I’ve been interested in using digital maps to in history projects for a while now. My first big project on this was Situating Chemistry. This is a research database of places where chemistry has been done. Each site can be linked to related people, documents, chemical processes, industries, etc.
Map of chemical sites in Paris, overlaid onto a map of Paris from 1790. You can interact with this map at situatingchemistry.org/worldmap
I presented on Situating Chemistry at a couple of DH workshops at OU, and eventually convinced Prof. Janet Ward to incorporate a similar project into one of her history courses. This Spring, she taught a course on 1945 focusing on the events at the end of the war and some of the more immediate cultural changes.
For Dr. Ward’s class, each student was asked to complete three assignments:
An analysis of a visual source including a painting or pamphlet or even physical object from 1945
An analysis of a primary textual source from 1945
And an analysis of a secondary history of 1945 or the war more generally
For each of these assignments, the students wrote a blog post on their own, free OU Create blogs.
I built a course hub that collected the students’ posts both in a menu and a map. Dr. Ward picked a map from the David Rumsey Map Collection and I embedded it into a WordPress site using the Leaflet Map plugin. Once the plugin was activated, I set up a home page for the site and then embedded the map using the Leaflet shortcode:
This loads the custom map as an image and sets the size of the map in the display. Then I added pins to the map for each of the student’s blog posts:
[leaflet-marker y=0.06400615721940994 x=-0.14913830161094666]
Post Title
Post Text
Post author
Post link
[/leaflet-marker]
The leaflet-marker coordinates tells the system where to put the pin on the map. The Title, text, author, and link appears in the popup when you click on a pin for a given student project. Temidepelayo Ojekunle, the Office of Digital Learning student assistant, scanned the student’s posts for the course and put together a spreadsheet of titles, short summaries, authors, and links. Using the Leaflet-plugin’s tool for finding the coordinates, I then plotted each of the pins and copied over the information from the spreadsheet. The end result is this site:
Screen shot of the 1945 course website showing the pins linking to student projects.
I really like the idea of accessing the content of the site both through the menu and through the map. I’ve been looking for web elements that are more interesting than a list, and I really like how the map draws you in and lets you see the focal clusters of the course.
In the next version of this site, for a future class, I’d like to use a tool like MapTiler to create tiles for the map, so that you don’t lose resolution as you zoom in on sections. I’d also like to get a better understanding of Leaflet’s resources for using and creating pin icons. I might even move out of WordPress and just use straight HTML since the WordPress php heavy and unnecessary for this type of site. I also hand-coded all the Leaflet pins in this project using the short code, but compiling a geo-json from some sort of form would have been far more efficient.
So yesterday was my last day of one of my teaching jobs. It’s one I’d had for about 6 years (my longest ever non-self employed job), and one that was the beginning of my return to teaching actual courses rather than one-off masterclasses after a break of over a decade.
The real joy of it was working with these guys:
Phi Yaan-Zek and Andy Edwards are both such excellent teachers and musicians, and between us I don’t think we had a single conversation in the 6 years I was there that wasn’t on some level about how we could making teaching better. It was such a joy to work with these guys on trying to come up with innovative methods to help music students connect with their creativity in ways that were conscious of the cultural and economic environment they were moving into, but not deterministically bound by those constraints when considering the role of creative practice in changing culture… We were constantly looking for ways to inspire the students to dig deep into themselves and pursue something other than purely commercial measures of meaning and value for their work. And, judging by the parade of extraordinary creative people we helped release back into the wild, we did OK.
The context wasn’t ideal – HE in the UK is a tough area to work in right now wherever you are, all the moreso in a provincial college with no underlying commitment to creative practice or focus on the arts. We, like everyone else around the country in the many, many institutions like ours, were constantly trying to make something worthwhile for the students. There were times when we were REALLY good at that, and times when we struggled, but we still punched (and the course continues to punch) WELL above our weight in terms of the circumstances we were (are) in. The course wasn’t reliant on me for what made it good (Andy’s extraordinary legacy in inspiring music students in the West Midlands stretches back decades before he met me!), so will continue to provide a worthwhile education to the students there. And, while there’s a ton of nonsense that I won’t miss at all about being there, I’ll dearly miss these guys, and Meldra, who more recently came on board to teach the vocalists, and brought so much wisdom and experience to the team.
If you’re paying attention, you’ll know that Phi, Andy and I are LEYlines – so it’s not like we’re not going to be working together still making music, and I’m probably going to end up Skyping the pair of them to argue about Wittgenstein and Heidegger, Phenomenology and Aesthetics, and how the hell we turn this or that scheme of work into a course worth studying…
But for now, we’ve got a LEYlines album coming out this weekend, gigs to organise, and I’ve got a PhD to write that I’m 18 months behind on (the real reason I quit my job there). And come September, I’ll still be working at the one college teaching gig I’ve kept on, at BIMM here in Birmingham.
(BTW, this also means I may have more time for some more private Skype students, so if you want a bass lesson or two get in touch…)
I used to hate cooking. I’d avoid it at all costs, sustaining myself on frozen pizzas, simple burritos, and, when I wanted to get fancy, a Caesar salad. Fed up with myself, I finally tried a subscription meal planning service—where I pay an app to send me handpicked recipes every week—and over the past five years, I’ve learned to cook hundreds of meals, using countless novel ingredients. The experience has cultivated my appreciation and enjoyment of cooking in a way nothing else has.
Claire Lower, food and beverage editor at Lifehacker, explained the central advantage of meal plans: “The benefits of meal planning all boil down to feeling some amount of control over your life. If you are very busy during the week, knowing what you’re going to feed yourself ahead of time, and having it already prepared, is one less thing to worry about.”
