of historical documents, many re-present the events in a more narrative way, albeit with pointers into the historical record. I’m trying to get hold of an export version of this site because it’d be a wonderful thing to try to pull into a database and run a named entity tagger over, for example, but I may just scrape it on the side too… erm… fair dealing in terms of personal research?!

There are also several notable books out there to add colour and background, as well as relevant context and critique around the social, political and economic conditions of the time, and I’ll be making my way through those over the strike period (and probably beyond): Darvall’s Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England” (based on his PhD thesis), and Hammond & Hammond’s The Skilled Labourer, 1760-1832, for example. (Another, more recent, PhD thesis that looks relevant for dipping into the archives is Bend’s 2018 thesis, The Home Office and public disturbance, c. 1800-1832.)

As far as original documents go, the Home Office archives HO 40/1 The Luddite riots – reports and HO 40/2 The Luddite riots – military reports are where I’m starting, and which are perhaps most immediately relevant. (Additional Home Office records can be found via the National Archives here, or search the National Archives using references of the form HO-42-19.) I can’t quite thoile getting Writings of the Luddites just now, but I’m intrigued as to what’s in it… (Please feel free to buy and ship me a copy from my wishlist… Or anything else from on there, for that matter, it being Christmas upcoming and all that…;-)

There are probably lots of other Home Office collections that contain relevant stuff, but I’ll be relying on secondary sources to give me rather more targeted initial hooks into those…

One of the things I am finding quite tricky is actually reading the handwritten script (palaeographer, I am not..). Someone has obviously read the originals in compiling posts on the Luddite Centenary blog, but I haven’t been able to find the original transcripts anywhere.

One thing I have been using to support my own transcription (using the Luddite Centenary posts as a crib, I have to admit!) is Transkribus, which I found via a British Library site, I think, an EU funded project that provides a cross-platform app for supporting the transcription of hand-written docs. (I had considered trying to build my own tool chain, but this was much easier!)

The app itself provides, out of the can, the ability to identify lines of handwriting and then you can provide your own transcription against the line:

The application can also try to do script2text conversions. There are some built in models available, but they didn’t seem to work so well. The idea seems to be more that you provide your own transcribed documents and when you have 15k words / 50 pages or so ready to go, you request permission to train a model on that; but that will take me some time to get to!

(I am hoping to bootstrap at some point, getting a model that can start to help with making transcriptions at least, providing a crude draft I could then work from to correct…)

Transkribus also allows you to tag certain elements, but I don’t think the tags, which would presumably be used as the basis for training a named entity tagger, are used for anything much at the moment. Still, it makes sense to tag-as-you-go, I guess!

At the moment I’m still in very early days, and my reading is not that fast. I have started wondering about models based on particular correspondents, such as Joseph Radcliffe, Justice of the Peace in Huddersfield. I’m not sure if the CC00727 – SIR JOSEPH RADCLIFFE OF HUDDERSFIELD, LUDDITE RECORDS ON MICROFILM (MIC:5) held by the West Yorkshire Archive Service contain papers written by Radcliffe as well as ones sent to him, but if they do it might be interesting to to try to get a digitised copy of them and run them through against the model…

One thing I have found slightly trickier than I’d expected is tracking down both Parliamentary papers and Parliamentary Acts. The UK Parliament Parliamentary Archives sends you off to a commercial Proquest database (subscription required; I presumably do have academic access, but: a) I’m on strike, so using my open.ac.uk credentials would be crossing the picket like; b) other people aren’t so privileged).

What is irksome is that I can download a scanned copy of the pages from Google going from Google Books, to trying to read the book (not necessarily successfully — I don’t have cookies set…) on Google Play, which adds it to my Google Play library:

and from where I can download it as a PDF…

A quick way into the Google Book pages for the Parliamentary Papers can be found here, Britain, Parliamentary Papers on the Post Office, Sessions 1810 – 1819. (Similar links aren’t on the Parliamentary Archive pages, perhaps because the Google scans… well… Google… Their rapacious and flagrant disregard for copyright is handy, sometimes…)

Accessing Parliamentary debates is possible via a hacky API. For example, the Frame Work Bill, which you can find being introduced in Journal of the House of Commons, Volume 67 (1812), p.116. (again, via Google) can be tracked, if you browse enough pages, through the following debates:

• FRAME WORK BILL. HC Deb 18 February 1812 vol 21 cc847-53

• FRAME WORK BILL. HC Deb 20 February 1812 vol 21 cc859-66

• FRAME WORK BILL. HL Deb 27 February 1812 vol 21 cc964-79 notable not least because it includes Lord Byron’s maiden speech, speaking in favour of the Luddites;

• PROTEST AGAINST GOING INTO A COMMITTEE ON THE FRAME WORK BILL. HL Deb 02 March 1812 vol 21 cc1084-6

and so on…

Finding the Act, once passed, becomes another matter. In the case of the 1812 Frame Breaking Act, which is to say, 1812: 52 George 3. c.16: The Frame-Breaking Act, or more fully “An Act for the more exemplary Punishment of Persons destroying or injuring any Stocking or Lace Frames, or other Machines or Engines used in the Framework knitted Manufactory, or any Articles or Goods in such Frames or Machines”, a transcription is available via The Statutes Project — statutes.org.uk, which itself got the transcription from the Luddite Bicentenary website, but that is far from comprehensive in terms of complete transcriptions.

