Rolandt

SaneBox and Spark bring me close to email nerdvana Yes, yes Slack is awesome. Basecamp is killer and I love Asana. All of these tools are designed to reduce the amount of email we send and receive. Except it hasn’t worked out that way. I still get a lot of email from people, especially for […]

Hugo-award-winning author Charles Stross said that a corporation is some kind of sociopathic hive organism, but as far as I can tell a corporation is really more like a monkey troop cosplaying a sociopathic hive organism.

This is important to remember because, among other reasons, it turns out that the money that a corporation spends to support democracy and creative work comes from the same advertising budget as the money it spends on random white power trolls and actual no-shit Nazis. The challenge for customers is to help people at corporations who want to do the right thing with the advertising budget, but need to be able to justify it in terms that won't break character (since they have agreed to pretend to be part of a sociopathic hive organism that only cares about its stock price).

So here is a quick follow-up to my earlier post about denying permission for some kinds of ad targeting.

Techcrunch reports that "Facebook Custom Audiences," the system where advertisers upload contact lists to Facebook in order to target the people on those lists with ads, will soon require permission from the people on the list. Check it out: Introducing New Requirements for Custom Audience Targeting | Facebook Business. On July 2, Facebook's own rules will extend a subset of Europe-like protection to everyone with a Facebook account. Beaujolais!

So this is a great opportunity to help people who work for corporations and want to do the right thing. Denying permission to share your info with Facebook can move the advertising money that they spend to reach you away from evil stuff and towards sites that make something good. Here's a permission withdrawal letter to cut and paste. Pull requests welcome.

TL;DR: Each of us plays the protagonist in our own life. This can leave us blind to all the other actors.

 

I met Paul at an art auction. He liked my paintings and told me so enthusiastically. He was one of few who did, that night. The others were more interested in representational wildlife paintings and framed hockey jerseys. His bid won my weird 3′ x 5′ abstract landscape. (I doubt anyone else bid on my painting.)

I bumped into Paul a few more times. He keenly supported artists in my hometown. That said, he owned an architectural design company, and was always on the run. I remember him in a sharp-looking, but understated, shirt and pants—with a notebook under his arm. He’d smile and wave before dashing to another meeting.

Years later, I’d stopped making art, and was working as a designer at smashLAB. At that time, a large company bought the naming rights to a local arena. They hired our studio to design an identity and treatments for that facility. They also brought Paul’s firm on to design the interior of one of the buildings. They contracted our companies separately, but our work overlapped.

It was a complicated project. Our direct contact was an independent project manager working out of Calgary. He acted on behalf of a large railway company, and reported to 17 managers there. They owned the naming rights to a building managed by a local team. This team reported back to city managers. If you’ve ever worked on a project like this before, you know why I’m sharing these details. Having that many stakeholders makes for a challenging gig.

The project manager reached out to me, asking that I check in with Paul. He explained that Paul’s team wanted access to the logo and brand elements. They needed to include them in the design of the space. It was nice reconnecting with Paul. I sent him the files. I also explained that our mutual PM wanted me to review his plans—to make sure they fit with the brand.

I never heard back from Paul. This confused our mutual PM, and kind of bugged me.

After a couple of months, I called Paul to ask why he hadn’t been in touch. I was friendly, but defensive. Our studio needed to oversee the brand’s implementation. Why hadn’t he at least sent the work for a quick once-over? Paul’s response was out-of-character. He snapped back, and explained that he had no obligation to show me anything.

I don’t remember how I responded to Paul’s outburst. My faint recollection is that I backed down, got off the call, and thought to myself: What a jerk!

That call loomed in my mind, for days. I didn’t think my request was unreasonable. Our mutual client wanted me to look his drawings over. Paul seemed so affable, in the past. Why was he unwilling to work together? Did he consider me inferior? Was I not good enough to deserve his time?

As these thoughts raced in my mind, I dwelled on my feelings. I felt slighted, rejected, and small. But, I never considered what Paul felt, nor, what might be going on in his life.

Six months later, Paul died of cancer.

Homework

Next time someone seems angry with you, take yourself out of the equation. Take a pause, breathe, and request a time out. Then, move the conversation to them, how they are, and how you might help.

The post The Rest of the Story appeared first on Eric Karjaluoto.

Eve Flare ist eine portable LED-Leuchte mit HomeKit-Unterstützung. Sie ist etwa so groß wie ein Basketball. nach IP65 gegen Wasser und Staub geschützt und wird von einem Akku mit Strom versorgt. Auf der Unterseite lässt sich auch ohne HomeKit die Farbe wechseln und das Licht ein- und ausschalten. Mittels eines Drahtbügels lässt sie sich auch wie ein Lampion aufhängen. Mit der Leuchte werden eine (nicht wassergeschützte) Basis und ein Netzteil geliefert. Die Stromverbindung zwischen Basis und Leuchte kommt über zwei Federkontakte in der Basis zustande, die auf zwei ringförmige Kontakte in der Leuchte greifen, unabhängig von der Richtung, in der man die Leucht aufsetzt.

Man kann diese Leuchte also im Innenraum betreiben und dabei gleichzeitig laden und bei Bedarf mit nach draußen nehmen. Dort wird sie problemlos einen Regenschauer überstehen. Bei einem Gewitter sollte man sie allerdings lieber reinholen. Die nur etwa 800 Gramm schwere Kugel wird zu leicht vom Sturm verweht. Dauerhaft kann man sie ohnehin nicht draußen betreiben, weil die Stromversorgung dafür nicht geeinet ist.

