You probably haven’t thought much about beer cans, Abstract Aluminum Space, the Midwest Premium, and how it all ties into Goldman Sachs, so you should read how the Goldman Sachs aluminum conspiracy lawsuit is over.

Der ehemalige FBI-Chef über Trump. In englischer Sprache ab 12,49 €. In deutscher Übersetzung durch Pieke Biermann, Elisabeth Liebl, Werner Schmitz, Karl Heinz Siber und Henriette Zeltner ab 17,99 €.

I remember when, at Harvard, my friends and I heard about a new website that promised to enhance our lives. Fourteen years later I see how wrong we were.

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This isn’t a song, it’s a movie soundtrack, I hope that’s OK. It’s by Philip Glass, and the movie is Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters from 1985. The name refers to Yukio Mishima, a Japanese novelist who went crazy and tried to lead a restore-the-sacred-Empire putsch against the Japanese government in 1970 and, when it predictably failed, committed seppuku.

Mishima was a loathsome person and my single attempt to read one of his books ran afoul of stinking heaps of metaphysical bushwah inside of a hundred pages, so I have no interest in seeing the movie. But it’s a damn fine set of songs.

Philip Glass is arguably the Twentieth Century’s most successful composer of “New Music”, using “New” in the sense of “classically rooted” and/or “not Pop”. For not-Pop music, some of his has been awfully popular. It’s been argued that every piece of Phil Glass music sounds like every other piece, but then the same is true of Vivaldi and Keith Richards. A lot of them sound very good to me, and he’s released several fine albums, but Mishima has always been my fave.

Sometimes he takes his show on the road; the Philip Glass Ensemble (5 keyboards, 3 woodwinds, one soprano and some of the instrumentalists sing too) includes Phil but he doesn’t lead it, he plays the lowest keyboard line, providing the core pulse behind the music. I caught a tour in 2006 where they played his soundtrack to Koyaanisqatsi in front of a screen showing the movie, and it was a hell of a show. Here’s a video clip (not Koyaanisqatsi) to give a feel for the experience.

The Mishima soundtrack is richly produced, with the awesome Kronos Quartet and lots of orchestral and keyboard help; it’s an audiophile favorite and sounds good turned way up loud.

This is the 107th in the Song of the Day series (background).

Links

Spotify playlist. As a sampler, I’m providing links to Mishima’s closing piece, entitled Closing, on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon. As for video, I can’t find any of the Glass ensemble playing this, but here is The Catalyst (String) Quartet playing Closing, the Amstel (saxophone) Quartet playing 1957 — Award Montage, and the Dublin Guitar Quartet playing what they call Blood Oath; the music sounds like part of Mishima but there’s a mistake, there’s no such track on the album.

Quote | via Folio:

National Geographic’s May issue (on newsstands April 24) will mark the unveiling of its most significant redesign in nearly two decades, increasing the quality of its paper stock, introducing a brand new front-of-book section, and creating even more room for the photography and visual storytelling that have long made up the brand’s DNA. Far from being born out of a desperate desire to survive in print—newsstand sales are actually up 16 percent this year, bucking industry trends—creative director Emmet Smith prefers to view the changes as a “proper evolution,” rather than a full-scale redesign.

More | Foliomag.com, National Geographic Unveils Redesigned Print Edition

Via Lifehacker | Visit New Places Every Day in Your Browser with This Google Earth Extension.

“Not every Chrome or Firefox extension you use has to be one-hundred-percent dedicated to productivity or utility. Sometimes, it’s just nice to look at something pretty. And in the case of Earth View from Google Earth (Chrome, Firefox), I don’t really care if it eats up my browser’s memory or otherwise impacts its performance in any way. It makes me happy, and it’ll make you happy too—exactly why this is our Extension of the Week.”

More news (it comes in daily) on the emergence of Transportation Service Providers – this time a data-sharing project between the public (Washington, DC) and private (Uber) through an intermediary (NACTO).  This suggests TSPs may be some mix of both.  Maybe.  (Check the last paragraph for where this is going.)