However, the The Statutes Project does also provide a chronological list of UK Statutes which links, again, to Google Book scanned versions of the statute books (example). And again, PDFs can be downloaded.

A couple of other notable Acts are the Unlawful Oaths Act (May 1812, 52 Geo. III c. 104) and the Watch and Ward Act, (March 1812, 52 Geo. III c. 17), aka the Nottingham Peace Act, aka the Preservation of the Peace Act. By the by, I note a locally published copy of this act on the Calderdale “From Weaver to Web” Visual Archive website.

For a list of the actual acts by name, Wikipedia seems most convenient: List of Acts of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, 1801–1819.

As a break from the reading, I’ve also started to track down related things to listen to and watch… For example, The Luddite Lament, a BBC radio programme from 2011, now on BBC Sounds, provides an interesting take on the Luddite times from the songs that commemorate it.

Finding songs otherwise is pretty tricky (I’m still trying to figure out how to do anything useful on the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library website!). There are some transcribed here and there’s at least one on the Luddite Bicentenary site: The Hand-Loom Weavers’ Lament. There are also a couple on the Yorkshire Garland Group Yorkshire folk song website, specifically: Foster’s Mill and The Cropper Lads.

Telly wise, there’s a Thames TV drama documentary from 1988 on The Luddites (available here but the Sophos spyware IT installed on my machine tries to block this site; it’s also on Youtube, so once again, Google’s disregard for all things copyright, except when it suits them, is handy…). It reminded me of Culloden, taking a documentary style approach as if it were recorded at the time. There’s also a Granada TV series from 1967, Inheritance (catchphrase: “there’s trouble at t’mill”), based on a novel of the same name by Phyllis Bentley. I’m waiting for a secondhand copy of the book to arrive, but haven’t tracked down the video…

PS Just as an aside, the Luddite history also acts as a useful branching point into other stories. For example, during the attack on Cartwright’s Rawfolds Mill, two Luddites died (“justifiable homicide”, no trial necessary) and two others were suspected to have died shortly therafter. In the days following the attack, a local parson lodging at Lousy Farm (now Thorn Bush Farm) in Liversedge, near to his church, St Peter’s, Hartshead-cum-Clifton [map], from whence this legend comes, was passing the church in the early hours of the morning. He heard a disturbance, and noticed several men secretly buring someone in the south-east corner of the graveyard. Knowing of the recent action, and further that there had been no recent burials in that part of the graveyard — the men were not graverobbers — he did not intervene but carried on his way. The Parson, who had been appointed to a curacy at All Saints, Dewsbury, in December, 1809, and thence to St Peter’s in in March, 1811, had originally hailed from Ireland under the name Patrick Brunty. Upon taking a place at St John’s College, Cambridge, in October, 1802, he had changed his surname, aged 25, to Brontë. He was later to marry and have several children, including a daughter whose second novel, “Shirley”, published in 1849, was set in, and around, the Spen Valley. The novel fictionalised the Luddite times, though several historical figures are recognisable within it. That daughter’s first novel, “Jane Eyre”, had previously garnered good reviews; her name, as you may already have guessed, was Charlotte. Her father’s tales of life in and around St Peter’s had surely (doh!) informed that tale…

3 Al Purdys, from Bruce Cockburn’s 2017 album Bone On Bone, has been running through my head since I first heard it last week.

It may have inspired in me a newfound love for poetry, especially the poetry of Al Purdy, from which much of the lyrics of the song are drawn:

Stand in the swaying boxcar doorway
moving east away from the sunset and
after a while the eyes digest a country and
the belly perceives a mapmaker’s vision
in dust and dirt on the face and hands here
its smell drawn deep thru the nostrils down
to the lungs and spurts thru blood stream
campaigns in the lower intestine
and chants love songs to the kidneys

(Excerpt from Transient, by Al Purdy, from Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets: Selected Poems 1962-1996).

The Ontario government is launching a five-year e-scooter pilot program that allows municipalities to decide whether they want to allow e-scooters on their roads.

The pilot, announced by Vijay Thanigasalam, the parliamentary assistant to Caroline Mulroney, the Minister of Transportation, is set to start on January 1st 2020.