Die Eve Flare lässt sich gewohnt einfach in HomeKit integrieren. Man muss lediglich den Code scannen. Die Verbindung zwischen Flare und Apple TV, Homepod oder iPad als Steuerzentrale geschieht über Bluetooth Low Energy. So kann man sie in Routinen und Szenen von Homekit einbinden. Die Reichweite dieser Verbindung schränkt etwas die Nützlichkeit ein, ist aber dem Akkubetrieb angemessen. Bei mir ist das kein Problem, da die Flare direkt über dem Apple TV steht. Man kann sie aber nicht einfach im ganzen Haus verteilen wie etwa die Philips Hue Lampen. Flare taugt mit ihren 90 Lumen außerdem nicht als Beleuchtung sondern erzeugt nur ein schwaches Stimmungslicht.

Flare kommt in einer Woche am 25.6. in den Handel. Sie lässt sich bereits jetzt vorbestellen.

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““Not to lie about the future is impossible and one can lie about it at will.” - |...

We like Fujifilm’s mirrorless cameras because of their excellent image quality and regular camera-improving firmware updates; a Fujifilm camera is also the way to go if you already have a collection of expensive Fujifilm lenses. We’ve taken advantage of several years of research and testing of mirrorless cameras to help you find the best Fujifilm model for you, whether you’re shopping to replace a broken body or you just want a better camera to reflect your growing photography skills.

Glen Bull, Joe Garofalo, Michael Littman, Matthew Hoffman, Register Login International Journal of Designs for Learning, Jun 21, 2018

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I like this idea."The goal of the project is for students to gain fluency in the process of invention and to understand related science concepts embodied in the inventions." They do this by having students make not just one but a sequence of progressively more advanced electric motors. "Kits have been developed for three types of motors in the electric motor sequence: (a) the Davenport Rotary motor, (b) the Charles Page Solenoid motor, and (c) a contemporary linear motor based on a 20th-century design." I never got to do anything like this when I was in school. I wish I had. 13 page PDF. From the just released current edition of International Journal of Designs for Learning.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Raymond Camden, CSS-Tricks, Jun 21, 2018

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I do like stuff like this. "In this article, I'm going to explain how I put it together and also what's wrong with it. I knew getting into this that I was going to make some compromises, so the plan is to follow up this version with a nicer one in a follow-up post." Part 1, Part 2.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

It might seem like the creative process begins with a brainstorm and ends with a presentation. But in reality, creating the asset is just the first step. It’s everything that happens after that determines whether the idea will fly. And at every stage of the content lifecycle—creating, sharing, reviewing, discussing, and iterating—there’s a team of contributors who shape and refine it. The hard part is making sure all those contributions build the idea up, and don’t whittle it down. To make the reviewing and iterating stages of the process easier, Dropbox is introducing new previews capabilities. Here’s how they can help your team save time and drive work forward.

Giving reviewers new ways to preview files

At Dropbox, we want to upgrade the preview experience from passive viewing to active reviewing. So we designed new previews capabilities to be an integral part of your team’s collaboration workflow. Dropbox previews generate more than 300 million views every month. That adds up to a lot of time saved by eliminating the need for downloading. Now you can quickly preview the file and stay in your workflow.

• AutoCAD previews. Access and view DWG files on mobile and web. Previews allow collaborators to view and provide feedback on the file, even if they don’t have the AutoCAD app installed. Available for Dropbox Professional, Advanced, Enterprise, and Education customers.

“This is great for our business. We frequently receive large numbers of CAD files and are tasked with sorting through those and figuring out which we truly need. Previously, we had to use AutoCAD to convert every file because we had no way to preview them right off the bat.”—Dana Hagar, Director of Customer Success Operations at Social Tables

 

 

• EPUB previews. View EPUB files on mobile and web without needing to download them or install an eReading app.

“Dropbox EPUB previews have drastically changed the way we share content with funders, librarians, and literacy program managers around the world,” said Stephanie Gomes, Digital Collection Manager at Worldreader, a global education technology nonprofit.

“Now we can send a password-protected, no-download shared link to an EPUB, complying with data protection requirements, cutting out weeks of delay, and saving hundred of dollars in administrative costs. Most importantly, it creates a new way for us to collaborate with partners all over the world. It’s amazing!”—Stephanie Gomes, Digital Collection Manager at Worldreader

• MXF video previews. Easily see whether an MXF file in Dropbox is actually the one you’re looking for. It’s a core step in our journey toward providing a comprehensive media collaboration toolset that helps media teams share material and work together from anywhere in the world. Available for Dropbox Professional, Advanced, Enterprise, and Education customers.

“Managing hundreds of different production files with similar names, and allowing executives to view early rushes as soon after they have been shot, is vital to increasing speed and collaboration in production.”—Mark Harrison, Managing Director at Digital Production Partnership.

• PDF and PowerPoint preview enhancements. Save time by using a new sidebar that lets you jump to a specific page in a PDF or slide in a PowerPoint file preview.

• ZIP and RAR previews. See what’s contained within an archive and navigate through its file structure without downloading and opening it on your desktop.