From Wired:

Today, the curb represents the most contested space in the urban world. Cyclists pedal through bike lanes, cars battle for parking spots. Taxis, Ubers, and Lyfts pick up and drop off riders. Delivery trucks unload Amazon Prime boxes and buses pull in and out of stops. People on foot scuttle through it all, trying not to get hit.

The people running cities believe there should be a place for all these things.  … But before city governments can start reallocating that space (too long given over to private, parked cars), they need information.

“The autonomous age is upon us but most cities really don’t even have the network password to log in,” says Janette Sadik-Khan, a former New York City transportation commissioner and the chair of National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO).  …

You know who does have that data? Private sector companies like Uber, which collect piles of information on who goes where, and when. And historically, they’ve been loath to let it until the sunlight. …  

Until now, perhaps. In January, NACTO quietly rolled out a data-sharing project called SharedStreets. And last week, it landed a very important private sector partner, in Uber. The ride-hail company has started using the project as an intermediary, to share sensitive pick-up and drop-off data for Washington, DC.

DC is pleased. “Data today is worth more than gold, oil and cryptocurrency,” says Ernest Chrappah, the director of the city’s Department of For-Hire Vehicles, which oversees taxi, limos, and ride-hail companies in the district. …

Indeed, SharedStreets may be exactly what both sides need. First, it will establish data standards for curbs, traffic speeds, and transit data, formats that can be shared between companies, agencies, even across cities. (No more, My computer can’t open that file.) Now, there’s a common language for curb data and maps, with agreed-upon locations for curb cuts and intersections.

SharedStreets’ second key advantage is that it serves as a non-profit, non-political third party, a data-holding buffer between occasionally adversarial cities and private companies. That’s key for the companies that have hesitated to share data, fearing less cautious of technically savvy users could compromise their customers’ privacy, or reveal their various secret sauces, like routing algorithms. …

So Uber is working with SharedStreets to build a tool that will process and aggregate private companies’ data, put it in the correct format, and leave it completely anonymized. …

This is nice timing for Uber. The ride-hail company is in the midst of a PR glow-up, eight months after dumping former controversial CEO Travis Kalanick in favor of the ultra–apologetic Dara Khosrowshahi. With a spate of announcements this week—about SharedStreets, its acquisition of a city-friendly bike-share company, and a mobile ticketing integration with public transit—Uber is working to prove it can be an excellent partner for cities.

SharedStreets’ success is not quite guaranteed. The platform has plenty of competitors, like Coord from Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, and Ford’s Transportation Mobility Cloud. These big dogs want to be the operating system for the modern city, with everyone—governments, companies like Uber and FedEx—feeding their info into their all-knowing, number-crunching transportation platforms. For now, though, cities and private companies say they are attracted to SharedStreets’ non-profit status. With its connection to National Association of City Transportation Officials, it feels safe. Now the project just needs to execute.

On Georgia near Denman:

A popular tourist attraction — riding around the park.  Cherry blossoms in spring, harbour views, beaches and fall foliage all a bonus.

Click to enlarge

It’s long been suspected that ballots alphabetized by candidates’ names confer an advantage to those at the ABCD end of the alphabet. Is this true; and who’s doing what to improve fairness in elections?
The theory is that some people haven’t pre-selected all 10 choices for councilor (say), so check off some at the top of the list when in the voting booth. Presumably, for many, this comes after they’ve chosen their party’s candidates, or after they’ve chosen some by an overriding method (such as incumbency or name recognition).

One good solution is to create a number of randomly-ordered, but differently ordered,  ballots, and distribute them randomly to the polling stations.  Such randomization is allowed under the Vancouver charter, but is not in use. This is not without its dangers, of course.  Imagine the concern if one of the random lists put all of one party’s candidates at the top. Yikes.

HERE‘s an analysis by Prof. Werner Antweiler of UBC’s Sauder School on the 2014 civic election in Vancouver.

. . .  as a researcher with the right empirical tools at hand, I went to find out if ballot order mattered in Vancouver too. You will probably not be surprised to learn that it does.

