My Affordable City is a series profiling people in cities to learn more about their housing situation, how they budget for urban life, and what cost-saving tips they can share. Email me if you, or someone you know, wants to participate! 

Jada Stevens is a full-time graphic designer renting a 400 square foot studio apartment in downtown Vancouver. 

“The building is over 100 years old and the apartments are full of vintage charm: 10-foot ceilings with crown mouldings, radiator heat, and a claw foot bathtub. I’m proud to say that my building doesn’t have parking, but the walk score is 99% and the transit score is 100%. The proximity to shops, parks and the downtown core is right outside my door, allowing me to live car-free and keep my expenses down.”

In our interview, Jada describes how she came to realize that home ownership might never be an option, but in spite of this, she has made the city her living room and enjoys the many low-cost activities it has to offer. “I am so much happier,” she says.

How much of your monthly income goes toward housing?

43% of the net income from my full-time job goes toward rent.

Are you satisfied with your current housing situation? 

In the past, I have lived in every kind of housing situation. This includes living with boyfriends and sharing the living expenses, living with multiple roommates, renting out a living room in a shared apartment, living in a mansion in a co-housing situation with a dozen others, and renting out the solarium in my apartment to international students so that I can afford rent. 

This is definitely the most expensive place I have lived. But a year and a half ago, I decided to live on my own downtown, and I don’t intend to go back to living with roommates. I am much happier.

Is unaffordability affecting your quality of life?

Currently, it doesn’t but for most of my life, it has. I’ve adapted my lifestyle to afford a decent quality of life in the city. A lot of the material possessions that people measure their quality of life against, like owning a home or a vehicle, or living in a big space filled with all the latest toys and gadgets, is not something I’ll ever have. But I’m fine with that. I’ve decided not to have these things and as a result, can afford to live downtown. To be able to live where I am surrounded by people, parks, beaches, shops, and restaurants increases my quality of life, so it’s a fair trade-off for me.

Have you made any lifestyle changes to afford to live in your city?

To afford city living, I need a dual income. In the past, I’ve lived with roommates or boyfriends to split the cost of city living. But as a single person, city living is only possible because I have a side hustle doing freelance.

Budgeting is huge. I have a spreadsheet that tracks my expenditures each month. I pay bills first, allocate funds for food, tuition, and savings, then keep a small portion for spending on extra things like entertainment. But I must stick to that budget as I don’t have a credit card, so I rely exclusively on debit and cash. Keeping an eye on my finances on a daily basis helps keep my spending in check.

I’m also living in a small space, which is the biggest tradeoff to living downtown. When I moved into this apartment, I had to reconsider how to live in a small space, so I decided to minimize my possessions and only own what I need. When it’s time to socialize with friends, we get together at beaches, cafes and coffee shops instead of cramming into my apartment. I consider the city an extension of my living space. The parks and public spaces are the backyard I share with everyone.

What are your favourite low budget activities in the city?

Vancouver hosts numerous free events and festivals, which I take advantage of, like the Vancouver Mural Festival, The Pride Festival, and Car Free Days.

Finding ways to make my hobbies low-budget encourages me to volunteer with non-profits and contribute in ways that interest me. For example, instead of paying for a ticket to a festival, I will volunteer. It’s a fantastic way to give back to my community, meet new people, and enjoy events without buying a ticket.

Living in downtown Vancouver means we are spoiled with beaches and parks. I adore Vancouver’s urban public spaces, like Robson Plaza or Harbour Green Park, which are great for people watching or hanging out with a book and a coffee.

What are your money saving tips for living in the city?

My girlfriends and I organize clothing swaps where we get together for a night of trading our gently-used clothes. It’s easy to walk away with a wardrobe of new-to-me clothes and accessories. It’s also a fantastic way to socialize and we donate the leftover clothing to a woman’s shelter.

Having a bike share membership and a bus pass keep transportation costs low. Plus I walk everywhere, never cab. My small investment in active transportation equals big savings plus the added benefit of a healthier lifestyle. I recommend it!

Vancouver has a terrific community centre membership program where one monthly membership gives me access to all of the city’s community centres, ice rinks and pools. I take dance classes and the gym to stay healthy. My friends have memberships as well, so we make going to the community centre a weekly social activity.

And, I try to never leave the house hungry. The convenience of having restaurants around can extend my food bill. But I make sure I eat breakfast before leaving for work, so I won’t pop in and grab a breakfast meal and coffee. All those small expenses add up.

Do you plan to stay in your current home for the long term?

I would like to stay in this apartment as long as possible. Even though my monthly rental is more than I’d like, the location is ideal and I love the space. If I move, I know I’d be throwing myself at the mercy of a city that has a rental vacancy rate at less than 1%.

When I was looking for an apartment, there were very few rental suites available that were clean, safe and in a good location that I could afford. This apartment was more than I  wanted to spend on rent. The building had a waiting list and the landlord made it clear that he had his pick of tenants. 

The only way I was able to secure tenancy was after the landlord told me it would be in my best interest to offer to pay more rent than was advertised. So I did, and I was given the keys and asked to sign a fixed-term lease. I wouldn’t want to be put in that position again, where landlords have the advantage over tenants. I am keenly aware that rental rates have increased in the last year, and if I were to move I’d be paying much more for the equivalent space and location. 

What do you think needs to be done to make city living more affordable?

We need to make it easier for people to live near rapid transit in housing that is affordable for the lower and middle classes. The biggest reason why I can afford to live downtown is that transit is so prevalent, keeping my transportation costs low. 

I would like to see the city rezone areas around existing and future rapid transit to allow more densification of market-rate rental buildings, social housing, co-ops and live/work buildings. Low and middle-class renters of Vancouver need more housing options besides competing for the few market rental suites and renting privately-owned condos or houses, which don’t provide housing security. 