“Ontario’s five-year e-scooter pilot will give people a new, clean and green way to get from point A to point B in their communities,” said Thanigasalam. “This pilot is another way that our government is giving consumers more choice and making Ontario open for business.”

Cities have a significant amount of control regarding how e-scooters can be legally used, including whether to allow or prohibit them on roads, in parks and on trails. Municipalities can also dictate where e-scooter parking is located, and in general, how scooters are managed.

The five-year pilot requires that riders always wear a helmet and be a minimum of 16-years-old. All e-scooters also need to have a front and rear light, along with a horn or bell.

Bird Canada launched in Alberta in early July. The company is a division of Bird, which is co-owned by entrepreneur John Bitove, the co-founder of the Toronto Raptors, and Stewart Lyons, who launched SiriusXM Canada and is also a Mobilicity co-founder.

Regarding Toronto, Bird Canada’s e-scooter sharing platform also briefly ran a pilot project in the city’s Distillery District from September 5th to the 15th.

While e-scooters are a convenient, affordable form of last-mile transportation in major cities, the dockless nature of the transportation often results in sidewalks littered with e-scooters. Further, bike lanes are already a scarce commodity in large Canadian cities like Toronto. This means that that forcing bike riders share already crowded bike lanes with electric scooters will likely be a point of contention for many.

In total, e-scooters have been launched in over 125 U.S. cities, along with being piloted in areas of Quebec and Alberta.

Source: Ontario Government 

The post Ontario announces 5-year e-scooter pilot that lays legal groundwork for Bird and Lime appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Open EdTech Global, Google Docs, Nov 27, 2019

The Open EdTech conference has released "12 guiding principles, developed by the educational technologists who came together at our first conference in Barcelona." Signatories come from organizations like Moodle, Androgogic, Mahara, and the Open Education Consortium. Following is a set of six discussion areas presented in terms of principles, actions and reflections. This document should be regarded as a draft. In many ways it's very shallow, and represents an educator-centric perspective of the subject. Could this evolve into a really strong statement? I'm not sure this community has the follow-through.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The State of Mozilla annual report for 2018 is now available here.

This report details how Mozilla operates and includes details from our financial reports for 2018. The State of Mozilla report release is timed to coincide with when we submit the Mozilla non-profit tax filing for the previous calendar year.

The 2018 State of Mozilla report focuses on how Mozilla leverages its unique structure and multi-pronged approach to influence some of the most pressing challenges people face online today. From misinformation to online privacy and security, in the last two years Mozilla has used its resources, influence and product know-how to push for systemic change that helps put people back at the center of online life.

This year’s report outlines Mozilla’s collective impact as a creator of consumer technology products, an advocacy organization and a key contributor to the development of internet policy and online standards and protocols that help ensure the internet is open and accessible to all.

Mozilla continues to believe that the internet can and should be a positive force for individuals and for societies. However, there are deep problems to be solved to make this true in an enduring way for the future. An obvious first step is to help people understand and protect themselves from current online harms. This gives Mozilla better knowledge to address the problems at a deeper level — to create new and better experiences where respect and security for the individual are built into our core product.

We measure our success not only by the adoption of our products, but also by our ability to increase the control people have in their online lives, our impact on the internet, our contribution to standards, and how we work to protect the overall health of the web.

None of the work we do or the impact we have would be possible without the dedication of our global community of contributors and loyal Firefox users. We are incredibly grateful for the support and we will continue to fight for the open internet.

We encourage you to get involved to help protect the future of the internet, join Mozilla.

The post State of Mozilla 2018: Annual Report appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Mozilla and the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) to jointly build new alliance to foster open voice data and technology in Africa and beyond

Berlin – 25 November 2019. Today, Mozilla and the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) have announced to join forces in the collection of open speech data in local languages, as well as the development of local innovation ecosystems for voice-enabled products and technologies. The initiative builds on the pilot project, which our Open Innovation team and the Machine Learning Group started together with the organization “Digital Umuganda” earlier this year. The Rwandan start-up collects language data in Kinyarwanda, an African language spoken by over 12 million people. Further languages in Africa and Asia are going to be added.

Mozilla’s projects Common Voice and Deep Speech will be the heart of the joint initiative, which aims at collecting diverse voice data and opening up a common, public database. Mozilla and the BMZ are planning to partner and collaborate with African start-ups, which need respective training data in order to develop locally suitable, voice-enabled products or technologies that are relevant to their Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Mozilla and the BMZ are also inviting like-minded companies and identifying further countries interested in joining their efforts to open up language data.

The German Ministry and Mozilla share a similar vision and work towards the responsible use of automated decision-making and artificial intelligence for sustainable development on scale. Supporting partner countries in reaching the SDGs, today, the BMZ is carrying out more than 470 digitally enhanced projects in over 90 countries around the world. As part of the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, the Federal German Government has agreed to support developing countries in building up capacities and knowledge on opportunities and challenges of AI – an area of expertise that the Mozilla Foundation has heavily invested in with their work on trustworthy AI.