 

• Managing larger, more complex files. Professional videographers can shoot up to 6 TB of video on a single shoot. Dropbox previews let them work with these large files without needing to download them.
• Coordinating projects with many reviewers. Though many are involved in approving a project, too often, few can access the application the file was created in. Previews tighten the feedback loop by allowing any colleague to view and leave feedback on any file.
• Integrating with more platforms and applications. Teams are using more applications, but many aren’t designed to work together seamlessly. With previews, employees don’t need to have the original application to be able to collaborate on their colleagues’ files.
• Providing one source of truth for post-creation work. By bridging file sync and share with content-based collaboration, Dropbox previews let you do more than just view your files. They improve your daily workflow by becoming your team’s source of truth for post-creation work.

With Dropbox previews, you can share your work, collaborate with colleagues, and easily coordinate client reviews—they can even annotate and comment directly on file previews. And with Dropbox Paper, you can do even more. Paper will preview all the same file formats that Dropbox does, and it also enables you to embed content from apps such as InVision and Vimeo. This allows collaborators to track the development of your project from ideation to production.

To learn more about file types that preview on dropbox.com, check out our help center article.

Price Tags contributor Tom Durning shares an article from Press Progress that sheds some light on the comments of Brad Wall, former premier of Saskatchewan, about British Columbia’s speculation tax.

Designed to tax vacant properties, the tax will target less than one per cent of the housing market.

So why was Wall in Victoria saying that, “the speculation tax is a message to people outside of B.C. that the province is not open”?

As the Times Colonist in Victoria states, the tax “will be applied to the 2018 tax year and is meant to discourage the buy-up of housing by investors who subsequently leave homes empty. A homeowner can avoid the tax by living in or renting out the home for six months a year.”

And according to Press Progress, a Victoria-based real estate firm called Focus Equities, along with the United Nations Association in Canada, took out a full-page the Times Colonist last week, and “bizarrely billed the event as a discussion about the quote-unquote “Housing Insanity Tax.”

While the focus of the event seems to have been more a discussion about the pitfalls of the speculation tax, some interesting statistics came out of it. Michael Ferreira with Urban Analytics illustrated the housing shortage by showing that the 2,100 unsold townhomes or condominiums in Vancouver at the end of 2014 had shrunk to an inventory of only 89 by April 2018.

And while both Mr. Wall and former B.C. Premier Mr. Mike Harcourt thought the speculation tax was not a good idea, Mr. Harcourt noted that with a burgeoning global population of 10 billion by 2050, cities would require resiliency, and $350 trillion of investment was needed in cities worldwide. He forecast housing affordability not so much as a crisis, but more an on-going condition that would require constant attention over the next decades.

As Price Tags has previously reported, a survey undertaken by Research Co. showed that 75 per cent of people surveyed in British Columbia thought the speculation tax was a good idea, with 86 per cent of residents on the west side of Vancouver agreeing with it in the survey. Dan Fumano of the Vancouver Sun covered the results of the survey here.

Photos: Times Colonist and CTV News

Over the course of nearly five months, we lifted thousands of pounds of weight for hundreds of reps (in addition to researching the topic, interviewing experts, and comparison-shopping) to find the best set of adjustable dumbbells for at-home use. With a lightning-fast adjustment mechanism, a compact footprint, and a 5-to-50-pound load range, Core Home Fitness’s Adjustable Dumbbell Set is the set we think will work best for most exercisers.

Android Messages on the web is slowly rolling out today, according to XDA Developers. Back in April, new code within the Android Messages app revealed the existence of the web client.

The Android Messages webpage has gone live already. However, the feature hasn’t seem to hit my Messages app yet. It’s likely Google will roll out the feature to the wider Messages userbase over the next couple of days.

A new update to the Android Messages app, version 3.3.043, is also rolling out via the Play Store. Users will need to install this update before they’re able to link their smartphone app to the new web client.

To get the Messages on web to work: launch the update Android Messages app, tap on the menu icon and then select “Messages for web.” Following that, a QR code scanner will appear and then head to the Messages for web page on a desktop browser and scan the QR code. If the user doesn’t choose the “remember this computer” option, it’ll require the user to scan the QR each time.

Source: XDA Developer, Android Messages

The post Google has started rolling out Android Messages for web appeared first on MobileSyrup.

OnePlus One owners the world over can now update their smartphone to Android Oreo 8.1 thanks to the ongoing support of the Lineage OS team.

On Monday, the team uploaded the latest LineageOS nightly build to its website. LineageOS 15.1 is built on top of Oreo 8.1.

The OnePlus One is the one and only OnePlus smartphone to ship with Cyanogen OS. Due to a falling out between OnePlus and Cyanogen Inc, every OnePlus smartphone thereafter has shipped with OxygenOS, OnePlus’ in-house Android fork. After Cyanogen Inc. pulled support for Cyanogen OS in late 2016, the Cyanogen Mod team, which later rebranded itself and its fork to LineageOS, continued to support the OnePlus One.

The result is that four years after launch, the OnePlus is still getting major software updates. For reference, the OnePlus One’s original Cyanogen OS build was based on KitKat 4.4.2.

Instructions on how to install LineageOS 15.1 can be found on the Lineage OS website. While Lineage provides detailed instructions on how to install the latest version of its operating system to the OnePlus One on its website, some technical expertise is required. Of course, if you bought a OnePlus One, you likely already know how to flash an Android device.

Source: Lineage

The post Android 8.1 now available on OnePlus One via LineageOS 15.1 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Google has been working on the idea of launching a web-based portal for Android Messages, the company’s go-to option for standard text messaging. Continue reading →

A year or two ago, someone gave me a set of silicone ice cube trays, so I promptly got rid of the junky old plastic trays I’d been using. For a few months, that seemed like a great decision. Then I started to notice that my glasses of ice water were tasting more like the frost scraped off the back of my cluttered freezer. I had run into the one big flaw that had led us to initially dismiss silicone models entirely from our guide to ice cube trays: smells stick to silicone like flies to flypaper. And though no amount of scrubbing can get those smells off, ice cubes readily absorb them (it’s possible ice picks up smells directly from the freezer too, but in my experience and in our testing, silicone makes the problem much, much worse).