We have a civic election coming up in Vancouver and I am paying attention to any candidate that has progressive ideas to alleviating housing stress for those who live, work and pay taxes in the city. 

Thanks, Jada!

This year, It’s Nice That and Dropbox have been partnering to champion creativity. Every month, we invite two artists to develop a limited edition poster by collaborating in Dropbox Paper. And this month, It’s Nice That asked illustrators Marion Deuchars and Anna Kövecses to combine their talents.

Though Anna was working from Cyprus and Marion from London, they easily found a connection and common ground in nature. After discussing concepts and working out ideas together in a shared Paper doc, Anna came up with a visual way to link the themes of spring and International Women’s Day: hands holding flowers in a community of women.

Inspired by Anna’s first iteration featuring her signature style of bold block colors and cut-out shapes, Marion felt the image could be enhanced with some lettering. So she researched works of literature for the piece, and suggested incorporating a verse from the poem “Spring” by English writer Christina Rossetti.

“[Dropbox Paper] encouraged a nice playfulness of dropping in random thoughts and images to stimulate ideas… and a great way to keep a record of a project.”—Marion Deuchars

At this month’s Nicer Tuesdays event, attendees got to take home a printed version of the finished poster. For the full story and a behind-the-scenes look at how Anna and Marion used Dropbox Paper to bring their vision to life, check out this post from It’s Nice That.

From 2010, Steve Jobs on data privacy:

Tags: privacy, Steve Jobs

Woo. Woo. Alex Hern reporting for The Guardian:

In at least one previous version of the Messenger app, Facebook only told users that the setting would enable them to “send and receive SMS in Messenger”, and presented the option to users without an obvious way to opt out: the prompt offered a big blue button reading “OK”, and a much smaller grey link to “settings”.

Nowhere in the opt-in dialogue was it made clear that text histories would be uploaded to Facebook’s servers and stored indefinitely.

This was only on Android devices, as iOS devices don’t provide developers such access.

Tags: facebook, Guardian, privacy

Rewind back to the reactions to the September 2016 iPhone 7 announcement and you’ll find few fans of the removal of the headphone jack. Press reactions called the move anything from “annoying” to “user-hostile and stupid.” Enter Incipio’s OX case, which was announced at the 2017 CES trade show, but is just now seeing the light of day. However, a year and a half after we started down the path toward this headphone jack-less future, does it matter anymore?

The OX is a $70 protective case with a Lightning connector on the inside, connected to a Lightning port and headphone jack along the bottom edge. It works well if you’re intent on listening to corded headphones and charging your iPhone at the same time. (The adapter included with iPhones can’t do both.) The headphone port is a little tight, but capably puts out music with audio quality that’s indistinguishable from Apple’s own Lightning headphone adapter. And the Lightning port charges properly—although you can’t use it for audio, if for whatever reason you wanted to. I would prefer using the OX to carrying around an imminently losable adapter if using corded headphones was a priority for me.

As a case, the OX is slim, with a matte rubber finish. A half-inch chin at the bottom houses the electronics. The buttons maintain a pleasant clickiness and the camera and side switch openings are properly sized. However, the protective lip around the screen is shorter than the 1 mm height Apple recommends (PDF). Technically, the case is certified to work with only the iPhone 7, but it works just fine with the iPhone 8.

The OX isn’t available in an iPhone X version, but at this point I’m left wondering if it’s even worth it. The outrage over the removal of the headphone jack on the iPhone 7 died down almost as quickly as it came and in the time since, major phone makers such as Google, HTC, and Motorola have followed Apple’s lead. (Samsung is the last major headphone jack holdout, with its latest Galaxy S9 and S9+.)

For us, at least, the initial annoyance has since been tempered by the recent proliferation of decent wireless headphones and earbuds. “Since headphones jacks have started to go away, Bluetooth headphones have become seen as the standard, rather than a bonus feature,” said Lauren Dragan, Wirecutter’s senior staff writer covering headphones. “There are a lot more cheap options, and a lot more great options, too. True Wireless have especially made a jump in stability and sound quality.” This includes Apple’s AirPods, which are a genuine hit and a favorite accessory among Wirecutter staff.

That’s not to say Bluetooth headphones are a perfect solution. “Because Bluetooth is still evolving as a technology, you’ll always be paying more than you would for corded headphones to get the same sound quality,” Lauren added. Other things being equal, wireless headphones require chips and batteries that add to their cost. “Usually price cuts are made in other aspects of the headphone (drivers, build quality, etc.),” she clarified. Additionally, Bluetooth headphones can be a pain to pair, and they’re yet another thing you have to charge.

Wireless charging, introduced to the iPhone line with the 8 and X, also makes a big difference. Instead of having to plug in to the Lightning port to juice up your phone, you can simply place it on a pad or stand, leaving the jack open for wired headphones.

There are other accessories to solve the problem if you don’t want Bluetooth headphones, wireless charging, or the OX. Belkin’s 3.5 mm Audio + Charge RockStar is a dongle that lets you use wired headphones and charge; Apple’s iPhone Lightning Dock is better suited for your desk.

The OX may fit well into some lifestyles, like for people who have audiophile-quality headphones they’re not willing to give up but still require power. But better options, such as wireless headphones, are available for most people. For us, we’d rather have a headphone port than not. But the jack-less trend is going to continue, and fortunately there are great solutions that require little sacrifice.