“Artificial Intelligence is changing and shaping our societies globally. It is critical that these technologies are both trustworthy and truly serve everyone. And that means they need to be developed with local needs and expertise in mind, diverse, decentralized, and not driven by monopolies,” says Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation.

“Innovating in AI poses complex technological, regulatory and ethical challenges. This is why I am very pleased to see multiple teams within Mozilla working together in this promising cooperation with the BMZ, building on our shared visions and objectives for a positive digital future,” adds Katharina Borchert, Chief Open Innovation Officer of the Mozilla Corporation.

The cooperation was announced at Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Berlin and will be part of the BMZ initiative “Artificial Intelligence for All: FAIR FORWARD”. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed at Mozilla’s headquarters in Mountain View on November 14.

Mozilla believes that the internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible for all people, no matter where they are and which language they speak. With projects such as Common Voice and Deep Speech, Mozilla’s Machine Learning Group is working on advancing and democratizing voice recognition technology on the web.

Useful Links:

• Mozilla Medium Blog Post: Sustainable tech development needs local solutions: Voice tech ideation in Kigali
• Mozilla Foundation: Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence
• About Common Voice
• About Deep Speech
• “Demand Better Of The Internet”: Mozilla at Internet Governance Forum Berlin

The post Mozilla and BMZ Announce Cooperation to Open Up Voice Technology for African Languages appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Another release is out for the Windows Terminal preview! This release is labeled as v0.7 in the About section of the Terminal. As always, you can download the Terminal from the Microsoft Store and from the GitHub releases page. Here’s what’s new in this release:

Windows Terminal Updates

Panes

You are now able to split your Terminal window into multiple panes! This allows you to have multiple command prompts open at the same time within the same tab.

Note: At the moment, you’re only able to open your default profile within a new pane. Opening a profile of your choice is an option we’re planning to include in a future release!

The following key bindings are included by default within this release to invoke panes actions:

{ "command": "splitHorizontal", "keys": [ "alt+shift+-" ] },
{ "command": "splitVertical", "keys": [ "alt+shift+plus" ] },
{ "command": { "action": "moveFocus", "direction":"down" }, "keys": [ "alt+down" ] },
{ "command": { "action": "moveFocus", "direction":"left" }, "keys": [ "alt+left" ] },
{ "command": { "action": "moveFocus", "direction":"right" }, "keys": [ "alt+right" ] },
{ "command": { "action": "moveFocus", "direction":"up" }, "keys": [ "alt+up" ] },
{ "command": { "action": "resizePane", "direction":"down" }, "keys": [ "alt+shift+down" ] },
{ "command": { "action": "resizePane", "direction":"left" }, "keys": [ "alt+shift+left" ] },
{ "command": { "action": "resizePane", "direction":"right" }, "keys": [ "alt+shift+right" ] },
{ "command": { "action": "resizePane", "direction":"up" }, "keys": [ "alt+shift+up" ] },

Tab Reordering

You can now reorder your tabs! A huge thank you goes out to James Clarke (@Clarkezone) for completing this pull request while at Microsoft Ignite! Here’s the video of him demoing it on the show floor.

Note: You are currently not able to reorder tabs when running the Terminal as administrator (it will crash if you try). Additionally, the UI of the tab will occasionally disappear when reordering. This issue is already being tracked on GitHub.

Suppress Application Title

You can now suppress all title change events that are sent from the application running within your Terminal. This means, you can have either the "name" or "tabTitle" of your profile appear in your tab without it updating! This implementation mimics the original "tabTitle" functionality released in v0.3. By setting "suppressApplicationTitle" to true, if you have "tabTitle" set, "tabTitle" will appear in your tab. Otherwise, the profile’s "name" will appear in your tab.

"tabTitle": "Ubuntu",
"suppressApplicationTitle": true

UI Improvements

There is no longer a thick border around the Terminal! The border is much thinner and will display your accent color when you have it set to do so in the Color page of your Windows settings.

Note: If you don’t have this setting enabled, the border will be white.

Bug Fixes

Here are some of the major bug fixes included in this release:

Line endings when pasting behave properly!

Alt+Arrow-Keys no longer print extra characters!

When you’re scrolled up, pasting now scrolls down to the prompt when using "snapOnInput"!

Quickly opening and closing tabs will crash less!

Cascadia Code Updates

Cascadia Code has received a major update! Here’s what’s new:

• Greek, Cyrillic, and Vietnamese are now supported!

• We have a powerline (Cascadia Code PL) version!

• There is also a version that ships without coding ligatures (Cascadia Mono)!

To get all of the latest goodness from Cascadia Code, feel free to download whichever font files you like from the GitHub repo!