Here’s how to know if a meal planner is right for you, too.
What you can (and can’t) expect from meal planning services
Meal planning services helped solve my two main roadblocks with cooking: having no idea how to cook, and having no idea what to cook.
A meal planning service like eMeals or PlateJoy is different from a meal kit service like Blue Apron. (Wirecutter recommends Blue Apron and others in our guide to the best meal kit delivery services.) Meal kits send you ingredients and recipes in a box. Meal planning services send only recipes through a smartphone app, so you still have to go shopping, but when we tested meal kit services, most testers wished they could pick out their own ingredients anyway. With a planning service, the ingredients for the meals overlap, helping to eliminate waste and save money.
Using a paid service eliminates the manual work of sifting through the infinite number of recipes on the Internet and requires no brainpower. Each week, recipes and shopping lists magically appear on my phone based on a plan of my choosing. Some plans, like “30-minute meals,” “kid friendly,” or “budget friendly,” are meant to help solve a logistical problem. Others, like “vegetarian,” “diabetic,” or “low carb,” are meant to help redefine your diet.
My inability to answer the question “What’s for dinner?” was the biggest wall between me and cooking. With a meal plan, I receive seven or so recipes a week, and I pick the ones I want based on my schedule. It requires no mental effort from me, and it means I cook meals that I wouldn’t pick myself. In one week I might make Tuscan beef pot roast, tuna Niçoise salad, braised pork, and huevos rancheros. Each meal is balanced with vegetables, grains, and a protein. Cooking something wildly new and different each meal is exciting, and grocery store runs are dead simple now, with little mental effort required (though I have run into some regional limitations, where certain ingredients aren’t carried locally). As with any cooking experiment, some meals are duds. Over a month, I’d estimate that I love 25 percent of the recipes, like 65 percent, and dislike 10 percent.
Because the meal planning provided training wheels to teach me basic cooking concepts, I couldn’t decide that a recipe was too difficult for me or lazily fall back on a simpler meal. When I started, my cooking skillset was limited to a vague understanding that chopping was thicker than dicing and boiling took more heat than simmering. As recipes trickled in, I learned skills such as making a roux, mixing my own dressings, and cooking sauces.
Meal plans are also helpful for planning a balanced dinner, especially if you’re reliant on prepackaged foods as I was. Before I started using a meal planning service, I rarely cooked with many vegetables or fruits. As Lower noted, “Having a plan also helps curb impulse, which means you are more likely to eat things that make you feel good, rather than things that make you feel bad.”
How to pick a meal planning service
You have a lot of options for meal planning services. No single service works for everyone, and finding one for your needs takes some trial and error.
I’ve primarily used eMeals ($60 per year), which has a good variety of recipes and plans. I rarely run into repeat recipes, so every week feels fresh. But eMeals doesn’t cater to specific preferences, so if you hate an ingredient, you have to eliminate recipes manually. You must call to cancel your subscription, which is annoying, but eMeals makes it easy to swap between different plans, so you can try out, say, vegetarian recipes for a week and then go over to “clean eating” before moving to a “slow cooker” plan. This service is best foranyone who wants to experiment with a variety of recipes and doesn’t mind substituting ingredients or skipping meals entirely sometimes.
PlateJoy ($100 per year) is the most customizable service I’ve tried. PlateJoy personalizes the plan to cut down on recipes with ingredients you don’t want, but that personalization means it isn’t as easy to swap between the more generic plans as with eMeals. I found that PlateJoy repeated recipes more often than eMeals, but the customization is worth it for some people. This service is best if you want a meal plan that integrates your specific preferences and if you don’t mind repeat recipes.
Other options include The Fresh 20 ($80 per year), a good choice for cooking for one. Cook Smarts (about $70 per year) focuses on helping you learn to cook, $5 Meal Plan ($60 per year) is designed to save money, and Once A Month Meals (about $160 per year) is a collection of freeze-ahead recipes. You’ll also find Real Plans, Prep Dish, Frugal Real Food, and countless others.
Every service has a free trial period. I recommend taking advantage of that before making a choice, and be sure to cancel the subscription before it charges you. If you don’t like the recipes, another service may work better for you.
Meal planning services aren’t for everyone. The biggest restriction is the price. These aren’t top-secret specialty recipes—they’re mostly available online. All you’re really paying for is someone to organize the meals for you. If you have the time and will, you can do this yourself for free. If you have picky eaters in the house, prefer staples, or have multiple dietary restrictions, it takes more effort to alter a meal plan to work for you than it’s worth. If you’re already a good cook with a collection of recipes, you’re likely better off creating plans using an app like Paprika.
Fenix, Mozilla’s experimental new Firefox browser, has entered version 1.0 and is now available in the Play Store.
Dubbed Firefox Preview in Google’s app store, Fenix boasts the use of the ‘GeckoView’ engine to render sites. Comparatively, Google’s Chrome browser uses the Blink engine.
According to the description Mozilla provides on the app’s download page, GeckoView makes Firefox Preview up to twice as fast as the previous version of the browser. Additionally, GeckoView allows Mozilla to push updates out more quickly, so users will get new features sooner than before.
GeckoView uses the same technology that powers Firefox on the desktop.
Further, Mozilla highlighted Firefox’s privacy features as another benefit the browser offers, such as tracking protection.
Firefox Preview was previously available on the Play Store, but users had to jump through several hoops to test it out. Now, it appears the fledgling browser is available for all who want to take it for a spin.
If you want to try it out, just click here or grab your Android device and search for ‘Firefox Preview’ on the Play Store.