Paul Miller, writing for The Verge, argues that Swift Playgrounds, while an amazing tool to learn the fundamentals of coding and Swift, ultimately doesn't let kids build real apps:

The Swift Playgrounds fantasy of what ARKit is like is closer to an ad than a tutorial. I’ve actually worked on an app using Apple’s ARKit and SceneKit APIs directly. I got stuck when my API call to Apple’s sound playback system wouldn’t work, despite all my best efforts at debugging. Writing software with Apple’s APIs is a powerful but difficult practice, and Swift Playgrounds’ penchant for hiding true complexity makes it hard to recommend for someone who doesn’t want to just “learn how to code” but instead wants to build something.

Apple would do its learners a huge service by providing them an Xcode equivalent on the iPad. Not because it would suddenly be easy to make applications and release them on the App Store, but because it would give iPad-bound learners a chance to engage that challenge and grow into true application developers in time.

I agree with Miller. I've been crossing my fingers for an iPad version of Xcode ever since the first-generation iPad Pro in late 2015. From aspiring programmers who would have a chance to see their creations on the iPad's Home screen (without using a Mac) to developers who could create commercial iPad software on their own iPads, the iPad needs Xcode. If coding is as important as learning a language, the lack of Xcode for iPad is like not having a keyboard to express our thoughts.

→ Source: theverge.com

For years now, I've been listening to many people -- smart, accomplished people -- feverishly proclaim that functional programming is here to right the wrongs of object-oriented programming. For many years before that, I heard many people -- smart, accomplished people -- feverishly proclaim that object-oriented programming was superior to functional programming, an academic toy, for building real software.

Alas, I don't have a home in the battle between OOP and FP. I like and program in both styles. So it's nice whenever I come across something like Alan Kay's recent post on Quora, in response to the question, "Why is functional programming seen as the opposite of OOP rather than an addition to it?" He closes with a paragraph I could take on as my credo:

So: both OOP and functional computation can be completely compatible (and should be!). There is no reason to munge state in objects, and there is no reason to invent "monads" in FP. We just have to realize that "computers are simulators" and figure out what to simulate.

As in many things, Kay encourages to go beyond today's pop culture of programming to create a computational medium that incorporates big ideas from the beginning of our discipline. While we work on those ideas, I'll continue to write programs in both styles, and to enjoy them both. With any luck, I'll bounce between mindsets long enough that I eventually attain enlightenment, like the venerable master Qc Na. (See the koan at the bottom of that link.)

Oh: Kay really closes his post with

I will be giving a talk on these ideas in July in Amsterdam (at the "CurryOn" conference).

If that's not a reason to go to Amsterdam for a few days, I don't know what is. Some of the other speakers looks pretty good, too.

From The Guardian:

How does a city cope with extreme weather? These days, urban planning that doesn’t factor in some sort of catastrophic weather event is like trying to build something in a fictional utopia. For Kongjian Yu, one of the world’s leading landscape architects, the answer to coping with extreme weather events actually lies in the past.

Yu is the founder and dean of the school of landscape architecture at Peking University, founding director of architectural firm Turenscape, and famous for being the man who reintroduced ancient Chinese water systems to modern design. In the process he has transformed some of China’s most industrialised cities into standard bearers of green architecture.

Yu’s designs aim to build resilience in cities faced with rising sea levels, droughts, floods and so-called “once in a lifetime” storms. At 53, he is best known for his “sponge cities”, which use soft material and terraces to capture water which can then be extracted for use, rather than the usual concrete and steel materials which do not absorb water.

European methods of designing cities involve drainage pipelines which cannot cope with monsoonal rain. But the Chinese government has now adopted sponge cities as an urban planning and eco-city template. …

Yu, who is based in Beijing, explained the key benefit of sponge cities is the ability to reuse water. “The water captured by the sponge can be used for irrigation, for recharging the aquifer, for cleansing the soil and for productive use,” Yu said.

“In China, we retain storm water and reuse it. Even as individual families and houses, we collect storm water on [the] rooftop and use the balcony to irrigate the vegetable garden.”

When it comes to water, the mottos of the sponge city are: “Retain, adapt, slow down and reuse.”

“One thing I learned is to slow down the process of drainage. All the modern industrial techniques and engineering solution is to drain water away after the flood as fast of possible. So, modern tech is to speed up the drainage but ancient wisdom, which has adapted in the monsoonal season, was to slow down the drainage so the water will not be destructive anymore. By slowing the water it can nurture the habitat and biodiversity.” …

As Yu says, it’s important to “make friends with water”. “We don’t use concrete or hard engineering, we use terraces, learned from ancient peasantry wisdom. We irrigate. Then the city will be floodable and will survive during the flood. We can remove concrete and make a water protection system a living system.”

mkalus shared this story from TorrentFreak.

Russia is developing a track record of being one of the most aggressive countries on the site-blocking front. Already many thousands of sites are rendered inaccessible to the general public but just how far will the government go to achieve its aims?

If reports coming out this week hold true, extremely far indeed.

The controversy centers around an app called Zello, which acts as a kind of ‘walkie-talkie’, assisting communication between close friends or in groups of up to a thousand people.

The app gained a lot of press in 2017 when it was revealed it was being used as an unofficial rescue co-ordination tool while Hurricane Harvey was battering the United States. It quickly shot to the top of the download charts after being downloaded a million times in a day.

But while the app clearly has some fantastic uses, Zello seems to represent a challenge to the authority of the Russian government.

Under the so-called ‘Yarovaya law‘, services like Zello, ISPs, and other telecoms companies, are required to register with Russian telecoms watchdog Rozcomnadzor. Amendments to come into force this year also require them to store the actual content of user communications for six months and metadata (such as who communicated with who, when, and for how long) for three years.