Note: The Windows Terminal ships with the base version, which only includes coding ligatures.

Community News

Microsoft Ignite 2019

This year, members of the Windows Terminal team went to Microsoft Ignite in Orlando, Florida from November 4 – 8. At the conference, Kayla Cinnamon and Carlos Zamora held a 45-minute session discussing what’s new with the Terminal, demoing its customization model and functionality, and chatting about what’s coming next. You can watch the recording of the session here: https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/81329?source=sessions

Top Contributors

We always appreciate contributions made from our community and we would like to acknowledge those who have made a large impact on this release!

Contributors Who Opened the Most Non-Duplicate Issues

skyline75489

j4james

greg904

Contributors Who Created the Most Merged Pull Requests

skyline75489

j4james

greg904

d-bingham

huoyaoyuan

spicaSL

Dugnychon

shakeel30

Contributors Who Provided the Most Comments on Pull Requests

skyline75489

greg904

ironyman

Until Next Time

As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out to Kayla (@cinnamon_msft) on Twitter. If you find any bugs or would like to request a new feature, you can file an issue on GitHub! We hope you like this month’s release and we’ll see you in the next one!

The post Windows Terminal Preview v0.7 Release appeared first on Windows Command Line.

Trudging through the rain is rarely enjoyable, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. A great umbrella can reduce the misery, keep you (mostly) dry, and be stowed away when it’s not needed. After 66 hours of research and putting 48 umbrellas through five rounds of testing, we’re confident the Repel Easy Touch Umbrella remains the best umbrella. Its nine-rib construction held up against gale-force winds, and it’s as sturdy as umbrellas that sell for more than twice as much.

Im Rahmen der Black Friday Angebote verschenkt Pixelmator heute den Foto-Editor Pixelmator Photo für iPad.

More >

(point of order: I'm just going to say "brand-unsafe context" here because we already know way too much about all the worst-case places where a Facebook ad might run. Excuse the marketing speak, but I'm not getting paid enough for this blog to think any more about all the redacted on Facebook than I have to. Follow the links if you really want to read about where your Facebook ad runs.)

Facebook makes the news in unpleasant ways, but so far this hasn't had much of an impact on the company. The decision-makers who matter are the people who buy the ads, from huge companies all the way to individual small business owners typing their credit card numbers into Facebook Ads Manager. And those decision-makers are still buying ads. Revenue is up.

Facebook does some magic algorithm shit to match your ad to people likely to click on it, and some of those people click on it and buy something. And for many advertisers the price of the ads is less than the expected increase in profit driven by the buyers the ads bring in. The two possible alternatives for the Facebook advertiser so far are...

• someone sees the ad and clicks it

• someone sees the ad and doesn't click it. Not good, but not actively bad either.

The ad might be running in a brand-unsafe context, as Sacha Baron Cohen recently pointed out. But Facebook management doesn't believe that running in a brand-unsafe context is bad for the advertiser. The worst the users can do is not click. Facebook Has Fewer Brand Safety Controls For News Feed Ads–On Purpose.

“We don’t believe ad adjacency matters in certain environments…and we designed the platform with that in mind,” said Erik Geisler, Facebook’s director of North American agency partnerships, speaking Thursday at 614 Group’s Brand Safety Summit in New York City.

Basically he's bragging on being able to take your brand's ad and run it in whatever brand-unsafe context the worst possible Facebook user can come up with. According to Facebook, you know all that stuff that has moderators crying in the stairwell and one service company quitting the moderation business entirely? Don't worry about it because people are going to click on whatever ads run there, like nothing happened.

Even if that was true before, to be honest I've never placed an online order while crying in a stairwell, don't know about you is brand safety still not going to be an issue in 2020?

The way the game works today is that the Facebook users can click or not click. But in the near future, things get a little different. The three options will be:

• someone sees the ad and clicks it

• someone sees the ad and does nothing

• someone sees the ad in a brand-unsafe context and tries to get to the bottom of it

How does the cost of dealing with people who have a problem with a brand-unsafe context affect the game? In other ad media, user concerns about brand safety can have a material effect on the market.

So here's my first attempt at a letter to send to the brand advertiser whose ads you see in a brand-unsafe context. Just like it's pointless to report a scam to Facebook, exception to that rule: reporting a Facebook scam matters if you're Craig Silverman calling for a comment on a story. Then they take care of it. don't report brand-unsafe content to them either. Just screenshoot it and send your CCPA letter to the advertiser.

This letter refers to the European and the new Kenyan law too. IMHO better to make the advertiser look up which should apply, so we can all use the same letter.

• California Consumer Privacy Act letter

Any suggested improvements? Please let me know.