. . . Nowhere is this effect more pronounced than in municipal elections where (a) voting turnout is low, (b) voters do not feel that the outcome matters much to them, (c) party identification may be vague to many voter (an outsider would not infer political affiliations from the name “Non-Partisan Alliance”, for example), and (d) individual candidates have limited ability to reach out to voters directly.

As to the upcoming October 20 civic election, Joanne Lee-Young writes in Postmedia outlet the Vancouver Sun about Councilor Reimer’s motion to produce randomized ballots. She has, it seems, support from Councilor Affleck.

Says Bryan Breguet, who teaches economics at Langara College and makes election projections: “There is a fairly strong case that ballot order matters, but either way, you can reverse the burden of proof. Why would you be against a random list?”

“My own feeling is that there are academic literature studies which feel conclusive and others that don’t,” says Reimer. “But if there is any possibility of a bias, whether it’s a perception or if there is real harm, why not just do it?”

“This is not about creating something that appeals to people simply because of its novel technical achievements; rather it is [about creating] something that has real meaning…”
– Kamal Sinclair, Director of New Frontier Lab Programs at the Sundance Institute

Virtual Reality is coming. In many ways, it’s already here.

Media outlets like the New York Times now regularly create VR content that is showcased alongside its other digital journalism efforts. On the entertainment side, serious buzz is building around the release of Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, and home VR headsets are becoming increasingly accessible.

These are all indications that the tides are shifting VR towards the mainstream, but significant obstacles remain for both creating content and enjoying most of the current immersive experiences. These include expensive hardware, confusing distribution methods, complicated configurations, and more.

The mixed reality team at Mozilla devoted two years to brainstorming and experimenting to find a way to bring virtual reality to the web. That’s because we believe the web is the best possible platform for virtual and augmented reality. The ability to share and access virtual experiences with a URL is a game-changer; the key needed to take this amazing technology and make it mainstream.

This type of direct access is critical for filmmakers and creators who wish to use VR as their next storytelling medium.

That’s why Mozilla convened our VR the People panel at this spring’s Sundance Festival. It was an opportunity to connect with some of the world’s most innovative visual storytellers and bring together some incredible names, including Mozilla’s own Sean White, VR journalist Nonny de la Peña, the creatively explosive Reggie Watts and immersive artist Chris Milk, CEO of WITHIN.

That Sundance panel was an extraordinary experience, but true to Mozilla’s mission, that panel had to be more than an isolated event. We want it to be a catalyst for an ongoing effort to blur (and eventually erase) the boundaries between VR, film-making, and visual storytelling. Next week, we’ll be traveling to Tribeca Film Festival in New York to continue the conversation. If you are around, let us know. We’d love to chat.

If you’re a creator reading this, I certainly hope you feel inspired, but I also hope you feel something more. I hope you feel empowered, and then you turn that empowerment into action. I hope you go on to create something amazing that inspires someone else to create something amazing. I hope you create things with VR that we can’t even imagine right now.

Check out https://mixedreality.mozilla.org/ to view the VR tools and resources Mozilla offers to help you create immersive experiences.

The post An Open Call to Storytellers: Make Something Amazing With Virtual Reality and the Open Web appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Design Director: Ivylise Simones
Photography Director: Anna Goldwater Alexander
Photo Editor: Amy Silverman
Art Director: Ben Bours
Photographer: Nik Mirus

What was the evolution of this idea, did it start one way and then evolve?
We started with a few different ideas- and i have to say this is one of the most collaborative issues I’ve ever worked on. We knew we were doing a special “life issue” broken down into various stages of one’s life (but including pre-birth and post-death). So the art department met a lot to talk about various ideas that were photo based and illustration based. We all brought ideas to the meetings with reference photos from different artists and across different styles. Eventually, art directors Ben Bours and Mike Ley put together a beautiful presentation for our editors that went through 3 different possible approaches we had agreed on. We called them Organic, Cellular, and Discovery and Decline. Each treatment had its own fonts and artists and colors associated with it. All focused on progression and stages and metamorphosis. When you are thinking about life and death it’s hard to avoid well worn metaphors so we decided to embrace them. Eventually we decided we wanted to use a photographic approach, our “organic” treatment. Our creative director, David Moretti, who left WIRED right as we were shooting, was excited about using flowers as a way to show the stages.