I came this close to getting rid of my trays, but instead, dove into researching cleaning tips and came out the other side with a solution that’s super effective, requires very little effort, and involves no cleaning supplies.

Lingering smells are not a problem limited to silicone ice cube trays; it can happen to all kinds of silicone kitchenware. The silicone gasket inside the lid of an Instant Pot (or any pressure cooker, for that matter), will absorb pungent odors like garlic, and then transmit them to the next thing you cook—a problem if you want to make, say, rice pudding. Silicone spatulas can also get odiferous, as can silicone bakeware.

A handful of solutions come up if you start Googling how to get the stink out of silicone. A lot of them involve soaking or burying your silicone in something (like vinegar, baking soda, or cat litter) and leaving it for anywhere from a few hours to a few days. But I, being impatient and loathe to buy a large quantity of something (like cat litter) that might not do me any good, skimmed past all of these. From what I could find on cooking forums, most of them didn’t seem that effective anyway.

Luckily, my unwillingness to take on an involved cleaning project paid off. After a little more time digging around on the Internet, I came across a Reddit post suggesting you could simply bake the smell out of your silicone ice trays. So I preheated the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, tossed in the ice cube trays, and, miraculously, pulled them out about half an hour later completely odorless.

The easiest way to get the stink out of silicone

Since that initial test run, I’ve made some adjustments to the technique as it was posted on Reddit. Here’s what I do:

• Preheat the oven to 250 ºF. I find that a lower temperature works just as well, though it may take a little longer. Most silicone cookware I’ve seen is oven-safe up to 500 ºF or more, and if yours is clearly labeled as such, go ahead and use a higher temperature. But because things like ice cube trays don’t usually come with heat limits, I like to err on the side of caution and treat them a little more gently. So far I haven’t had an issue.
• One very important thing to check before you go any further: Make sure that whatever you’re cleaning is 100 percent silicone or otherwise heatproof. Although silicone can hold up under high temperatures, it’s not a good idea to stick most rubbers or plastics into the oven. Read more on this in “Some important precautions” below.
• While the oven is heating, carefully wash your silicone item with soap and hot water to make sure it’s not covered in any food residue or oils that might get baked onto it in the oven.
• Place your silicone item in the oven, either on a baking sheet or directly on an oven rack. Set a timer for 20 minutes.
• Pull the item out of the oven and carefully take a whiff (you don’t want to burn your nose!). If you detect some lingering scent, return it to the oven. I like to check every 10 minutes or so until the scent is gone, and in my experience the process shouldn’t take more than 40 minutes or so. Leaving your items for longer probably won’t harm them (things like a silicone loaf pan are meant to be left in the oven for an hour or more anyway), but I haven’t tested baking anything for more than an hour, so proceed with caution when baking items like ice trays that aren’t specifically labeled for oven use.

I haven’t tried this technique on a huge variety of scents and objects, but I have used it to successfully remove smells from ice cube trays, Instant Pot gaskets, and the little silicone nub that seals my Zojirushi travel mug. It worked exceptionally well on the ice trays, and at getting the smell of soup out of an Instant Pot gasket. On the Zojirushi seal, I noticed a light lingering coffee scent, but that seemed to be tied to some residual oils I could see clinging to the silicone. After pulling the seal out of the oven, I gave it an extra scrub to remove that residue, and the scent disappeared almost entirely.

I asked Wirecutter senior staff writer and former science editor Leigh Krietsch Boerner why this baking trick works, and although she couldn’t find any studies on the subject, she suspects the answer is relatively simple. Those off smells are made up of molecules clinging to your silicone kitchenware, and just like water, those molecules evaporate at high temperatures. So when you bake silicone, you are truly burning the scents right off. This might explain why the trick didn’t work so well on those coffee oils, which didn’t evaporate in the heat. It also explains why, when I first baked my ice cube trays, I could actually smell the freezer burn wafting out from the oven.

Some important precautions

Before you go throwing a bunch of kitchenware into your oven, there are a few very important things to know:

• Most important, as mentioned above, this trick works only for items that are 100 percent silicone or otherwise extremely heatproof. Please do not put plastic ice cube trays or spatulas with plastic handles into a hot oven. The heat will ruin the tool, and maybe ruin your oven. If you’re at all unsure what an item is made of, check the manufacturer’s website to find out. And note that certain materials, like the rubbery handle on our favorite OXO whisk, look and feel like silicone but aren’t and will melt.
• Silicones in general are stable at high temperatures, and I haven’t noticed any changes to my ice cube trays after baking them several times. But items like ice cube trays haven’t necessarily been heat tested by the manufacturer. If that makes you uncomfortable, you should stick to using this technique only on items like silicone cake pans, which have been heat tested.
• Along the same lines, if you plan to use this technique on the gasket for your Instant Pot, stick to heating it to 250 ºF. Other silicone accessories made by Instant Pot are heat resistant to 450 ºF, but the company doesn’t provide those specifications for its sealing rings so it’s best to err on the side of caution. The Instant Pot itself can reach temperatures as high as 242 degrees, while stovetop pressure cookers with similar gaskets (as well as the forthcoming Instant Pot Max) will get up to 250 degrees, so 250 is likely a safe temperature for the gasket. But because your Instant Pot won’t build pressure properly without an intact gasket, it’s important to treat it with more care than you might an ice cube tray. That being said, the gaskets on all pressure cookers eventually need to be replaced, as they wear out over time. You’ll know it’s time to get a new one when your cooker takes longer than usual to come to pressure.