Bonus links

“We’re wounded animals and wondering if they’re going to shoot us”: Publishers have, um, cooled on partnerships with platforms

YouTube’s opening up ads for ‘edgy’ videos signals shift in brand-safety sentiment

Google Will Let Companies Limit Ad Personalization To Facilitate CCPA Compliance

The Halo Effect: How Advertising on Premium Publishers Drives Higher Ad Effectiveness

The precarious state of local news giants

NYT says it will no longer use tracking pixels from Facebook and Twitter, instead using TAFI, a new AI-powered tool, to target potential subscribers

New Research Finds Americans Support Greater Regulation to Protect Their Data Online

Ad targeting key to why internet giants face blame for undermining elections, democracy

A precious-metals scheme used fear and Facebook to trick older conservatives out of their savings

Programmatic – don’t believe the hype

In Rukavina family written history, perhaps the preeminent distillation of my grandmother Nettie came in a note she left for my father (her son) one day, taped to the back window of her house in Brantford, Ontario:

For those of you who don’t read Pig Latin, that’s “the key is under the back porch in basket.”

My grandmother placed a lot of faith in the notion that those of the criminal element were not skilled at foreign languages.

And in her son (who was).

It worked.

My father saved the note all these years, in an accordion file marked “Rukavina Memorabilia.”

Given the fact that nearly every Canadian carrier has released its Black Friday deals, it can be difficult to stay on top of them.

With that in mind, MobileSyrup has rounded up all of the major Black Friday deals revealed by Canadian carriers below. We will update the post as more carriers release their deals.

This year, Black Friday takes place on November 29th, with deals carrying over to the weekend.

Bell

Montreal-based national carrier Bell has unveiled its Black Friday deals on its website with plenty of exceptional offers on the latest smartphones.

The carrier is offering $0 down, 24 monthly payments ranging from $24.80 to $47.30 on a variety of phones. This includes the iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone XR, iPhone 11 Pro Max, Samsung Galaxy S10, Samsung Galaxy S10+, Huawei P30 Pro, Google Pixel 4.

It’s also presenting customers with a family deal of 40GB of shareable data for $67.50 per person (with a family of four) when you bring your own devices (BYOD).

Further, if you go into a Bell store, you can get a free pair of Huawei FreeBuds Lite ($169.99 value) with the purchase of a Huawei P30 or P30 Pro.

More information about the offers can be found here. 

Rogers

Toronto-based national carrier Rogers is providing customers with a variety of deals for Black Friday this year.

Customer can get up to a $100 credit when activating or upgrading any smartphone on a two-year plan.

The carrier is offering the Samsung Galaxy S10+, iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 for $0 down on an Edge 40 plan. The Samsung Galaxy S10 and S10e are also available for $0 down on Edge 20 plans.

Select Android devices like the Pixel 4 XL are $0 on select two-year Rogers Infinite plans. Additionally, you can get $0 down on a Samsung Tab A 8.0 or a Huawei MediaPad T5 when you add a 2-year tablet plan for $15 per month to a Rogers Infinite plan.

More details about the deals can be found here. 

Fido

Fido has revealed its Black Friday deals and has discounted select phones and doubled the data for some of its plans.

Customers can get a $200 bill credit when they activate a new smartphone online on select two-year plans.

It is also offering the iPhone XR, Samsung S10 and S10 e for $0 down on Large plans. You can get he iPhone XS for $0 on an Extra Large plan. The iPhone 8 and Samsung A70 are also available for $0 down on a Medium plan.

The carrier has also doubled the data on its 1GB, 2GB, 3GB and 4GB data, talk and text plans when you bring your own phone or with a new activation or phone upgrade on a two-year term.

More information about the offers can be found here. 

Freedom Mobile

Shaw-owned regional carrier Freedom Mobile has unveiled its Black Friday deals with a big emphasis on its ‘Absolute Zero’ offers.

Freedom says its Absolute Zero deal as actually $0, unlike “the other guys” who charge you $0 upfront but make you pay for the device over time.

For the Absolute Zero deals, customers can get the Samsung Galaxy S10, S10e and the LG G8 ThinQ for $0 down on a $75+ per month plan. It’s also offering the iPhone XR and Samsung Galaxy A70 for $0 down on a $60+ per month plan.

Customers can get the iPhone 11 for $0 down on a $90+ per month plan. You can get the iPhone 8 for $0 down on a $55+ plan.

The carrier also has other deals on smartphones that don’t fall under the Absolute Zero monicker.

You can get more details about the deals here. 

SaskTel

Regina-based SaskTel has released its Black Friday deals, including a $200 signup bonus for new wireless customers and a $90 phone plan with unlimited data.

In addition to the signup bonus, subscribers that buy either a Samsung S10, S10e, S10+ or Note 10+ will get a free pair of Galaxy Buds wireless headphones. If customers opt for a new Huawei P30 or P30 Pro, they’ll also get a free pair of Huawei Freebuds Lite wireless headphones.