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There is a remarkable restored film that was made in 1911 in New York City by the Swedish company Svenska Bigrafteatern. The footage has been slowed down and there is unfortunately a soundtrack added that is not original.

It does show the remarkable time when streets easily  incorporated all users, and formal pedestrian crossings had not yet arrived.

In 1910 New York City had a population of 4.7 million people, of which nearly two million were born outside the United States. Through this film people walk across the street easily, and the trams are slow enough to allow people to cross. In the view from a rooftop at 6:59 you can see the unimpeded movement of pedestrians in the  streetscape.

This was a crucial time in the history of mobility and transportation – in 1908, Henry Ford built and sold the first Model T car, and sales for this automobile reached over 250,000 by 1914.

By 1916, the price of a Model T dropped to $360, the equivalent of  $7,828 American dollars (2015), making an automobile an affordable purchase.

What this film illustrates is the different use of the street before motordom usurped the space as their domain, and the use of boats, trams and trains as public transit. Over one hundred years later we are now examining goals of increasing the use of public transit and enhancing walking and cycling, revamping city fabric for the use of people.

As Will Rogers said in   the book ‘Henry Ford and Grass-roots America’ “It will take a hundred years to tell whether he helped us or hurt us, but he certainly didn’t leave us where he found us.”

The film can be viewed here.

Lots of GDPR advice out there. As far as I can tell it pretty much falls into three categories.

• Play it straight and handle user consent correctly. Good part: you end up with less personal data, but what you do have is better quality and you clearly know what data you can use for what purposes. Bad part: UX gets annoying because users have to fill out a bunch of web forms.

• Cut back on surveillance marketing. Good part: better for brand equity in the long run. All advertising is brand advertising. Some of it is just brand advertising in the wrong direction. Bad part: what long run? CMO is a short-term job, and surveillance marketing projects get budgets for a reason. Strip-mining brand equity is a short-term win.

• Hack the system, and build a way to keep doing surveillance marketing as usual. Good part: like one spider said to the other spider in the Far Side cartoon, if we pull this off, we'll eat like kings. Surveillance marketing lobbyists might still get European governments to accept this kind of thing. Bad part: what if Johnny Ryan at PageFair is right, and it won't work for regulatory reasons? Or if the client side improves privacy protections and it won't work for technical reasons? What did I tell you? Delay to e-privacy regulation causes uncertainty Then you have done just as much work as the clean solution, with nothing to show for it.

But what if there is another way?

1. Start with the clean version. (Here's that link again: How to: GDPR, consent and data processing).

2. Add microformats to label consent forms as consent forms, and appropriate links to the data usage policy to which the user is being asked to agree.

3. Release a browser extension that will do the right thing with the consent forms, and submit automatically if the user is fine with the data usage request and policy, and appears to trust the site. Lots of options here, since the extension can keep track of known data usage policies and which sites the user appears to trust, based on their activity.

4. Publish user research results from the browser extension. At this point the browsers can compete to do their own versions of step 3, in order to give their users a more trustworthy and less annoying experience.

Browsers need to differentiate in order to attract new users and keep existing users. Right now a good way to do that is in creating a safer-feeling, more trustworthy environment. The big opportunity is in seeing the overlap between that goal for the browser and the needs of brands to build reputation and the needs of high-reputation publishers to shift web advertising from a hacking game that adtech/adfraud wins now, to a reputation game where trusted sites can win.

If you’ve fantasized about getting rid of your smartphone, you are not alone. An entire genre of Internet writing is devoted to the experiment. Fed up with smartphone dependency, the writer tries a dumb phone (or no phone) for a week, increases their attention span and the number of in-person interactions they experience, then almost always concludes that modern life without a smartphone—and the maps, music, and mobile boarding passes they enable—is just too difficult. Having recently found myself checking Instagram while waiting to cross the street, and sometimes even mid-stride, I decided it was time to try my own hand at this trope, but from a different angle.

A less drastic and more sustainable solution to smartphone fatigue could lie in getting a second device that does many of the important things, but makes engaging with the biggest distractions, like social media and other bottomless scrolling experiences, more difficult. I spent two weeks with the Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE to see if it could be that device for me.