About those other techniques

One of the most common suggestions for getting smells out of silicone is to soak your silicone item in a 50-50 mixture of white vinegar and water for a while. I’ve seen it in a number of forums, and it’s also what Tovolo, the maker of some popular silicone ice cube trays, recommends. But it’s only moderately effective at best. In researching our guide to ice cube trays, some of my colleagues tried soaking a smelly ice tray in vinegar and water for an hour before rinsing it, and found that the freezer smell was slightly reduced, but definitely still there.

I’ve also seen people recommend coating or soaking your silicone kitchenware in a mixture of baking soda and water for a few hours, burying it in cat litter for a few days, or just running it through the dishwasher regularly. But from my research, none of these seemed easy enough or reliable enough to try. The baking soda thing is messy, and from most feedback I saw online, about as effective as vinegar. The dishwasher might work, or it might not, or it might make your silicone taste like detergent instead. Or you (like me) might not own a dishwasher. Some people have had success with cat litter, but I don’t want to buy a whole bag when I don’t own a cat. Nor do I want to worry if cat litter has any odd additives that I shouldn’t be ingesting.

GitHub, Jun 21, 2018

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I'd rather have a jmysql - a one line JSON api. But still, this is a pretty cool concept. "Generating REST APIs for a MySql database which does not follow conventions of frameworks such as rails, django, laravel etc is a small adventure that one like to avoid .. Hence this." Use with caution, though. Related: AWS SAM CLI -- a CLI tool for local development and testing of serverless applications.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Mike Bostock, Observable, Jun 21, 2018

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Nicely described in O'Reilly thusly: "a really nice demo of the "what if we didn't publish static text and images, but instead you could interact with the explanation?" You can continue on and look at other examples of Explorables, though note that they get complex quickly. De Casteljau’s Algorithm, for example, is a mind-bender. But the benefit of something like Explorables is that you can see what the equations are describing. And you can see how practical some algorithms are, as in for example this bit of centerline labeling on a map of California. Here's the Observable platform, where you can make stuff like this.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

 

Brad Ogbonna

Who printed it?
I went with Smartpress based in Minnesota (where I’m from) the last 3 years. I was looking for a high quality and affordable printer and most of the NY local options were a bit out of my price range when I was starting out and not exactly patient when it came to figuring out which paper to use and which printers worked best for my colors. I reached out to Smartpress and they were super helpful with sending over examples of papers and being very patient as we went back and forth on proofs.

Who designed it?
My friend Emily Kapsner www.emilykapsner.com and I put it together each year.

Tell me about the images?
I’ve been fortunate to work on a lot of different types of projects ranging from fashion, to editorial, portrait, and some documentary work so I like to include those projects alongside my own personal projects where I am doing tests with people that I meet while street casting and my photo projects on the different destinations I travel to yearly.

How many did you make?
The first year I created the promos I printed around 100 copies, the second year I printed 500, and this year I printed out 1000.

How many times a year do you send out promos?
I only send out promos once a year and will periodically e-mail clients new work that I’ve shot.

Do you think printed promos are effective for marketing your work?
Yes definitely! The response I get each year has been phenomenal and my first run of promos was what landed me my first big editorial gigs with the New York Times, Refinery29, and magazines like The Fader and Billboard. From there the ball really started to roll.

Now that I’m on my 3rd promo, I’ve had photo editors tell me that they look forward to receiving them each year and are now collecting them. A lot of friends and fans of photography have also reached out to ask if they can get/purchase copies. I guess it feels like a zine rather than a standardized promo so it has a different feeling to it. I carry a few copies with me on every job to show people I’m going to photograph or a leave behind for editors.

I hope to keep doing one every single year and put out like a 10-year collection or something :)

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Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit | David Graeber

One reason we don’t have robot factories is because roughly 95 percent of robotics research funding has been channeled through the Pentagon, which is more interested in developing unmanned drones than in automating paper mills.

A case could be made that even the shift to research and development on information technologies and medicine was not so much a reorientation toward market-driven consumer imperatives, but part of an all-out effort to follow the technological humbling of the Soviet Union with total victory in the global class war—seen simultaneously as the imposition of absolute U.S. military dominance overseas, and, at home, the utter rout of social movements.

For the technologies that did emerge proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. They have enabled a financialization of capital that has driven workers desperately into debt, and, at the same time, provided the means by which employers have created “flexible” work regimes that have both destroyed traditional job security and increased working hours for almost everyone. Along with the export of factory jobs, the new work regime has routed the union movement and destroyed any possibility of effective working-class politics.

Meanwhile, despite unprecedented investment in research on medicine and life sciences, we await cures for cancer and the common cold, and the most dramatic medical breakthroughs we have seen have taken the form of drugs such as Prozac, Zoloft, or Ritalin—tailor-made to ensure that the new work demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally crazy.

With results like these, what will the epitaph for neoliberalism look like? I think historians will conclude it was a form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones. Given a choice between a course of action that would make capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and one that would transform capitalism into a viable, long-term economic system, neoliberalism chooses the former every time. There is every reason to believe that destroying job security while increasing working hours does not create a more productive (let alone more innovative or loyal) workforce. Probably, in economic terms, the result is negative—an impression confirmed by lower growth rates in just about all parts of the world in the eighties and nineties.