Uber drivers in Toronto might join the United Food and Commercial Workers, a 250,000 trade union that operates in Canada and the U.S.
Gizmodo did not report the number of divers intending to join but during a press conference a UFCW Canada employee said the support “had hit the ‘high hundreds’ and were growing rapidly.”
If anything, Uber drivers would want to unionize to make sure Uber has the right work standards and offers minimum wage, sick leave, and vacation time.
Uber has not commented on this potential move.
The City of Toronto is looking at how to balance the rights and interests of ridesharing platforms like Uber and taxi companies.
Waterfront Toronto has begun reviewing Sidewalk Labs’ proposal for its smart city in downtown Toronto, after it released its 1,524-page proposal earlier this week on Monday outlining its $1.3 billion CAD plan.
Stephen Diamond, the chairman at Waterfront Toronto board, acknowledged in an interview with BNN Bloomberg that the proposal was larger than anticipated.
“I think they were aware that we had concerns or that there should be some pushback, but I think they wanted the opportunity, and fairness to them, to debate what they felt was their vision,” Diamond told BNN Bloomberg.
He also stated that he believes some of what they are proposing is “going a bit too far.”
Diamond said that this does not mean that they shouldn’t take a look at it. He stated that the board needs to examine the implications the plans could pose to residents in Toronto. He says this is the case when anything new or innovative is proposed.
When asked about the data issues surrounding the proposal, he said that data privacy is not just an issue for Sidewalk Labs or for Waterfront Toronto, and that it is a global issue.
He said that the government will be looking at the data privacy issues as well, as the federal government is hinting towards initiatives.
Diamond said that the next step of the process is to hold public consultations. He said that the board hopes to address the issues by the end of the summer after hearing from the public and after a discussion with Sidewalk Labs.
Sidewalk Labs’ proposal included plans to integrate physical and digital policy innovations, such as the implementation of a commercial plot that would create 3,900 jobs.
The proposal also said it the company would implement “unprecedented” data privacy policies.
However, the proposal surprised critics as it outlined a plan that spanned further than the 12-acre plot that was originally agreed upon. Waterfront Toronto outlined its issues in a statement, saying that they would be to looking into the proposal deeply, as they were concerned with privacy and expansion issues.
Version 2 of the first and only security key offering tamper evident laptop protection has a tightened supply chain to ensure privacy and security for users
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., June 27, 2019 – Purism, the social purpose corporation which designs and produces popular hardware and software that protects users’ digital lives, today announced its Librem Key product will be the first device of its category to be made in the USA.
Librem Key, the first and only OpenPGP smart card closely integrated with the Heads-firmware offering a tamper-evident boot process, launched in September 2018. Initially manufactured in-part by partner Nitrokey, Purism is now manufacturing Librem Keys entirely from Purism’s Carlsbad, California headquarters – the same U.S. facility used to manufacture its Librem 5 smartphone devkits in 2018. Version 2 also stores up to 4096-bit RSA keys and up to 512-bit ECC keys and securely generates keys directly on the device.
Supply chain security is a rising concern due to the lack of control hardware companies have over manufacturing links. Threats include security hacks, malware concerns, cyber-espionage, and even copyright theft. Purism sees protection of its supply chain as an existentially important issue, and has invested in supply chain improvements including the launch of Librem Key V2.
“Having a secure supply chain is critical for hardware that holds your most sensitive secrets,” said Kyle Rankin, Chief Security Officer of Purism. “By making the Librem Key in the USA, we’ve removed even more links in the supply chain and can directly oversee the complete process from Librem Key production to shipping to the customer. Here at Purism we hope to lead by example, lessening uncontrolled links and understanding every step of our supply chain.”
Purism takes the “Made in USA” label seriously, especially as other firms have been fined for mislabeling their products as American made when they were made in China. For example, “screwdriver assembly” – electronics made elsewhere and doing final case assembly in the USA – does not qualify a “Made in USA” stamp of approval. And while a company can source specific individual electronics components like resistors or unpopulated circuit boards from around the world, the company must fabricate the product here in the US to qualify as “Made in USA.”
“Librem Key’s USA fabrication is yet another area where Purism is beating the technology giants by ensuring a secure supply chain for critical hardware, and it has been our goal to do so since we formed in 2014,” said Todd Weaver, founder and CEO of Purism. “As we start to move more and more of our manufacturing to the U.S., it will give us complete control over the production lifecycle, which means that eventually our devices will never leave our purview, from schematics, through PCBA (Printed Circuit Board Assembly), to finished product.”
This move will enable Purism to exponentially increase manufacturing volume to meet growing sales demands.
A Key to the future
Made in USA Librem Keys is the beginning of Purism’s journey to a tighter supply chain. Since the inception of Purism in 2014, the company has been working toward a U.S. supply chain because of the security implications and benefits.
Purism has already tested the capabilities of its U.S. facility by making Librem 5 devkits late last year, and the company continues to fine-tune operations with the Librem Key and setup for more of its products to be built there.
The investment in protecting user privacy and security has paid off. Purism has seen triple-digit sales growth year-over-year since its founding in 2014 and even with a rapidly growing 60+ person team continues to grow funded from profits.
Made in the USA Librem Key will begin shipping on July 4, 2019. Learn more about Librem Key here: https://puri.sm/products/librem-key/
About Purism:
Purism is a Social Purpose Corporation devoted to bringing security, privacy, software freedom, and digital independence to everyone’s personal computing experience. With operations based in San Francisco, California, and around the world, Purism manufactures premium-quality laptops and phones, creating beautiful and powerful devices meant to protect users’ digital lives without requiring a compromise on ease of use. Purism designs and assembles its hardware by carefully selecting internationally sourced components to be privacy-respecting and fully Free-Software-compliant. Security and privacy-centric features come built-in with every product Purism makes, making security and privacy the simpler, logical choice for individuals and businesses.