The Watch substitutes well enough as a basic phone: For a $10-per-month service charge (in addition to your monthly phone plan), you can use it to send texts (although doing so is a little cumbersome—no keypad) and place calls. It doesn’t quite have all the functionality of a miniature iPhone, but because it has its own data connection and GPS, it can look up directions or call a Lyft. The regular Apple Watches can do that only when within range of an iPhone.

It also does music really well; you can sync songs you own on iTunes or stream, though the latter can drain the battery quickly. The watch works only with Apple Music (sorry, Spotify users), but you can sync any music you own in iTunes for offline listening. That alone puts the Apple Watch well above other solutions for a limited device, like The Light Phone (phone calls only, though a version in funding on Indiegogo can do a little more). Other reviewers mention that it pairs well with AirPods, Beats X, and other headphones that use Apple’s W1 chip, but I found that connecting my non-Apple Bluetooth headphones could be a pain at times.

Technology that is cumbersome doesn’t slip so seamlessly, devilishly, into your life and psyche. The distance can be nice.

Happily, for the purpose of smartphone reprieve, the most attention-hogging apps do not work on the Apple Watch when it’s out of range of your phone. There’s no Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. Some third-party apps try to get around this, but they’re clunky at best. For example, Littlebook will allow you to browse Facebook newsfeeds—for $3; that’s enough of a barrier that I didn’t download it.

The watch also lacks a camera, which means no saving material for posting to social media. I wore a faux-fur scarf on the first day of spring, and, as I exited the subway, found myself unable to snap a picture to complain to my 196 followers about the bizarre cold. The feeling of reaching for my phone was strange, but then it felt nice to just keep walking uninterrupted.

There’s also the fact that the screen is just so small: It doesn’t have much to distract you with, and the stuff that it does have isn’t particularly easy to use. Texting via scrawling out a message one letter at at time reminded me of the feeling of hunting and pecking on my old Nokia, a feeling I’ve missed. You can also text via voice dictation. This is easier, but can be awkward in many social situations and still isn’t conducive to long conversations. I actually came to appreciate this friction over time. Technology that is cumbersome doesn’t slip so seamlessly, devilishly, into your life and psyche. The distance can be nice.

However, having a relaxing experience with the Watch doesn’t come without some hurdles. Namely, no podcast app. The third-party workarounds leave much to be desired (plus, third-party apps for the watch change not-infrequently, so don’t buy the watch counting on one). I tried an app called Minicast, which requires episodes to be preloaded from your phone and then downloaded. The process is so slow that after two hours just 10 percent of an episode of Serial had loaded onto my watch. An app called Outcast may work better, according to 9 to 5 Mac, however, it is full of workarounds, and a little glitchy: After I downloaded it, it froze. I found myself taking my phone on excursions where I’d rather just use the watch, in order to finish listening to an episode of Pod Save America.

Then there were apps that worked in theory, but were a pain to use in reality because troubleshooting them required access to an iPhone. For the first week, I could not, for the life of me, get the Lyft app to load; then when it began functioning, I realized there was an issue with the payment, which I’d need to enter on the phone. And the first time I tried to use the maps app to get directions, there was an issue with the location settings, which, again, required the phone to resolve.

I ultimately found that the Watch is not a panacea for phone addiction—after a challenging day, I’d still end up fully curled around my phone joylessly refreshing Twitter. But I did appreciate how using the watch has made me consider my relationship to my phone. During my phone-free hours, the Watch’s limited capabilities kept me from getting stuck in a cycle of mindless scrolling and prevented me from engaging in lengthy text conversations. I returned from these little vacations refreshed, excited about my phone’s features, namely that it’s a magical endless folder of articles and audio shows.

Tellingly, after testing a sample unit, I’m still not shelling out my own money for an Apple Watch. However, I am now thinking about going entirely deviceless for short excursions.