Most of SaskTel’s home internet plans are discounted for Black Friday, but you need to make sure you select a two-year plan. Users can also get their first month free.

The carrier is also proving customers with a number of deals on select phone accessories.

More information about SaskTel’s deals can be found here. 

Eastlink

Halifax-based regional carrier Eastlink has revealed its Black Friday deals, and is offering a 5GB data plan for $50 CAD/month.

The carrier is also giving customers a buy one, get one free deal where if customers buy the LG G8X ThinQ Dual Screen, they’ll get a LG Q70 for free.

You can also get the iPhone 8 Plus, iPhone XR, iPhone 11, Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, S10e and S10+ for $0 down with easyTab ranging from $20-50/ month for 24 months.

Eastlink’s full list of Black Friday deals can be found here.

Public Mobile

Telus-owned Public Mobile has revealed a new Black Friday deal offering a one-time bonus 5GB of data for new activations on plans that are $35 and higher.

The carrier says this offer is only available to new customers and is not stackable with any other promos, excluding a refer-a-friend bonus.

There is also a Refer-a-Friend bonus of $20. New customers are eligible for this offer and can use the referral code to activate online or in-store.

More information about Public Mobile’s deals can be found here. 

Vidéotron

Montréal-based regional carrier Vidéotron has released its Black Friday deals and is giving discounts on a number of smartphones.

It is offering a several Huawei, Samsung, LG, Google, Motorola and Apple phones for $0 down either with a Zen plan or Base plans ranging from $60 to $100.

The carrier is also giving customers a $200 Visa card with a number of its smartphone deals.

More information about the offers can be found here. 

Telus

Telus has revealed its Black Friday deals. The carrier is offering a variety of discounts, including getting a free pair of Samsung Galaxy Buds when you activate or renew a Galaxy Note 10+ (until December 1st or while supplies last), $10 off Peace of Mind Connect Plus plans and saving $100 when you shop online.

• You can also get an iPhone XS Max 64GB for $0 with $36.25 24-month Easy Payment, amounting to savings of $255.

All of Telus’ Black Friday offers can be found here.

Koodo

The Vancouver-based Telus sub-brand is calling its Black Friday promotions ‘Bright Friday.’ The carrier has released its ‘Early Bright Friday’ deals so it’s possible it could be adding more soon but that’s unclear.

Koodo is offering a number of phones including the iPhone XR, LG G8X ThinQ Dual-Screen, Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, Google Pixel 4 XL for $0 down on select two-year small, medium, large and extra large plans. Some of the phones come with a Visa gift card or bill credit.

There’s also an online exclusive, which offers 12 months of Amazon Prime for free. Additionally, Koodo has also waived the connection fee.

More information about Koodo’s deals can be found here. 

---

For more Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, check out our round-up of retailer offers at this link.

The post Here’s a round-up of Canadian carriers’ 2019 Black Friday deals appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Microsoft’s biggest challenge between now and the release of its Surface Neo and Duo dual-screen devices in 2020 is getting developers on board. Thankfully, it may not take a whole lot of work.

According to a blog post the Redmond, Washington-based company published, current Android and Windows 10X apps will work on the new devices without needing new tools and redesigns.

That’s huge news for developers and an important measure for Microsoft. In the past, the company has struggled to get new platforms off the ground because developers didn’t want to invest in building new apps to work on it. If existing apps and websites work out of the box, developers don’t need to do as much work to support the new hardware. It makes developers’ lives easier, it’s great for consumers (their favourite apps just work) and it means Microsoft’s new platforms won’t be dead on arrival.

However, more importantly, if developers don’t need to spend time building apps for new platforms, they can focus on adding features to their apps to take advantage of new capabilities offered by the new form factors.

In terms of taking advantage of those capabilities, Microsoft’s idea is a “common model” that overlays either Windows or Android. Unfortunately, the company wasn’t clear on the details, so we’re not sure how this overlay would work. That said, developers should have plenty of time to add support for Neo and Duo before they go on sale next year.

You can learn more about Microsoft’s development plans here.

Source: Microsoft Via: Engadget

The post Microsoft wants to make developing for Surface Neo and Duo easy appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Broken or cumbersome luggage is one of the quickest ways to disrupt the best-laid travel plans. You don’t need to spend a fortune to find a carry-on that’s great, but you do need to know what to look for and what you really need. At Wirecutter, I’ve tested hundreds of bags for travel, and these are the questions I ask and the details I consider when evaluating any type of luggage.

First, though, a note about cost: You should expect to spend at least $225. Plenty of luggage is less expensive than that, but most of it is plagued with problems. I’ve come across wobbly and misaligned wheels, zippers of questionable quality and strength, extendable handles so brittle and stiff that they could only charitably be described as arthritic, and suitcases so poorly balanced that they would not stay upright without constant support.