Media Contact:
Marie Williams
Coderella
415-689-4029
pr@puri.sm
Purism is happy to announce the new, made in USA Librem Key
What does “Made in USA” mean?
We would never use the words “Made in USA” lightly. We had to meet very strict requirements before being allowed to use that label. It’s well-known that other firms have been fined for mislabeling their Made in China products as Made in USA, for instance because “screwdriver assembly” only (getting electronics made elsewhere and doing final case-assembly in the USA) is not enough to qualify for “Made in USA”. A company can source specific, individual electronics components from around the world (we source chips like the OpenPGP smart card from a European supplier, for example) but must actually make–as in fabricate–the product here, in the US, to be able to label it as “Made in USA.”
Protecting the digital supply chain matters
We are investing in improvements all across our supply chain. We have written about the importance of protecting the digital supply chain before, and are now pleased to announce a major, related improvement: the new, made in USA Librem Keys!
The original Librem Keys were manufactured by Nitrokey as part of our initial partnership. We will be manufacturing the Librem Key v2 in the same US facility where we manufactured our Librem 5 devkits; it will have the same features of the original Librem Key, use the same OpenPGP smart card chips, and the inside will look almost the same–but the outside will have a new, re-branded case saying “Made in USA”.
Tight supply chain control is very important, because this device will hold your most sensitive secrets–your GPG keys, your PureBoot secrets. We oversee the complete production of the Librem Key, so they never leave our sight–from PCBA to finished product–until we send them to you. You can trust not only the keys, but also any laptops configured (at our facility) with PureBoot and protected by those same Librem Keys.
This is only the beginning
Made in USA Librem Keys are only the beginning: we have already tested the capabilities of our US facility by making Librem 5 devkits there, and as we continue to fine-tune our operations with the Librem Key, we are testing how many more of our products we can build there.
Having Made in USA, in-house fabrication ensures freedom, security, and privacy for people and enterprises. This is the second Made in the USA product by Purism, but only the beginning of what we have coming.
If you are interested in Made in USA Librem Keys, you can find more information about them here.
One piece of advice, if I may. When you buy your next Android phone, don't be lured by the best camera in the world. That won't last long. Rather look at the software situation. Android One, here a Motorola, and Google phones get prompt updates. Samsung has also gotten rather good at providing timely updates.
Major upgrades are different thing. The closer the software is to straight and pure Android, the faster and more likely is a major upgrade. Google wins, Android One is second, and then there is a very long tail. Do your research.
Vancouver’s obsession with uniformity (just look at all the grey buildings) is.... at times bizarre.
I get it, don’t let anybody paint anything they just want, but put an approval process in place so you don’t get bad / political designs and brighten the place up a bit.
Julia Goudkova thought painting her late partner's memorial park bench was a great way to celebrate his memory.
Colin Mackay died in a motorcycle accident in July 2015. Goudkova spent much of the past week sanding, washing, priming and painting the memorial bench at Kitsilano Beach vivid colours of yellow, red, teal and white.
Now the City of Vancouver plans to remove it entirely.
"They said that ... it would impede with the uniformity of the look of the park," Goudkova said Wednesday evening, as she finished touching up some yellow leaves.
"They basically said they qualify it as tagging, as graffiti and vandalism."
Painting memorial park benches is not allowed, city spokeswoman Daria Wojnarski said in an email. In keeping with "overall park design," the bench will be replaced with a new one as soon as possible, she added.
Goudkova said she was told this would happen within two days, despite asking to have the bench stay at least until July 2 when a memorial will be held at the park for Mackay.
A personalized plaque on a park bench for 10 years costs $5,000, according to the city. But such "dedicated park amenities" remain property of the park board.
The city said the donor of the bench was not aware that it had been painted and supported having it removed.
That donor, Colin Mackay's younger brother Angus Mackay, said that's not entirely true.
"I have no bones with the painting of the bench, it's fine by me," he said, although he added he was not told or consulted about plans to paint the bench and has not yet seen it in person.
If he was consulted, he said he would have advised against painting it because he would have expected the park board to treat it as graffiti.
He respects the rules in place, he said, and recognizes that paying for a memorial bench is essentially a lease.
But at this point, he would like to see it stay at least until the upcoming memorial.
"I definitely think they could show some compassion and leave it in place for a week," he said.
Her partner of 10 years was a big supporter of the arts, and the bench was deteriorating and in need of some upkeep, she added.
While she was painting it, she said passersby stopped to ask her about it, share their own stories of love and loss, or just admire the colours.
Goudkova said after receiving positive feedback from people in the park, she wanted to offer to paint other benches in the park.
She has lived in Kitsilano for 10 years, she said, and she'd love to help brighten the neighbourhood — especially during the gloomy times of the year.
"I would love to be able to reason with the city. I'm not here to cause trouble. I understand that people are just trying to do their jobs," she said.
"I believe there is an opportunity to continue the conversation instead of quickly removing the bench."
The Art of the Personal Project is a crucial element to let potential buyers see how you think creatively on your own. I am drawn to personal projects that have an interesting vision or that show something I have never seen before. In this thread, I’ll include a link to each personal project with the artist statement so you can see more of the project. Please note: This thread is not affiliated with any company; I’m just featuring projects that I find. Please DO NOT send me your work. I do not take submissions.