But the neoliberal choice has been effective in depoliticizing labor and overdetermining the future. Economically, the growth of armies, police, and private security services amounts to dead weight. It’s possible, in fact, that the very dead weight of the apparatus created to ensure the ideological victory of capitalism will sink it. But it’s also easy to see how choking off any sense of an inevitable, redemptive future that could be different from our world is a crucial part of the neoliberal project.

I feel like I was supposed to know what blockchain is a while ago, but I’ve only had a hand-wavy explanation on hand. And it wasn’t a very good one. Reuters provides a clear and concise visual explanation of how blockchain works. Now I can explain it to friends and family whenever there’s a Bitcoin spike or dip, or I can at least point them to this explainer.

Tags: blockchain, Reuters

David Graeber | Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something. But if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.

“Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following:...

In case it wasn’t obvious from yesterday’s piece, Graceland — the real one I mean, Elvis’ mansion in Memphis — is a place of worship. The visitors are serene, experiencing belief not faith; a lot of them saw Elvis on TV or even in the flesh. They know that, as Paul Simon sings, in his lovely, lovely song also called Graceland, that there’s reason to believe that they’ll all be received there. And also just the name “Graceland” is the prettiest word imaginable.

“Poor boys and pilgrims” Paul sings, but getting into the mansion is kind of expensive so I guess it’s just pilgrims. That’s a word that brings another kind of worship to my mind, because of a related word: Peregrine, a falcon whose name is cognate with “pilgrim” etymologically. One of the most intense experiences of my life was when in 1989, an employee of the University of Waterloo, I got involved with the effort to re-introduce peregrine falcons to the area; a young rescued bird was being persuaded to nest on top of the eight-story library. We, the volunteers, took shifts as watchers, keeping track of the falcon’s movements, worrying when it went to ground, rejoicing when it started to learn to hunt. I loved that bird, the creamy beauty of its feathers, the drama of its “stoop”, a word which means dive; a hunting peregrine’s dive is the fastest movement known to be achieved by any animal, approaching 320 km/hr. A peregrine flying a couple of hundred feet high stoops to the ground in the same amount of time you or I stoop to pick up a fallen pencil; it’s awesome. Watching the pilgrim bird, I was full of reverence. Just for the bird; no metaphors or symbolism.

Oh, I seem to have gotten distracted.

You have to be a little ambiguous about Paul Simon, who got on the wrong side of some of the right people around Apartheid. But then he taught the world about the music of southern Africa, which has to count for something.

You don’t have to be ambiguous about Graceland, though; it’s a beautiful tune beautifully played, the chord changes are spookily epic, and the melodic hook on “I’m goin’ to Graceland, Graceland” is among the sharpest any songwriter ever embedded in anyone’s musical memory.

This is part of the Song of the Day series (background).

Links

Spotify playlist. This tune on Spotify, iTunes, Amazon. Here’s a nice live performance.

David Graeber | Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

Defenders of capitalism make three broad historical claims: first, that it has fostered rapid scientific and technological growth; second, that however much it may throw enormous wealth to a small minority, it does so in such a way as to increase overall prosperity; third, that in doing so, it creates a more secure and democratic world for everyone. It is clear that capitalism is not doing any of these things any longer. In fact, many of its defenders are retreating from claiming that it is a good system and instead falling back on the claim that it is the only possible system—or, at least, the only possible system for a complex, technologically sophisticated society such as our own. 

But how could anyone argue that current economic arrangements are also the only ones that will ever be viable under any possible future technological society? The argument is absurd. How could anyone know?

David Graeber | Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

To begin setting up domes on Mars, let alone to develop the means to figure out if there are alien civilizations to contact, we’re going to have to figure out a different economic system. Must the new system take the form of some massive new bureaucracy? Why do we assume it must? Only by breaking up existing bureaucratic structures can we begin. And if we’re going to invent robots that will do our laundry and tidy up the kitchen, then we’re going to have to make sure that whatever replaces capitalism is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power—one that no longer contains either the super-rich or the desperately poor willing to do their housework. Only then will technology begin to be marshaled toward human needs. And this is the best reason to break free of the dead hand of the hedge fund managers and the CEOs—to free our fantasies from the screens in which such men have imprisoned them, to let our imaginations once again become a material force in human history.

furtho:

Willi Dorner’s Bodies In Urban Space, 2007 (via here)

My first memory of Taiwan is of scalding my skin in the hot springs in Hell Valley, a place where an oceanic trench and a volcanic system have created uniquely beneficial pools. I watched my skin pink up and pressed white spots into it as the shock of the heat turned soothing and the air smelled heavy with sulfur. The springs in Beitou all feed from boiling water connected to the Tatun Volcano group, which frame the hotels and springs below. I remember, when  told that the water I’d stepped into was volcanic, I became too afraid to move — men have been boiled alive by water from this source; locals used to boil eggs in these pools before it was outlawed, yet there we were, swimming in it and staring at a dormant volcano. But then, adjusting, I slid slowly further into the water. I’ll never forget how I felt because it feels so familiar now as an adult: It was the first time I felt seductive doom.