Encrypted services are also required to share keys which allow law enforcement bodies so that they can decrypt messages sent and received by users, something which has communications and VPN companies extremely concerned.

Until now, Zello has reportedly failed to register itself so as a result, the service has become a blocking target for Russian authorities. Zello uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) and last summer it was reported that dozens of Amazon’s IP addresses ended up on Russia’s official blacklist. This week, however, a much more worrying proposition raised its head.

Operators of at least four Internet service providers confirmed to Russia’s Vedomosti that Rozcomnadzor had issued recommendations that they block access to Zello. Copies of letters to the ISPs were published on Telegram and according to reports, most if not all of the country’s ISPs were targeted.

While blocking Zello would be bad enough, the suggestion of how that should take place is nothing short of astounding. The letter speaks of “an experiment” in which ISPs take action to block 36 Internet subnets – representing a staggering 15 million IP addresses – in order to take Zello down.

A total of 26 of those subnets have been identified as belonging to Amazon, accounting for 13.5 million IP addresses in total. Some are reportedly operated by Comcast, others by Softlayer, with the remainder connected to companies in China.

“The subnets selected by Roskomnadzor are not all Amazon’s IP addresses, but they account for a significant portion of the addresses from two large regions of the United States where the company’s data centers are located,” Vedomosti said, quoting a source familiar with Amazon’s infrastructure.

Zello founder and technical director Alexei Gavrilov said that he wasn’t surprised by the news and noted that he’d learned about the list of addresses from Telegram channels. However, it’s claimed that Zello doesn’t completely depend on the listed subnets, meaning that hundreds or thousands of other services unrelated to the app would end up as collateral damage, should they be blocked.

Neither Rozkomnadzor nor Amazon have commented publicly on the news and Russia’s Ministry of Communications has refused to comment. Fortunately, at the time of writing there have been no reports of ISPs mass-blocking IP addresses connected to Zello.

Whether Russia would really flex its muscles so broadly and aggressively just to prove a point is unknown but with the growing war on privacy the way it is, almost anything seems possible.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Data about population, urbanism, cities: I can’t get enough of it. Last week we saw that people move away from rural areas into the cities in Europe, and four weeks ago we looked at how fast exactly cities grow around the globe. Today, let’s compare numbers on the national level: How many people in a country live in rural areas? How many people live in cities? And of that share – how many people live in the capital?

Before looking at this chart, we might assume that the bigger a country’s population, the smaller the share that lives in its capital. And indeed: Iceland is a small country, and more than 50% of its citizens live in the capital. And China is huge, and a tiny share of its population live in Bejing. Then again, Argentina’s population is greater than Australia’s, but 35% of Argentinians live in Buenos Aires and almost nobody lives in Canberra.

But unfortunately, that’s something we can’t see in this chart. It shows us the relative numbers, but we have not even the slightest idea about the absolute number of people who live in these countries and cities.

The Marimekko Chart

If only there was a chart type that solved this problem. Oh wait, there is! The Marimekko Chart. It’s one of those rare chart types that looks simple & accessible, but contains a lot of information. One can read a lot of different information out of it. Which information? Let’s untangle that with our capital data:

In a Marimekko chart, the height of each bar represents an absolute number – in our case, the population of a country. And since each bar has the same width, the area of each bar represents the full population of a country, too. The area of the “Russia bar” tells us that 143m people live in Russia. The area of the “Argentina bar” is approximately a third the size of the “Russia bar”. So we learn that Russia’s population is three times bigger than Argentina’s one:

That’s where it gets interesting: Since the full area of a bar represents the number of people in a country, a share of the bar will represent the number of people falling into this category. It’s genius! We can look at the chart and learn that in Argentina, a bigger share of people lives in the capital than in Japan. But we can also learn that in absolute numbers, there are more people living in the Japanese capital than in the Argentinian one. (To do so, we compare the size of the red areas of Argentina and Japan with each other.) The Marimekko chart shows us what relative numbers mean for the absolute world. It shows us both.

So Marimekko charts are awesome and we should use them every time we show shares with a stacked bar or column chart? Well, it depends. It’s hard to compare the height of bars with each other (what’s bigger: the population of Russia or Japan?). It’s also hard to compare the size of areas (what’s bigger: the number of people living in Buenos Aires or in Moscow?). So Marimekko charts make sense if the height of the bars should give readers some context, but is not the main story. If we want readers to compare sizes of capitals with each other, the Marimekko chart up there would not be our first choice.

Another deficit: The height of bars can’t be massively different in a Marimekko chart. Here are Iceland and Japan:

The contrast between the population of these two countries is too high to display Iceland well – our original chart at the top of this article makes that easier. And imagine three tiny countries (followed by far bigger ones): Labelling the small ones would be a pain.

Like every chart type, Marimekko charts have their limits. Which is too bad, because it means I can’t use them all the time. I will see you next week! With another chart type. I promise.

Maps typically show a view from straight above, which is good for navigation and to see regional patterns over large areas. However, missing out on the extra dimension of height can mean missing out on context. Robert Simmon for Planet Labs shows off some work in getting the less abstract perspective at a large scale.

Tags: perspective, satellite

 Recently our Blix  Prima was featured in a video review on TechCrunch.

The stylish mid drive electric bike impressed with its ability to mix stylish looks and great performance.

"Blix is a new European e-bike brand that melds high style, faux leather, and a really nice electric drive train".

The Blix bike impressed with its style and performance but it also surprised with its weight. "Its a really cool experience and surprisingly light". Weighing in at 46 pounds the Prima is one of the lightest full-sized commuter ebikes available.

With three power settings high, normal or eco you can choose how much assistance the motor gives you depending on your preferences. In eco mode, the stylish electric bike can reach up to 60 miles on a single charge.