It’s been three years since I first discovered #vanlife and two years since my VanLife project was first featured on A Photo Editor. In those three years I have met some incredible humans and have heard some inspiring journeys. People from all over the world who have made the decision to down-size and simplify their lives while trying to minimize their footprint on this planet—finding more economical ways to live, creative ways to utilize space, and building a stronger, tighter-knit, community. This has become a lifestyle that fills them with love and purpose.
My fiancé and I have dabbled into the van life culture to experience it for ourselves and, although, this is not a lifestyle that fits our goals and needs, there is much we have adapted into our own rhythm. We’re more of Overlanding adventurists and have been able to incorporate the “tiny-living” mindset on our own adventures. We still dream of owning our own van someday, albeit, for shorter, less permanent travels. Until then, we’ll continue to admire and romanticize of those who are living “the dream.”
APE contributor Suzanne Sease currently works as a consultant for photographers and illustrators around the world. She has been involved in the photography and illustration industry since the mid 80s. After establishing the art buying department at The Martin Agency, then working for Kaplan-Thaler, Capital One, Best Buy and numerous smaller agencies and companies, she decided to be a consultant in 1999. She has a new Twitter feed with helpful marketing information because she believes that marketing should be driven by brand and not by specialty. Follow her at @SuzanneSease. Instagram
Success is more than a matter of your talent. It’s also a matter of doing a better job presenting it. And that is what I do with decades of agency and in-house experience.
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In an effort to promote the new tracking protection features built into its Firefox browser, Mozilla has launched a website called ‘Track This‘ to show you just how bad ads can be.
The idea behind Track This is simple — if you open enough tabs, you can convince advertisers that you’re into certain things, and thus shape the ads you get. According to Mozilla, advertisers follow people across the web using cookies. These small data files are typically used to store information for the sites you visit, like language preferences or what’s in your shopping cart.
Harmless as that may be, advertisers now rely on cookies to collect data about your internet habits without your consent and serve you ads based on what you do online.
To throw advertisers off the trail — or just to see how quickly your browsing habits get turned into ads — Track This lets you choose a persona, then it opens 100 tabs based on that persona to generate advertisements.
Personas include ‘Hypebeast,’ ‘Filthy rich,’ ‘Doomsday’ and ‘Influencer.’ Once you select your persona, Track This will prep you for opening 100 tabs, such as turning off pop-up blockers for the site.
Interestingly, when I tried using Track This on Firefox, the site told me that due to protections against malicious sites built into the browser, it’d only open a maximum of 20 tabs. It then directed me to try another browser if I wanted to see 100 tabs.
So, I dusted off Chrome, booted it up and launch 100 tabs under the Influencer persona. 100 tabs opened, most in the makeup or beauty area. Now, when I load up pages in Chrome, the ads reflect my new makeup influencer persona. However, this isn’t a permanent change. Sooner or later, the ads will correct themselves as you browse normally.
You can learn more about Track This, cookies and Firefox’s tracking protection over here.
HBO has announced Game of Thrones Beyond the Wall, a new mobile strategy game based on its hit fantasy TV series of the same name.
The game is being developed by Montreal-based Behaviour Interactive, which is best known for its original IP Dead by Daylight, as well as its work on Bethesda’s Fallout Shelter and HBO’s now-shut down Westworld Mobile. Assisting HBO with publishing duties is Gaea, an interactive entertainment company that focuses on bringing games to Asian markets, including CD Projekt Red’s Gwent: The Witcher Card Game.
In Game of Thrones Beyond the Wall, players must command a Night’s Watch castle to defend Westeros. To help with this, you’ll be able to recruit unique characters from across the Seven Kingdoms and beyond. Some recruitable units include crossbowmen from The Westerlands, scoundrels from King’s Landing, spearmen from Dorne and exotic fighters from The Free Cities.
Specific gameplay details haven’t yet been revealed, although the game is confirmed to feature grid-based strategic combat, which will require you to leverage each character’s uniques skills to best your enemies.
The game features an original narrative set a few decades before the events of the TV show, shortly after Lord Commander Brynden Rivers (also known as the Three-Eyed Raven) disappeared while ranging beyond the Wall.
However, players will be able to harness the powers of the Weirwood Trees to move throughout history and visit key moments in the Game of Thrones timelines. In doing so, you’ll get the chance to participate in various in-game events for a chance to obtain different costumed versions of characters like Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, Jaime Lannister and Melisandre. Once recruited, these characters can be used across several gameplay modes.
Game of Thrones Beyond the Wall is set to launch sometime later this year on both Android and iOS. Pre-registration is now open on the Google Play Store.
iOS 13, the next version of Apple’s mobile operating system, will make it easier for third-party apps to recognize pictures of your cat or dog.
According to CNBC, Apple showed off a new API called VNAnimalDetector, which is part of its Vision framework, at its annual developer conference in June 2019.
Animal detection has been around for some time. Apple added the ability to its Photos app back in 2016, and Google Photos was capable of recognizing animals for a while. Further, computer scientists and big tech companies have developed machine learning programs to identify animals in the past.
What sets Apple’s new API apart is that it makes it easy for developers to add animal recognition to their apps, in as little as four lines of code.
Essentially, VNAnimalDetector draws a digital rectangle around any part of a picture that contains an animal and label it as either a cat or dog.
Along with the ability to recognize animals, Apple’s Vision framework can identify whether two pictures are similar, recognize faces and identify objects in a photo, even if they aren’t pets.
You can learn more about VNAnimalDectector here or watch the keynote about the Vision framework here.