Those hot springs in Hell Valley, I later discovered, have that sensation built into its history. The architectural marvels are a product of Japanese colonization, developed to comfort colonizers and remind everyone else that the land was for the Japanese to use. The first hot spring in Taiwan was established in 1896 by Hirita Gengo, a Japanese businessman, shortly after Japan began its 50-year occupation of the island. It was expanded for the arrival of Japan’s Prince Hirohito in 1923 to make the springs the largest baths in his empire. Another hot spring just up the road was also a center for political power for the rest and restoration of occupying forces. Now a museum, it was first a hotel taken over by the Japanese military to house soldiers on their way to war. Submarine operators were sent there before their deployment to the Pacific theater and pilots were sent before their final flights as kamikazes in both the Sino-Japanese wars and World War II. The letters they left behind suggest that they did not believe their sacrifices would win the war, but they hoped their deaths would help immortalize their ideals. They took the water to prepare for death.

When I think of those soldiers bathing in that water only a few decades before I did, I think of the river Styx. The mythological channel between life and death carried departed souls to the underworld and gave Achilles the strength of an immortal everywhere it touched him, which of course was every place but one. These examples show that water is transformative, a medium of both sacred conversion and political indoctrination, and it flows easily between both. People rely on water not only for literal survival but also to help establish cultural significance, imperial domination. Immersion doesn’t just transform your body or heal ailments; it presages the afterlife.

“Spatial forms or distance,” wrote Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception, “are not so much relations between different points in objective space as they are relations between these points and a central perspective — the body.” Water is such a bridge of relation, a medium that relates us to both the symbolic sacred and the state that demands our transformation. The body is just where we begin. Wellness spaces shape their transformation. Sara Ahmed writes in Queer Phenomenology that “spaces are not exterior to bodies; instead, spaces are like a second skin that unfolds in the folds of the body.” Water’s the catalyst, power the source.

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Bath houses, spas, and springs are some of the longest-standing examples of architecture as petrified political power. Within them, that power is harnessed as the catalyst of bodily transformation, further testifying to itself. Bath houses represented the wealth and cultural legacy of a healthy civilization. They’re the nexus of health and wellness for a community. It is no surprise that they were some of the first places destroyed in coups.

Ancient Greek and Roman baths were cities within cities and centers of cultural legacy and production. Their first altars and baths were built on places they believed were sacred springs — to honor their gods, of course, but also in hopes that these gods would make those who visited them healthier. This relay of power was ultimately a demonstration of the state’s efficiency.

Hospitals were attached to community springs, and during militarization troops were stationed near springs to aid with the soldiers’ recoveries. Platoons pooled their funds to buy dedications to gods, which were etched onto the marbled columns at Bath, England. The pagans who bathed in those springs beforehand did much the same. They buried curse tablets dedicated to Sulis, their god of wisdom and healing, who was adopted into Roman myth as Minerva, the goddess of medicine, magic, and war. Both goddesses oversaw the waters at Bath; one of the spring’s previous names was Minerva’s Water.

Mosques and hammams also have a symbiotic connection, connecting hygiene and wellness practices to piety. When the Crusaders invaded Damascus, the hammam became a point of socialization where wellness rituals were shared among opposing forces. Knights would use the hammams alongside the communities they were occupying. The Crusader castles along the Syrian coast all have hammams, including those of the famed Assassins at their Al-Kahf Castle: nearly overgrown with plants following the fortress’s destruction. Given Iran’s rich history of invaders, the architecture of its hammams reflects centuries of power struggles. The Crusaders considered hammam-building a sign of community philanthropy and cultural assimilation, and the Arabs considered preserving mosques and hammams a sign of indomitable power in the face of colonization.

These sites don’t merely link wellness and statecraft through architecture and myth. Some wellness practices, like the procedures typified by isolation tanks and sound baths, are wielded as both therapeutic treatments and military interrogation techniques. Architects of meditation spaces sometimes bring in audio engineers to balance the environment; too quiet a room makes visitors uncomfortable, while a white noise unique to the room prevents the solitude from feeling restrictive. Floatation tanks in spas come with glowing exit/assistance lights regardless of how pitch black they become, so you’re allowed to have a safe exit if it ever starts to disturb you. This is in contrast to Guantánamo Bay and other black sites, where solitary confinement and sensory deprivation are used to turn the body against itself. You can be at peace alone in a room with no windows or in an uncomfortable pose or temperature if you’re free to release from them as you please. Both uses of isolation as an embodied exception to the rule are potentially transformative.

Wellness spaces are meant to bring you in tune with your own body in a way that feels restorative and provides a sense of safety and ease. Therapeutic design in wellness spaces uses a lot of the same tropes: therapy lights with perfect horizon lines of shadow for distracted meditators, plenty of storage to prevent any clutter at all, walls that blend into the ceiling with no harsh lines, and heated, spring-reinforced floors. In the Scandinave Spa Vieux-Montréal, designed by the architectural firm Saucier + Perrotte, the surfaces are all slightly angled and undulate: floors, walls, ceilings. Depressions in the floor become pools, benches are cantilevered, and steam baths are placed on pedestals, directing you as you progress through the bathing ritual. According to architect Dwayne MacEwen, who has designed spas and hotels, wellness spaces are meant to create something “intimate and choreographed,” with a careful consideration of the social and the non-social, and each space is programmed for an emotional impact.

Survivors of torture experience this emotional impact’s inverse — not a choreographed experience of individualized care but a deindividualization that has been described by academic E. Valentine Daniels as “therapeutic terror.” This is when a person is pushed past their capability to experience their body and endure aftershocks of specific pain. They are turned against themselves — irrevocably, violently transformed.