The Shimano Steps system is one of the most intuitive electric bike systems on the market today whether you are going uphill or need some assistance on a long straight the Steps system will not only make your ride easier but also more enjoyable.

The Blix Prima comes as standard with disc brakes, front and rear lights, fenders and a rear rack.  So its ready to ride from day one, no extras necessary.

Check out the full review on TechCrunch.

To find out more about the Prima click here.

Grab your Raspberry Pi, everyone — we’re going on an Easter egg hunt, and all of you are invited!

When they’re not chocolate, Easter eggs are hidden content in movies, games, DVD menus, and computers. So open a terminal window and try the following:

1. A little attitude

Type aptitude moo into the terminal window and press Enter. Now type aptitude -v moo. Keep adding v’s, like this: aptitude -vv moo

2. Party

Addicted to memes? Type curl parrot.live into your window!

3. In a galaxy far, far away…

You’ll need to install telnet for this one: start by typing sudo apt-get install telnet into the terminal. Once it’s installed, enter telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

4. Pinout

Type pinout into the window to see a handy GPIO pinout diagram for your Pi. Ideal for physical digital making projects!

5. Demo programs

Easter egg-ish: you can try out various demo programs on your Raspberry Pi, such as 1080p video playback and spinning teapots.

Any more?

There’s lots of fun to be had in the terminal of a Raspberry Pi. Do you know any other fun Easter eggs? Share them in the comments!

The post An elephant being eaten by a snake: Easter eggs on your Pi appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Bevor Facebook uns die Nachrichten gefiltert hat, gab es bereits sogenannte Feedreader. Das sind Programme, die einfach mehrere Quellen einlesen und dann gemeinsam präsentieren. So kann man sich Beiträge von Tagesschau, Süddeutsche, Heise, etc. in einem Programm anzeigen lassen.

Die Nachrichten kommen in einem standardisierten Format, so dass man nicht eine App pro Quelle braucht. Man installiert das Programm, wählt seine Quellen aus und los geht's. Um vowe dot net hinzuzufügen, gibt man einfach die URL vowe.net ein und das Programm bietet zwei Feeds zur Auswahl: Beiträge und Kommentare. So bekommen einige der Leser hier mit, was gerade in den Kommentaren läuft.

Für iPhone, iPad und Mac empfehle ich den Reeder, für Windows 10 den Nextgen Reader:

• Reeder 3 iOS 5,49 €
• Reeder 3 macOS 10,99 €
• Nextgen Reader 1,49 € statt 5,99 €

Es gibt noch eine ganze Reihe anderer Programme, aber das sind die schönsten und besten. Und mit weniger bin ich nicht zufrieden.

Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker, Apr 02, 2018

This is a really good article, cogent and clear, describing Andy Clark's philosophy and theory of cognition. It also takes us through some side-trips involving David Chalmers and Karl Friston. But the focus is on Clark and his theories concerning the extended mind - the idea that the mind isn't just what's in our head but also incorporates the conceptual and physical world around us. What I like about this article is the way it embeds the description of Clark's philosophy with an account of Clark's personality and style of engaging with the world. Do read the article to the end; otherwise you'll miss the account of Friston's work (to me much more appealing than Clark's) describing how human cognition is, in essence, a prediction engine.

After testing more than 100 keyboard cases over the past few years, including six models specifically for the 5th-generation (2017) and 6th-generation (2018) standard iPad, we think that the Logitech Slim Folio is the best way to get a great keyboard and a protective case in one convenient package. The Slim Folio is more pleasant to type on—and more like a typical laptop keyboard—than any of the competition.

After 50 hours of research, we learned that clothes dryers all work pretty similarly. So if you don’t care if your dryer matches your washer, we recommend looking for a simple, sturdy dryer because it’ll work just as well as models that cost hundreds more. We think the Maytag MEDX655DW electric dryer (or the Maytag MGDX655DW gas version) is a good choice because it’s one of the most well-built dryers you’ll find for the money, with all the features you need and none that you don’t.

Brian Barrett, Wired, Apr 03, 2018

I of course have never given up on RSS and use it every day as an ad-free user-selected searchable alternative to the social media newsfeed. And I think it's worth noting what Ben Wolf (of The Old Reader) said when Google killed its reader five years ago: "How long will it be before your Facebook stream is so full of promoted content, bizarre algorithmic decisions, and tracking cookie based shopping cart reminders that you won't be getting any valuable information? For as little as $60, a business can promote a page to Facebook users. It won't be long before your news feed is worthless." RSS is our path back to an open internet; the infrastructure already exists. All you have to do is use it.

Dear Readers, as I write this I am sitting near the blue Pacific in a place called Napili on the island of Maui. When I post this, it will be from Vancouver on the morning after this Pacific expedition. Moana Chimes is Hawai’ian music, performed by Ledward Kapanaa and Bob Brozman. It swings softly and complexly and yeah, sounds like Hawai’i feels.

When you’re in the Pacific Northwest and it gets to be March, schoolkids have a Spring Break and after six months of short grey days and long wet nights, Maui gets awfully appealing, and is one six-hour plane ride away. So this isn’t the first time we’ve been here, nor the second nor third either.

Moana Chimes is off a record called Kīkā Kila Meets Kī Hō'alu, which I can’t recommend enough. Here’s the listing at the charming Dancing Cat Records site. The genre is called Slack-key guitar, and this album is all two-acoustic-guitar instrumentals with Ledward and Bob, every one of them great.

It’s probably worth mentioning that when you listen to the radio in Hawai’i, slack-key isn’t what young people are listening to or playing; stray away from mainstream pop and it seems like everything has a reggae flavor. Is there a universal warm-island musical culture breaking out? But anyhow, I love me some slack-key.