The "Completely Automated Public Turing Test, to Tell Computers and Humans Apart" (CAPTCHA) can be found all over the internet. I have a terrible time with it because my eyes just aren't good enough to count school buses on tiny images. As the W3C says in this report, "asking users who are blind, visually impaired or dyslexic to identify textual characters in a distorted graphic is asking them to perform a task they are intrinsically least able to accomplish." The alternative audio isn't any better. As the article notes, “Hotmail’s sound output, which is itself distorted to avoid the same programmatic abuse, was unintelligible to all four test subjects, all of whom had good hearing.” That's my experience as well. The article goes on to review a variety of approaches, but ultimately, there's no single best technology.
Face it: if you’re prospective non-fiction author, you may as well have “sucker” written on your forehead. Everyone knows you yearn to be a bestseller and they’re quite happy to take your money to feed that need. Much of what they’re offering is waste. A lot of it is worthwhile. But it could cost you … Continued
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As a photographer, I do most of my photo editing on a desktop computer with a giant screen. But like most people, I also take loads of pictures with my phone, and I often employ mobile apps to sharpen and polish those iPhone photos before sharing. The bevy of tools and adjustments in the best photo editing apps can be truly overwhelming. But don’t panic: In the video above, I walk through my basic workflow for quickly editing photos in one of our favorite apps, Adobe Lightroom.
You don’t need a deep knowledge of Lightroom to get great results. In this video, I focus on the basics first, such as exposure, and getting the most detail out of highlights and shadow areas. Then, I establish a look with contrast and white balance adjustments. Finally, I adjust specific hues and regions of the image. Check out the before-and-after results:
The original photo, shot with an iPhone XS. Photo: Michael Hession
The edited version. Photo: Michael Hession
Every photographer has their own preferred methods for getting great results, and this is just one path that happens to work for me. Once you get familiar with the tools and figure out your own techniques, I think you’ll find it endlessly gratifying to control your photos and make them come alive without resorting to prefab filters.
As we steadily work towards the release of the Librem 5 smartphone (Q3 of 2019), we’re taking a look at one new application (or game, or feature) running on the Librem 5 Development Kit every single day.
Below is the first week worth–Solitaire, web browser, system tools, note taking… just all over the map. Some of these are mobile optimized applications. Others are desktop Linux applications, running unmodified on Librem 5 development kit hardware.
What will the next week hold? Which applications and games will we take a look at over the coming week? Who knows! (Well. I do. But I’m not telling.)
Side note: If you pre-order the Librem 5 before July 31st, you save $50. And fifty bucks is fifty bucks.
As this is an article focussing on Boris Johnson, a man who parted company with honesty some decades ago, let us focus on truth. Specifically, five truths. First, Johnson wants to be prime minister and in four weeks, almost certainly will be. Second, a majority of MPs in the House of Commons do not think he is up to the job. That is, almost all opposition MPs and almost half of all Tory MPs. Third, both Johnson and Jeremy Hunt are advertising their determination to take us out of the EU without any further delay, even if that means a no-deal crash-out. Fourth, a majority of MPs are implacably opposed to no-deal.
Which takes us to our fifth truth: we are either heading for a political crisis in July, or October, or both.
Let’s start from basic principles. The EU will not renegotiate the backstop because it has no incentive to do so. Its leaders would sacrifice their own leverage, shatter their own political cohesion and credibility, throw a small member under the bus to appease a departing one, and strengthen a political opponent who once literally compared them to Hitler. They would be idiotic to back down to the UK now, and they will not. This, then, is the bottom line.
Johnson and Hunt, however, have established their own parallel bottom line: that we must leave without a deal rather than revoke Article 50. Johnson told the BBC on Monday that both Labour and the Conservatives would face “mortal retribution” if we did not leave on 31st October, deal or no-deal. On Tuesday he insisted that no-deal must be “do or die” (likely the latter). Meanwhile, over the weekend, Hunt—let’s remember, the more serious and credible candidate—discussed a factory near Kidderminster which relies on EU trade and would be “wiped out” by no-deal. Without pausing for breath or apparently thought, he then declared that “if that was the only way to deliver Brexit, then I’m afraid we have to do that, because that’s what people have voted for.” Ignore the fact that a majority of voters, who in 2016 were guaranteed increased prosperity and free trade, emphatically did not vote for their fellow citizens to lose their jobs. This is now our political reality, and this is our next prime minister’s starting point.
And so here we are. The EU will not renegotiate the deal. The prime minister will not request a new extension. We therefore revert to the control Brexit intended to take back: the sovereignty of parliament.
Now we know that a new PM will almost certainly take us to the brink in October, parliament may finally feel compelled to take the initiative. The Tories will announce their new leader on 23rd July. May will conduct her final Prime Minister’s Questions the following afternoon, then visit the Queen to tender her resignation. The day after that, MPs begin their summer recess. The scene is set for chaos.
It now seems increasingly likely that parliament will test the confidence of the government before that recess begins—possibly on the Tuesday, after the Tories unveil their new leader, or even the Wednesday, before May has reached Buckingham Palace. Why would it not? Labour’s strongest and most consistent Brexit policy has been to reject no-deal. Now that is effectively the government’s default policy, it will perceive both a duty and opportunity to stop it. The SNP, Lib Dems, Plaid Cymru and Greens will support the vote, as will, surely, the current and erstwhile members of Change UK (even if it means losing their seats in a subsequent election). We then turn to the small core of Remain rebels still on the Tory backbenches. Dominic Grieve and Ken Clarke say they would bring down the government in order to prevent no-deal. Tobias Ellwood, a current minister, has told the BBC that a dozen MPs, including himself, would join them. And so the first question is, would they do so next month? After all, since Johnson has already made his ultimate intentions plain, they cannot give him the benefit of the doubt because there won’t be any. Why, in that case, let him take us on a direct route to the autumn cliff-edge? If they do go on the offensive, we could be heading for a major constitutional crisis. Johnson will in practice have lost the support of the Commons before he even begins. The subsequent turbulence is difficult to overstate. The Queen could potentially be dragged in if the Commons demonstrates its lack of confidence before she invites Johnson to form a government. Buckingham Palace would consider this anathema and do everything possible to avoid it. The Tories might have to call upon a caretaker leader, such as David Lidington, who would command the House’s confidence. In any event, an immediate election would ensue.