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Fascists love architecture like that of Roman bath houses because they’re cathedrals of flesh, designed with Vitruvian body proportions in mind. Vitruvian proportions are exemplified by that drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, based on notes by the architect Vitruvius. They suppose the human is in harmony with the world, that man is based in God’s image, and that our bodies’ natural harmony should also be employed in buildings. It standardizes the requirements of beauty in both bodies and buildings. Architects used these ratios to build proportional buildings in antiquity, including bath houses, but they’re still used today in some of our most epic feats of design, like Grand Central Station. Grand Central was based on the ruins of the Caracalla Baths in Rome, a ruin that Mussolini loved dearly. He wanted to host the Olympic Games in the 1940s upon their bones. These bath houses, beautifully designed, reflect their creators’ egos and what it means to have power and success in the world. They do so perhaps more effectively than the more obvious monuments because they extend their legacies less explicitly. The London Museum of Design’s director, Deyan Sudjic, refers to this particular “edifice complex,” writing that “trying to make sense of the world without acknowledging architecture’s psychological impact on it is to miss a fundamental aspect of its nature. To do so would be like ignoring the impact of warfare on the history of technology.” He wasn’t speaking about the architecture of spas, but many of his examples of political aesthetic mention wellness spaces like hammams and holy pools.

Architects whose work includes no Romanesque columns or sound baths still base their work on the fantasies of both mythology and bodily transformation. Consider the projects of Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa, and their concept of “procedural architecture,” exemplified in their book Architectural Body and their foundation Architecture Against Death. Gins and Arakawa wanted to create buildings that kept people from dying, and they too had “decided not to die.” They both died from terminal illnesses they kept private for most of their lives, before most of their designs could be executed. They created architecture meant to trigger states the human body must reach to transform, with the hope of guiding bodies toward immortality. The premise of their work was the question: “How do people understand the relationship between their bodies and their surroundings, and how can that relationship be reimagined?”

Some of their proposals were exorbitantly expensive and only a fraction came to fruition — undulating floors and walls you had to slide through while moving on a downward slope. Their work is considered impractical and best as theory now, but what they were trying to do is not much different from what other architects attempt. If other architects create buildings around the way bodies need to use them, Gins and Arakawa demanded you interact with the building with your body to transform yourself. The only radical difference lies in how they executed their quest for transformation. Their work simply wasn’t comfortable, and their designs were as physically rigorous as the designs they were constructed to respond to.

Madeline Gins’s last project after Arakawa’s death was a commission for a healing center in the Peloponnese, based on the Sanctuary of Asclepius, a cluster of bath houses where ancient Greeks believed they could be healed of illness. Gins named her reinterpretation the Reversible Destiny Healing Fun House. Unfortunately, the client died before it was built.

Gins and Arakawa’s proposal that architecture should be a tool of wellness is an inheritance of our cultural love of sacred sites and our hope that some sort of power can transform us if we only know how to use it. Wellness as a protective shell against death is a universal experience. It is also, unfortunately, a medium that can transport you straight to it.

Cupertino computing giant Apple has officially released its HomePod smart speaker in Canada.

The device retails for $449 CAD, and is available in both white and space grey.

For those French language-speakers hoping to chat with Siri in their native tongue, Apple has said that French language support will come to the HomePod “later this year as a free software update.”

MobileSyrup managing editor Patrick O’Rourke reviewed the HomePod, calling it the “best smart speaker for Apple users.”

Patrick not only praised the device for its design, he also complimented it for its impressive sound quality.

However, he was critical of its price, while also highlighting that it only works best when paired in conjunction with Apple devices.

The HomePod is available at retailers like Apple, Best Buy and The Source.

The post Apple’s HomePod smart speaker is now available in Canada for $449 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Apple has hired autonomous vehicle expert and ex-Waymo engineer Jamie Waydo.

Waydo worked as the head of systems engineering at Waymo and was in charge of verifying the safety of the car company’s prototype vehicles.

Apple has been quietly working on its self-driving cars for a while. The last we’ve heard is that the company partnered with Volkswagen to build autonomous shuttles for Apple’s campus.

Waydo is possibly being brought on by Apple to test its vehicles, which would line up with a report from The Information that speculates Waydo is joining Apple’s team because the company is getting close to testing the safety of its vehicles. While this is speculation, it would make sense considering Waydo’s old role at Google.

Photo credit: Twitter user @idiggapple

Source: MacRumors, The Information

The post Apple hires top self-driving safety engineer from Google’s Waymo appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Images of a foldable Samsung smartphone have leaked, showing off a device dubbed “Project V.”

The phone carries the model number SM-G929F, a number found between the Galaxy S6 Edge and the Galaxy S7, meaning this foldable project was likely developed sometime between 2015 an 2016.

Samsung Project V
SM-G929F
CANCEL pic.twitter.com/NhBLH6grZK

— 萌萌的电教 (@MMDDJ_) June 16, 2018

The phone’s display also has the older Play Store icon, which Google retired in 2017.

The Project V device is rather thick with a thinner screen that flips out. The device also has one camera and a single flash.

The leak comes from Twitter user @MMDDJ who also says this device is “CANCEL,” likely meaning the foldable device that Samsung says it will launch next year won’t be the one shown in these pictures.

DJ Koh, the president of Samsung’s mobile division, announced back in January that the company will launch a foldable smartphone in 2019.

Source: @MMDDJ Via: Android Police

The post Images of a cancelled foldable Samsung smartphone have surfaced online appeared first on MobileSyrup.