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

Links

Spotify playlist. This tune on Amazon, iTunes, Spotify. Here’s live video from a slack-key workshop, great fun because you can see how they produce those sounds and make them fit together.

It’s the morning of March 31, 1998, and the Netscape campus is chock-full of engineers, hours earlier than on a normal day. It’s a Tuesday and it’s known universally in the Netscape browser world as “three thirty-one” and written as 3/31. It’s the day the Mozilla code is open-sourced to the world, and the day the Mozilla Project is formally launched.

Three thirty-one was the result of a massive amount of work in two short months. The intent to make open source the code for “Netscape Navigator” had been announced on January 22. On that date the code was not ready, we didn’t know which free software / open source license we would use, and we didn’t have a structure for running an open source project. That was pure Netscape style.

(For those who came online anytime this century, Netscape Navigator was the product that gave consumers access to the internet for the very first time starting in 1994. Scientists used a command line interface, early adopters used the first browser called Mosaic, and everyone else used Netscape Navigator to access what we called “the World Wide Web.”)

By 3/31 the code had been cleansed of proprietary code owned by others that Netscape couldn’t open source, a new open source license (the Mozilla Public License) had been created and approved by the Open Source Initiative (https://opensource.org/about), and a small band had created “mozilla.org” as the governance body for the new open source project. Here’s the earliest image of the mozilla.org site I can find, from December of 1998:

https://web.archive.org/web/19981212031129/http://www.mozilla.org:80/

Mozilla was not originally intended to create consumer products. It was expected to be a technology development organization that would make technology available to Netscape and others who would build consumer products. Over time we found people liked the development version Mozilla was shipping and we began moving towards producing products rather than technology.

We’ve come a long way since then!

In my wildest dreams I could not have imagined how many people would be drawn to the Mozilla mission and would choose to affiliate with Mozilla in some way. This includes employees, volunteer contributors, “friends of Mozilla” and an ever broader range of people who recognize what Mozilla stands for and want more of this in the world. For me, this is the richest legacy.

There is plenty to do going forward to build a healthier internet that has better human experiences. There’s no detailed map — we’ll build that together. We’ll go forwards, sideways, and in circles. It’s an adventure, and probably not for the faint-hearted. But for those who love the adventure, thrive on change, and want to be remembered for building decent values into great products and programs – for us, there’s no better place to be.

The post Mozilla Turns Twenty appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Yesterday was my first ride of the year with TBN. With Easter being earlier than last year, the Good Friday ride was a bit earlier than my first TBN ride last year. On a sunny but blustery day, we had 11 riders at the start.

There was a fairly strong and steady wind out of the north the whole ride which made the first part of the ride a bit of a grind. Just like last year’s Good Friday ride, I elect to go for the shortest (60km) route that turns right at 19th Ave. Joey and the faster riders are going straight ahead.

Every year, development inches further north. This sign on 19th Ave. was one of many new ones I saw in the area.

Headed back south with the benefit of going downhill with a tailwind, you can see the effect on my speed.

Given that I was first to Unionville, I chose to skip the brunch stop, and rode back to Finch. Joey’s ride report is here.

Just to vary things a bit, I elected to ride partway back to downtown along the Finch hydro corridor, incidentally collecting a few tiles along the way, and also connecting the Finch start point to some of my previous rides on my personal heat map.

This section west of Yonge St. has crossings of major streets with lights.

Not that this made any difference to Edouard Le Blanc who was killed at a very similar crossing on the Gatineau trail at Warden by a driver who ran the red light.

This section of trail branches north and south at a dam in G Ross Lord Park. I elect to take the southbound branch that leads to some streets that make it easy to bike down to Wilson, at which point I took the subway the rest of the way downtown.

I tracked this ride with both the Cyclemeter App, and my Garmin. I had seen before that Cyclemeter is much more generous is assessing average speed than the Garmin. Cyclemeter says:

However, the curious thing was that when I uploaded both the Cyclemeter and the Garmin data to Strava, the stats were much closer:

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You can see that the average speeds now almost agree, which means that Cyclemeter interprets the GPS data differently than what Strava does. I think from this point, whenever I use the Garmin, I’ll use that data for Strava, rather than the Cyclemeter upload.

Two other geeky points on gear. One thing was that my right shoe wasn’t clipping in for the entire ride. A quick look afterwards reveals that my cleat was broken. I found one last spare in the garage, but since Bebops are no longer made, I might have to switch to another type of clipless pedal.

The other thing is cycling caps. I always thought that they were a bit of an affectation, especially when you wear one under a helmet. However, after using a kayak visor and having the velcro come unstuck from my helmet, and then trying and failing to use epoxy to stick the velcro onto my helmet (polycarbonate is not easy to glue to, and using a solvent based adhesive seemed like a bad idea), I finally broke down and tried out the hat under helmet thing.

Voila, I find that the cap visor is perfectly shaped to shade my eyes from several angles while not blocking forward vision, even when I’m leaning forward on the drops. And note that my helmet has a raised bottom edge just wide enough to clear the visor.

You learn something new every day…..

We just got back from a week in Maui; obviously, I took a lot of pictures. I think my choice of tools and techniques is pretty mainstream, so when I suddenly change them I wonder if I’m part of a news story. As of this trip, I treat my camera (Fuji X-T1) and phone (Pixel 2) as peers, and which one I reach for depends on what kind of picture I want to take. And almost always, there’s big glass on the Fuji (the Samyang 135mm F2 or Fuji’s own excellent 55-200 zoom). I’m wondering if “normal” lenses on “real” cameras have a future. By way of evidence I offer ten pictures of Maui, five each from the Pixel and from the “real” camera.