I provide a tiled visualization of average monthly birth rates between 1938 and 1991 for the United States and for England and Wales. Ideas about demographic “generations” such as Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials are in widespread use in popular discussions of social change, often quite fancifully. The visualization makes apparent the sheer scale of the U.S. Baby Boom in comparison to other alleged generations.

On the Omni blog I wrote up how we do The Omni Show.

The post explains my approach to marketing, unchanged over the decades:

I don’t have some grand marketing philosophy, other than 1) make great apps, and 2) look out and let other people look in.

On March 28th, the Drupal Security Team released a bug fix for a critical security vulnerability, named SA-CORE-2018-002. Over the past week, various exploits have been identified, as attackers have attempted to compromise unpatched Drupal sites. Hackers continue to try to exploit this vulnerability, and Acquia's own security team has observed more than 100,000 attacks a day.

The SA-CORE-2018-002 security vulnerability is highly critical; it allows an unauthenticated attacker to perform remote code execution on most Drupal installations. When the Drupal Security Team made the security patch available, there were no publicly known exploits or attacks against SA-CORE-2018-002.

That changed six days ago, after Checkpoint Research provided a detailed explanation of the SA-CORE-2018-002 security bug, in addition to step-by-step instructions that explain how to exploit the vulnerability. A few hours after Checkpoint Research's blog post, Vitalii Rudnykh, a Russian security researcher, shared a proof-of-concept exploit on GitHub. Later that day, Acquia's own security team began to witness attempted attacks.

The article by Checkpoint Research and Rudnykh's proof-of-concept code have spawned numerous exploits, which are written in different programming languages such as Ruby, Bash, Python and more. As a result, the number of attacks have grown significantly over the past few days.

Fortunately, Acquia deployed a platform level mitigation for all Acquia Cloud customers one hour after the Drupal Security Team made the SA-CORE-2018-002 release available on March 28th. Over the past week, Acquia has observed over 500,000 attacks from more than 3,000 different IP addresses across our fleet of servers and customer base. To the best of our knowledge, every attempted exploitation of an Acquia customer has failed.

The scale and the severity of this attack suggests that if you failed to upgrade your Drupal sites, or your site is not supported by Acquia Cloud or another trusted vendor that provides platform level fixes, the chances of your site being hacked are very high. If you haven't upgraded your site yet and you are not on a protected platform then assume your site is compromised. Rebuild your host, reinstall Drupal from a backup taken before the vulnerability was announced and upgrade before putting the site back online. (Update: restoring a Drupal site from backup may not be sufficient as some of the exploits reinstall themselves from crontab. You should assume the whole host is compromised.)

Drupal's responsible disclosure policy

It's important to keep in mind that all software has security bugs, and fortunately for Drupal, critical security bugs are rare. It's been nearly four years since the Drupal Security Team published a security release for Drupal core that is this critical.

What matters is how software projects or software vendors deal with security bugs. The Drupal Security Team follows a "coordinated disclosure policy": issues remain private until there is a published fix. A public announcement is made when the threat has been addressed and a secure version of Drupal core is also available. Even when a bug fix is made available, the Drupal Security Team is very thoughtful with its communication. The team is careful to withhold as many details about the vulnerability as possible to make it difficult for hackers to create an exploit, and to buy Drupal site owners as much time as possible to upgrade. In this case, Drupal site owners had two weeks before the first public exploits appeared.

Historically, many proprietary CMS vendors have executed a different approach, and don't always disclose security bugs. Instead, they often fix bugs silently. In this scenario, secrecy might sound like a good idea; it prevents sites from being hacked and it avoids bad PR. However, hiding vulnerabilities provides a false sense of security, which can make matters much worse. This approach also functions under the assumption that hackers can't find security problems on their own. They can, and when they do, even more sites are at risk of being compromised.

Drupal's approach to security is best-in-class — from fixing the bug, testing the solution, providing advance notice, coordinating the release, being thoughtful not to over communicate too many details, being available for press inquiries, and repeatedly reminding everyone to upgrade.