Here’s what to look for and what Wirecutter recommends as the best carry-ons for most people.

Do you want soft- or hard-sided luggage?

At Wirecutter, we suggest soft-sided luggage for most people. In our research, we’ve found that frequent travelers appreciate the multiple external pockets found on most soft-sided bags. If you tend to travel with a suit, you should also consider that most soft-sided luggage is designed with a suiter built into the lid—a feature noticeably missing from most hard-sided suitcases I’ve tested. And mile for mile, the nylon fabric used in soft-sided luggage shows less wear and tear than the pliable polycarbonate shells of hard-sided luggage.

For most people, Wirecutter recommends the Travelpro Platinum Elite 21" Expandable Spinner or the slightly larger Travelpro Platinum Elite 22" Expandable Carry-On Rollaboard. The Platinum Elite offers the best balance of size, value, reliability, and durability, with high-end details. It’s also backed by a lifetime warranty.

If you can spend about $200 more and want a buy-it-for-life suitcase, we recommend the Briggs & Riley Baseline Domestic Carry-On Expandable Upright. It has superlative build quality, plenty of expandable room, and a uniquely effective compression system.

However, hard-sided luggage does look great. Polycarbonate can be molded in an endless variety of colors or prints, which soft-sided luggage can’t replicate in thread. Wheeling around a minimalist shell of a suitcase is undeniably comforting—everything you are traveling with is packed away in a single wheeled brick. The restriction of the design and the absence of exterior distractions such as pockets makes it impossible to overpack, something a lot of our readers say they appreciate.

Another reason hard-sided luggage might be appealing is the protection its pliable shell provides its contents against sharp, direct impact. According to our testing and numerous interviews with luggage designers, though, hard-sided luggage is not, in fact, stronger—unless you’re talking about very expensive metal cases—or more durable than soft-sided luggage.

If you want hard-sided, we recommend the Away Carry-On, a great-looking and relatively resilient piece of hard-sided luggage with top-of-the-line components, including YKK zippers and wheels as smooth-rolling as any we’ve tested.

The details you should look at

A suitcase, though relatively simple, is made up of a few critical components. When you’re shopping for luggage, here are the things you should consider and, if possible, try with your own hands:

Lifetime warranty: One of the best ways to judge the quality of a piece of luggage is to see if its manufacturer stands behind its work. Good warranties protect against anything that makes your luggage unusable. The best, like the Briggs & Riley warranty, expressly offer repair and replacement programs, which protect against airline damage regardless of whether you lodge a formal claim with the airline.

Zipper: In most cases, the first thing to wear out on your luggage through regular use is the zipper. It also happens to be the easiest component to check at a glance. YKK, the Japanese zipper manufacturer, is widely considered to make the best zippers in the world—it turns out nearly 7 billion zippers, or half the zippers produced on Earth, in a year. Though some luggage companies use custom zippers from other brands, which are often excellent, a “YKK” stamped on the tongue of a zipper on any piece of luggage is a good indication of high quality.

Wheels: Unlike zippers, wheels are rarely marked by the manufacturer. The best way to test wheels yourself is to roll the suitcase across as many surfaces as possible, especially carpet. If wheels are going to get squirrely, it will most likely happen on carpeting. On any surface, the wheels should roll smoothly without dragging or chattering beneath your hand. If you’re especially concerned about durability, bear in mind that luggage with two larger wheels almost always lasts longer than luggage with four spinners. However, a four-wheeled suitcase is a luxury when you’re negotiating tight airplane aisles and crowded airports.

Extendable handle: The handle of your luggage is very important, but most of the engineering —shape, reinforcement, and metallurgy—happens inside the aluminum tubing, where you can’t see it. In my conversations with luggage designers over the years, most have described a sweet spot in the feel of a handle. The entire handle shouldn’t twist too much when fully extended, but the tubes themselves should feel just a touch loose at the joints where they meet, which helps them avoid jamming against one another.

What about ultralight luggage?

Most carry-on suitcases weigh between 7 and 9 pounds. We have seen brands shave off anywhere from 2 to 5 pounds when designing so-called ultralight luggage. Though this type of luggage is undeniably lighter, it often sacrifices the rigidity and durability of more typical designs. It’s a compromise, but not one I recommend making.

The surest way to save weight when you travel is to pack less. And the easiest way to pack less is to travel with smaller pieces of luggage. The more room you have, the more likely you are to try to fit that one more thing you think you might need.

Do you need a carry-on at all?

Possibly not. Many people choose to forgo carry-on suitcases entirely—sometimes by choice, sometimes because they’re flying Basic Economy—and instead travel with just a smaller item. (Wirecutter has recommendations for both backpacks and underseat personal items.) Though these small bags restrict the amount you can pack, you may find that the less you carry with you, the more you actually enjoy traveling.