Here’s the thing: The Pixel 2 isn’t just a great mobile-phone cam, it’s a really freaking great camera. Like all modestly-sized great cameras, it can’t do everything so it has to be opinionated. It wants you to shoot what’s in front of you — all of what’s in front of you — more or less as you see it, and while it can fake shallow focus, it’d rather make everything in the picture sharp.

Pictures that you discover tend to work well with that approach. Those you consciously envision and compose, maybe not so much.

The Fuji, wearing a long lens, wants you to zero in on a small rectangular fragment of what you see, and makes it easy to blur away the foreground and background so you isolate not just that rectangle but some still smaller fragment of reality that you think is the “subject” of your photo.

When you think Maui you think beaches and sunsets:

Obviously the first is the Pixel capturing the whole sky, while the second is the Fuji zoom at 115mm zeroing in on the local helium furnace. The effect with the long lens leaks a little ugly into the beauty, but in a way I like. After all, our lives depend fragile-ly on a big hot dangerous nuclear reaction, and this is a picture of that.

If you’re willing to carry around a behemoth like one of the big Nikons, it can do everything I’m talking about and more, and with more pixels too if that’s a thing that turns your crank. I’m just flatly unwilling to carry the weight of those bodies and (especially) of the full-frame long lenses. I insist that I like opinionated cameras, but maybe I’m just lazy.

Also, the best camera is the one you have with you.

Objects that have been carefully designed for visual appeal to humans are right in the Pixel’s sweet spot; after all, it’s optimized for capturing what you saw. Such objects notably include those intended for religious veneration.

Sometimes, purely for practical reasons, you want to shoot something you can’t get near; big glass is about the only way.

But let’s be honest, sometimes you don’t want What You Get to be What You Saw:

Both shots consciously work with a long bright lens to select subject from non-subject. Yes, that face was mostly obscured by vegetation. Yes, that horned chameleon had boring crap behind it. Hey-presto! Heavy glass solves those problems!

On neither camera do I have to fool much with White Balance. The Fuji’s files have a whole lot more depth, so you can do crazy things like shoot straight at the sun. But there’s some depth in the Pixel’s pixels; and anyhow its goal of just catching what you see, about the way it looks, tends to not lead to extreme lighting conditions.

Where am I going with this?

The wonderful Fuji XF 35mm F1.4, which in recent years captured more keepers than any other lens I’ve ever owned, has been suffering neglect. The long lenses so precisely deliver exactly what mobile-phone cameras can’t that there’s temptation to use either the phone or the long lens but nothing in between.

I think that’s probably wrong. But it’s an easy habit to fall into, which I learned by doing it these last seven Maui days.

And by the way, both those long lenses are heavy and awkward on the X-T1, they stress my neck and wrist. I see Fuji just announced the X-H1, which is substantially bigger; one of the reasons is to provide a better grip with bigger lenses. But dammit, I got into the whole mirrorless Fuji thing precisely because I wanted lighter bodies and lenses. People say the Samyang is remarkably light for what it offers. I’m glad they think so, but it’s still a big honking hunk of glass.

So, here are two things I’m pretty sure of. First, the 2017 generation of truly great mobile-phone cams is going to have a major impact on photography and we don’t know yet what it’ll be. Second, I’ll be amazed if anything that’ll go in my pocket will get anywhere near what 135mm F2 glass can do, in the next couple of years anyhow. And anyone who’s trying to forecast camera tech further out than that is wasting time.

Anyhow, back to Maui seascapes.

Sure is fun taking pictures these days. Heavy glass is a small price to pay for what it offers. But my wrist gets tired.

Sean Kane, O'Reilly, Apr 02, 2018

I've mentioned things like Docker and virtualization from time to time but haven't exactly addressed why these things would be interesting. This article helps fill that gap by offering six ways these solutions can solve problems such as read-only filesystems, solving operating system incompatibilities, or running specialized graphical applications.

Sunset Beach Park, cherry trees, and a Mobi station.

Click to enlarge

[This is a copy of http://www.mozilla.org/mission.html from launch day]

our mission

Netscape Communications made two important announcements on January 23rd, 1998:

• First, that the Netscape Communicator product would be available free of charge;
• Second, that the source code for Communicator would also be free.

On March 31st, the first developer release of the source code to Communicator was made available.

But what now? For the product to grow and mature and continue to be useful and innovative, the various changes made by disparate developers across the web must be collated, organized, and brought together as a cohesive whole.

mozilla.org

A group exists within Netscape that is chartered to act as a clearing-house for the newly-available Netscape source. That group is mozilla.org. We will provide a central point of contact and community for those interested in using or improving the source code:

• We will collect changes, help authors synchronize their work, and periodically make new source releases which incorporate the best work of the net as a whole.
• We will operate discussion forums (mailing lists, newsgroups, or whatever seems most appropriate.)
• We will coordinate bug lists, keep track of and publicize works in progress, and generally attempt to provide “roadmaps” to the code, and to projects based on the code.
• And we will, above all, be flexible and responsive. We realize that if we are not perceived as providing a useful service, we will become irrelevant, and someone else will take our place.
• We are not the primary coders. Most of the code that goes into the distribution will be written elsewhere, both within the Netscape Client Engineering group, and, increasingly, out there on the net, at other companies and other development organizations.
• We are code integrators. And, through our forums, we will try to help people reach consensus, and thereby provide direction and coordination for future improvements.