Acquia's platform level fix

In addition to the Drupal Security Team's responsible disclosure policy, Acquia's own security team has been closely monitoring attempted attacks on our infrastructure. Following the release of the Checkpoint Research article, Acquia has tracked the origin of the 500,000 attempted attacks:

To date, over 50 percent of the attempted attacks Acquia has witnessed originate from the Ukraine:

At Acquia, we provide customers with automatic security patching of both infrastructure and Drupal code, in addition to platform level fixes for security bugs. Our commitment to keeping our customers safe is reflected in our push to release a platform level fix one hour after the Drupal Security Team made SA-CORE-2018-002 available. This mitigation covered all customers with Acquia Cloud Free, Acquia Cloud Professional, Acquia Cloud Enterprise, and Acquia Cloud Site Factory applications; giving our customers peace of mind while they upgraded their Drupal sites, with or without our help. This means that when attempted exploits and attacks first appeared in the wild, Acquia's customers were safe. As a best practice, Acquia always recommends that customers upgrade to the latest secure version of Drupal core, in addition to platform mitigations.

mkalus shared this story from The Omni Group.

The big news in OmniPlan 3.9 for iOS is that you can view all recently edited documents in one place — it doesn’t matter if they were saved locally or synced by OmniPresence, iCloud, or other syncing system.

And: you can use the new Open option in the Locations list to open projects stored in various locations and syncing systems.

See the release notes for the full list of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes.

Make today the day you stop worrying and start planning!

mkalus shared this story from Price Tags.

The temporary surfaces have been in place for a while; the big design jam happened, and now it’s time to look at a design concept.

April 21 12-3 pm
April 25 3:30-6 pm
April 28 12-3 pm

511 w Broadway, Vancouver

So its a couple of days later than usual, but taxes are due today. However, let's look to the bright side -- tax returns are next!

If you are due a tax refund it usually takes the IRS about 21 days or less to process your tax returns. This gives you just the right amount of time to do your research and invest your money wisely! 

Electric bikes have been making headlines for the past couple of months. From the Mayor of New York overturning the ban on e-bikes due to the overwhelming benefits they provide for commuters to one of the most successful companies, UBER entering the electric bike space, the future looks bright for this innovative and fun transportation method.

If you are looking for a smart (and fun) way to spend your refund, invest in a Blix.

Blix gives you more ways to gain with your e-Bike investment. With a Blix bike, there are no hidden costs. Included on almost every model is a rear rack, bell, fenders, lights, kickstand, stylish comfortable seat, grips and a 3-year warranty to guarantee you peace of mind.  We also provide free shipping and convenient finance options because we want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to join the electric bike revolution!

E-biking to work is becoming more and more popular; explore your city better with an electric bike, sneak in some exercise, save time & money with your Blix  bike.

        

There are lots of good books out there about the beginnings of the Internet in the 1960s and how people started using it in the decades to come. I specifically recommend ‘Dealers of Lightning‘ if you are interested in the early history. But how was the development of ‘networking’ in general and the ‘Internet’ in particular viewed from the outside starting in the 1970s?

My own story ‘only’ starts in the mid-1980s, dial-up modems, mailboxes and the Fidonet and my first contact with the ‘real’ Internet at university. By the mid-1980s, however, interconnecting computers was already in full swing for a decade or so and I’m missing this part of the story. If you speak German, a good resource that also captures this part is the 100th episode of Tim Pritlove’s CRE in which he interviews Hans Hübner alias ‘Pengo’ who was part of the (in Germany) famous ‘KGB hack‘ between 1985 and 1989. In the 2.5h interview from back in 2008, only the last few minutes focus on this particular topic while in the main part Tim and Hans give interesting insights into how computers started to become connected in the 1970s on a global scale on how this was perceived from a German teenager’s point of view.

While having played no role in the US, the X.25 packet switched network that was popular in Europe in the 1980s ties in nicely into the overall story and helped me better understand its use and relation to dial-up modem connections and the TCP/IP ‘Internet’ at the time. A highly recommend source for those of you speaking German and interested in computing history!

P.S.: Coming to think of it, Harald Welte’s (LaForge) talk in December 2017 at 34c3 on ‘BBSs and early Internet access in the 1990ies‘ has interesting insights on the same topic as well!

If you have other good resources on the topic, please let me know!