Alternatively, let us suppose that Grieve and Clarke decide to indulge Johnson for a few weeks, and allow him his courtesy meetings in Brussels where his fellow leaders smile politely and tell him to go away. Parliament returns in September—by now in its longest session of sitting days in centuries—and Johnson has an urgent decision to make. Assume he goes for no-deal. He has calculated that parliament will support him. He is wrong.
MPs have no appetite to usher in an economic crisis. They have repeatedly rejected no-deal in Commons votes, and polls show two-thirds of the public agrees with them. Johnson would be mistaken to rely on the parliamentary vote two weeks ago in which MPs declined to seize control of the Commons agenda. Many members considered it was the wrong time for a vote, and Tory whips had assured them that there would be other opportunities to defeat no-deal. The motion, in the end, failed by 11 votes. Three MPs who voted with the government had previously resigned in order to stop no-deal, while other MPs who would have supported the motion were, for various reasons, absent. A future, clear motion to stop no-deal will almost certainly not fail. In this circumstance, it is difficult to see how Johnson survives.
The second possibility is that Johnson successfully requests an extension after all. His fragile coalition will fall at the first hurdle. You cannot tell moderates you will secure a deal, simultaneously tell the European Research Group that you will go for no-deal, and appease them both. The hardliners have no personal investment in Johnson and will not hesitate to bring him down if he betrays them. Johnson will lose a confidence vote and his government will fall.
The third scenario is that Johnson fails to secure an extension. Parliament must then answer the most fundamental question of all: whether it should revoke Article 50. The UK enjoys this unilateral right, and quiet Tory moderates have said that they would exercise it. Only a tiny number of Labour MPs would oppose. Johnson would not last the rest of the week.
We therefore face two potential blow-ups: a full constitutional breakdown in July, or a straightforward political crisis in September or October. They will trigger either an election or referendum or likely both. Beneath it all, the truth remains the same as it always has: a no-deal exit is the least likely option, and we are in for many more months or years of national chaos.
Brett Terpstra writes about how scripting runtimes are being removed from the Mac in the next OS release.
This is actually distressing, and not that much attention has been paid to this.
I’m one of those people who just use whatever’s on the system. I don’t think I’ve ever installed a different version of Ruby, and I don’t even know how.
But the ability to run Ruby scripts is hugely important to me — for one thing, this blog is generated by a set of Ruby scripts running on my Mac.
The iPhone is the first — and only? — direct interface that is both great and hugely successful. It’s direct in the sense that you touch things directly on the screen.
The first time I used an interface even remotely like that was the first time I ever sat in front of a computer, sometime in the ’70s — it was a PLATO system at the University of Delaware. (Elementary school field trip FTW.)
But it took a long time before the technology advanced to the point where direct interfaces could be a mass-market thing.
Indirect Interfaces
Even though we have this wonderful thing of touching directly on the screen, indirect interfaces are still everywhere. If you have a hardware keyboard connected to your iPad, you’re using an indirect interface with iOS.
And of course there’s the digital crown on the Apple Watch, the remote you use with your Apple TV — and the keyboard and mouse or trackpad you use with your Mac.
Indirect interfaces are part of the future of computing. The future is diverse and complex, and indirect interfaces are a necessary part of the future — because I’m not going to get up and touch my TV screen.
I remember when potato chips were potato chips. Then one day barbecue-flavored chips came along. Then sour cream and onion. Now you can get potato chips of all kinds! It’s crazy, but people have their favorites. The future is like potato chips.
The Mac
The thing about the Mac is that it’s always used via indirect interface. When you have a hardware keyboard and a precision pointer that takes very little energy to move, then you can do things that would be non-ergonomic for a direct interface.
You can have giant monitors — and even multiple monitors — and whip that pointer from place to far-away place with little effort. You can make targets smaller, due to the precision, which means you can make information and controls quite a bit denser. You can put features in menubars, because menus are much easier to get to and navigate using an indirect pointer.
Though this kind of interface is roughly as old as those early touch-screen PLATO systems — and therefore mature, and therefore boring to a lot of people — there’s still so much to be said for the efficiency that it provides. You can see more, and do more, with less physical energy. For eight hours a day, five days a week — if not more, for some people — it matters.
There’s a cognitive cost, I think, but it’s paid up-front and then ingrained, and most of us have forgotten how we learned to use a Mac in the first place. (I was almost certainly older than you when I first started using a Mac, and I only kind-of remember.) (You also have to learn iOS, too.)
And many iPad users see the benefit of indirect interfaces — plenty of people ask their iPad app-makers to provide full control via keyboard. They want to be able to navigate everything without having to touch the screen. I get it! It totally makes sense. I want that too.
But here’s what I think: the future does include machines that are built, like the Mac, entirely around the idea of indirect interfaces. There will be enough people that value efficiency that this isn’t going to go away.
There are, of course, plenty of tasks that are truly best-suited for an iPhone or an iPad. Absolutely. But for many productivity tasks, the force-multiplication that an indirect interface provides makes a big difference to many people.