It can be observed that all successful open-source software projects follow this model of distributed development and centralized integration. One of the fears that open-source software software neophytes often express is that open availability of the source will lead to balkanization, that there will eventually be thousands of different descendants of the original software, and confusion and chaos will result. But, in reality that doesn’t happen; organizations like mozilla.org tend to appear. Eric Raymond tries to explain why in his excellent paper, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. We hope to operate in the “Bazaar” style, and be to the public Netscape source code as Linus Torvalds is to Linux.

Mozilla

“Mozilla” was the original code name for the product that came to be known as Netscape Navigator, and later, Netscape Communicator.

Later, it came to be the name of Netscape Communications Corporation’s dinosaur-like mascot.

Now, we intend to use the name Mozilla as the generic term referring to web browsers derived from the source code of Netscape Navigator.

Netscape Communications Corporation holds trademarks on the names Netscape, Navigator, and Communicator; it has not yet been decided what, if any, restrictions Netscape will place on the use of those names. However, a generic term for browsers is still needed, and “Mozilla” is as good a name as any.

So, Mozilla is a family of web browsers, but not a specific web browser (in biologic terms, Mozilla is a genus; Netscape Communicator is a species.) And mozilla.org (pronounced “Mozilla Dot Org” or “The Mozilla Organization”) is this group of people, the coordinators of the project.

The New York Times Magazine: Tragically Lost in Joshua
Tree’s Wild Interior – Dark Zones.

“In June 2010, Bill Ewasko traveled alone from his home in suburban Atlanta to Joshua Tree National Park, where he planned to hike for several days. […]

Ewasko left a rough itinerary behind with his girlfriend, Mary Winston, featuring multiple destinations, both inside and outside the park. […]

The plan was that after he finished the hike, probably no later than 5 p.m., he would call Winston to check in, then grab dinner in nearby Pioneertown. But 5 p.m. rolled around, and Ewasko hadn’t called. Winston tried his cellphone several times, and it went directly to voice mail. She knew he might still be in a region of the park with limited cellular access, but the thought was hardly reassuring. As night fell on the West Coast with no word from Ewasko, Winston tried to call someone at the park, but by then Joshua Tree headquarters had closed for the day. Her only option was to wait.”

Link via MetaFilter.

I’ve been following the efforts of Tom Mahood as chronicled on his weblog Other Hand for years, ever since I read about the The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans.

iOS 11.3, one of Apple’s most substantial iOS updates ever that isn’t a core full number upgrade, is now widely available.

This updated version of iOS adds new Animoji to the iPhone X, improves ARKit’s ability to recognize surfaces and also adds the ability to turn processor throttling off for iPhones with older batteries. The update released for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch just a few hours ago.

The final feature in the above list was added following a wash of criticism Apple received after it was uncovered that iOS slows down processor performance in some iPhones in order to prevent shutdowns. Apple subsequently released a public apology and stated that a fix was on the way. That solution has finally arrived now that the final version of iOS 11.3 has been publicly released.

With this option turned off, the older iPhones will shut down when the battery isn’t able to provide sufficient power for resource intensive tasks, such as augmented reality, or gaming for example. The ability to toggle throttling on and off has been added to the iPhone 7/7 Plus, iPhone 6S/6S Plus, iPhone 6/6 Plus and iPhone SE. Apple also notes that all users with an iPhone 6 will get a notification on the device’s battery health screen that recommends the battery be replaced.A lion, bear, dragon and skull Animoji have also joined the iPhone X’s current line-up of colourful creatures. On the AR front, ARKit can now detect vertical surfaces like walls and doors, as well as horizontal surfaces such as floors, tables, countertops and more.

Other new features include a U.S. exclusive Health records section inside Apple’s Health app, and a new privacy icon that’s displayed whenever Apple asks for personal information such as an Apple ID password. This is designed to help users verify when a password request is legitimate and coming directly from Apple.

iOS 11.3 also adds a number of bug fixes, including solving connectivity issues with Apple’s iPad Pro Smart Keyboard.

Additionally, it’s worth noting that Messages in iCloud, as well as AirPlay 2 — which is set to add multi-speaker support to the HomePod — have been removed in 11.3, despite appearing in earlier betas.

Finally, Business Chat, a way for users to communicate directly with businesses through Messages on iPhone and iPad, has been added to iOS as well. The feature, however, is exclusive to the U.S.

Source: Apple 

The post Apple’s iOS 11.3 update is now available with battery management and new Animoji appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Industry experts say that Uber’s small number of LIDAR sensors on the self-driving Volvo that killed a women on March 19th, may have been the reason for the crash.

Before Uber started using Volvos as its test vehicles, it employed a fleet of smaller Ford Fusion cars that had seven LIDAR sensors compared to the one on the Volvo.

Not that the Volvo’s one sensor is bad, though. Its roof mounted and its spins in rapid circles to gather 360 degree coverage around the vehicle. That said, a handful of former Uber employees and four industry experts have said to Reuters that, “in scaling back to a single LIDAR on the Volvo, Uber introduced a blind zone around the perimeter of the SUV that cannot fully detect pedestrians.”

“If you’re going to avoid pedestrians, you’re going to need to have a side LIDAR to see those pedestrians and avoid them, especially at night,” said Marta Hall, president and chief business development officer at Velodyne, which is the company that builds the LIDAR sensors for Uber, in an interview with Reuters.

Uber does have other sensors that could have spotted the crash victim, including seven cameras and 10 RADAR units which are dpecifically supposed to make up for the small LIDAR blind spot.

While it’s unclear of this blind spot played any part in the accident on March 19th, the collision is still under review by police and federal safety officials. So far, neither party has stated whether Ubers choice to scale back on its LIDAR is under review.

Source: Reuters

The post Experts say Uber’s use of a single LIDAR sensor could be cause of crash appeared first on MobileSyrup.