It’s not a normal week if we don’t hear at least three or four new reports on the status of the Model 3.

Tesla stated to BuzzFeed News that its Model 3 production line is going to shut down for up to five days.

During the shutdown, employees are expected to either use vacation days or stay at home without pay, according to several employees who spoke to Buzzfeed anonymously. In a statement to Buzzfeed, a Tesla spokesperson said the break is to “improve automation”.

This is the second time Tesla has shut down Model 3 production since February. At the time, the company told Bloomberg it was temporarily stopping manufacturing to increase production by improving automation and addressing bottlenecks, said a Tesla spokesperson in an email with Bloomberg.

In an interview with CBS‘s Gayle King, Musk said Tesla has been too reliant on automated robots. He then reiterated that fact on Twitter.

Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 13, 2018

All of these issues have occurred while pressure mounts on the company to deliver the 5,000 model 3s per-week it promised for the second quarter of 2018.

Source: BuzzFeed News

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Netflix has denied a recent report that said the company is planning to make a TV news play.

Last month, MarketWatch published a report that said Netflix was planing to expand into the news business with a show that would rival ’60 Minutes.’

Ted Sarandos, the company’s chief content officer, denied the rumour during the company’s most recent earnings call, saying, “Our move into news has been misreported over and over again. We’re not looking to expand into news beyond the work that we’re doing in short-form and long-form feature documentary.”

Sarandos went on to further clarify that the company considers shows like the new David Letterman show entertainment, not news.

Based on that statement, it seems Netflix could still produce quasi-news shows like The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight, so there is a slim chance that the MarketWatch report was somewhat accurate.

Source: Netflix Via: TechCrunch

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Nintendo has filed a patent for what looks like a new system that’s capable of communicating between two or more displays.

The patent, first spotted by Digital Trends, is described as featuring “a plurality of information processing apparatuses that are capable of communicating with each other.” What this seems to mean is that data will be capable of transferring from one display to the another when the displays are close together. 

Images located within the patent show off the displays at various horizontal and vertical angles. It also looks like it may even be possible to daisy-chain multiple displays together that can then be physically separated, while still keep their positional data.

As always, a patent being filed doesn’t mean a product will ever actually exist. That said, Nintendo does seem to be making an effort to release experimental products lately, with Nintendo Labo being the latest example.

Bloomberg also recently reported that the Japanese gaming giant is looking to work with startups to create new, inventive accessories for the Nintendo Switch.

Source: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Via: Digital Trends

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Google Maps users are reporting that the service is now pointing out landmarks to improve the directions it offers.

For example, what had previously been “turn right onto Blue Jays Way” may instead come out as “turn right by the Pizza Nova.”

The feature was first spotted by CNET senior editor Scott Stein and Twitter user @iamdeemah, who confirmed that Google Maps was telling them to make turns after local fast food restaurants.

Google Maps told me to make a right “right after the White Castle.” Does it do that now?

— Scott Stein (@jetscott) April 14, 2018

So @googlemaps instructed me to “turn right after Burger King” … I think this is the best update yet. #mindblown

— Deemah MS (@iamdeemah) April 14, 2018

When reached for comment, Google told Engadget that this is just one feature that it is testing with some users to improve guidance, although no word was given on wider roll out plans.

Still, it’s interesting to see how more the kinds of directions one might give to a friend in person are being considered for digital map services as well.

Via: Engadget

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Samsung has reportedly started using blockchain technology to track its product shipments worldwide.

In a report from Bloomberg, the head of blockchain at Samsung, Song Kwang-woo, said the company ships tens of millions of dollars worth of products every year and by switching to blockchain technology the company could slash shipping costs by up to 20 percent.

Blockchain is the tracking technology used to manage cryptocurrencies so that all transactions are recorded and can’t be tampered with.

Using blockchain to track shipping could also make it so it is easier to reduce the amount of  trade paperwork that is involved with shipping something across multiple borders, particularly with port authorities.

The biggest plus for users is this could mean that products will make it to stores or your front door faster. It will be interesting to see how this project takes shape and what positives this brings to the companies shipping efforts.

Source: Bloomberg Via: Engaget

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