You may value other things. You may move between both worlds pretty easily. Different people like different kinds of potato chips — but sour cream and onion doesn’t have to disappear so that barbecue may thrive.
All three of the apps in Apple's iWork productivity suite received a substantial update this week. Changes varied by app and across platforms, but the lion's share of the revisions improved the apps' flexibility, text styling, and image handling capabilities, and, on iOS, Pencil integration.
The Mac versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote and their iOS counterparts now allow text to be styled with gradients and images. There are also new outline styles. Images, shapes, and equations can be placed inline in text boxes, which allows them to move with the text box when it's moved, and the apps use face detection when photos are added to a document to determine where they should go intelligently.
In Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for iOS, a double-tap of the Apple Pencil toggles it between two modes: scrolling and selection, and drawing. The apps' dictionaries can also be modified now using a new 'Learn Spelling' function. Altering the size and color of bullets, adding custom bullets, and changing indentation levels for bulleted lists is available in all three apps as is changing the borders of cells in tables. Finally, all three apps have new chart editing functionality for styling series, adjusting the spacing between columns, and adding trend lines, among other things.
Most of the remaining changes are to Pages and Numbers. Both iOS and Mac versions of Pages and Numbers have added the ability to link text to other pages of a Pages document or sheets in Numbers. Also, on both platforms, Pages can copy and paste pages of a document or sections of one between two different documents and reapply a master page to return a document to its default style state. There's an English-language template for creating novels in Pages on iOS and the Mac too.
Finally, both versions of Numbers use a new, more powerful 128-bit calculation engine in its spreadsheets and add the ability to insert rows into filtered tables.
It's great to see all versions of the iWork apps getting an update. I don't use Pages or Keynote regularly, but Numbers has become an app that I rely on most days, and I appreciate the fact that Apple has kept the functionality of both the Mac and iOS versions close to each other even if it means maintaining two separate sets of code.
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As is the case with most restaurants in Charlottetown, the cost was about 2-3x the price of a similar meal in Hsinchu, but unlike the “fries-with-that” places that litter the city, it’s a worthwhile treat.
Relative to 25 years ago, when we arrived here in Charlottetown, the proportion of “fries-with-that” restaurants has dramatically decreased; there was a time when that was almost all you could get if you ate out.
Today, within walking distance of my office I can get bibimbap at three different places; we have two Vietnamese restaurants, three Thai restaurants, and three Indian restaurants. Our 1993 selves wouldn’t recognize the place.
Mr. Howard: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Electric bikes are another emerging trend. These can be used to get around outside of winter months. This combination of active transportation and small scale electrification will become more prevalent. Are there any plans to encourage the uptake of electric bikes?
Speaker: The hon. Minister of Transportation, Infrastructure and Energy.
Mr. Myers: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. At this point we haven’t even gotten a program off the ground to help people get into electric cars, so we’re working towards that. As we talked about in House here last week, I believe our solar option is stage one to living a sustainable lifestyle and as I’ve said to you in private discussions, I believe that electric vehicles is clearly stage two – something that I’m committed to work towards, it’s something that our government is committed to work towards and I’ll take any recommendations you have seriously and I’ll bring them back to our efficiency people and to our energy people and make sure that they get on the agenda.
Speaker: The hon. Member from Summerside-South Drive.
Mr. Howard: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The active transportation network’s bike lanes and regulations will be sufficient to encourage the safe use of these of these types of active transportation. The range extension that electric assist affords means it would become much easier to bike into town from rural areas – meaning we will see an uptake in bicycles on our highways. Can we expect to see any improvements to highway planning infrastructure that will accommodate the inclusion of more bicycle traffic?
Speaker: The hon. Minister of Transportation, Infrastructure and Energy.
Mr. Myers: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So we have a sustainable transportation committee – the Minister of Environment, Water and Climate Change; him and I set that up not that long ago. We have a strategy that we’re about to unveil that’s going to cover a number of topics, one of them will be active transportation links and how we plan to deal with them moving forward in the future, so yes, it’s on our agenda. I realize there hasn’t been a lot done in the province in the last 100 years as far as bicycle goes. Prior to that probably there was. At this point, since there are some vehicles on the road there’s been very little done to accommodate any other type of vehicle on the road. Yes, it’s something that we’re looking at. It’s something that’s in our planning, and it’s something that we’re going to try to get to as we build new highway structures across Prince Edward Island.
I’m happy both that the question was asked, and also the spirit of the reply.
I met this morning with Shayne Connolly, my personable life insurance broker. While reviewing our coverage he scrolled by the section of the PDF that had my actuarial age at death as 84.
It wasn’t so much that this was news to me as how casually it floated by.
According to the US Social Security actuarial tables, my probability of dying in the next year is 0.65%. By the time I’m 84 it goes up to 8%. If I live to 119, I’ll have an 88% probability of being dead with a year.
In this, as in all things statistical, the words of the late Stephen Jay Gould in The Median Isn’t the Message are helpful:
We still carry the historical baggage of a Platonic heritage that seeks sharp essences and definite boundaries. (Thus we hope to find an unambiguous “beginning of life” or “definition of death,” although nature often comes to us as irreducible continua.) This Platonic heritage, with its emphasis in clear distinctions and separated immutable entities, leads us to view statistical measures of central tendency wrongly, indeed opposite to the appropriate interpretation in our actual world of variation, shadings, and continua. In short, we view means and medians as the hard “realities,” and the variation that permits their calculation as a set of transient and imperfect measurements of this hidden essence. If the median is the reality and variation around the median just a device for its calculation, the “I will probably be dead in eight months” may pass as a reasonable interpretation.
