Source When you’re out shopping whether it’s for a party, work, or just for everyday clothes, the one thing that you always want to ensure is that the clothing is flattering. Choosing a dress in particular can be a bit of a challenge for many as they may not know which types of styles suit […]
I’ve been working in Serbia the last few days. The past weeks at home in the Netherlands, E and I noticed how the clock on the microwave in the kitchen was running behind. I’d arrive at the railway station in the morning to find that I was actually later than I thought. Had I been cycling slower than expected? But no it was the clock in the kitchen, that was off by a few minutes.
E sent me a link yesterday evening to a Dutch newspaper article that explains how this happened. [Update: Here’s the original press release by the European network of transmission system operators. The Guardian has an article in English, as does Ars Technica]
Energy producers in Serbia and Kosovo, as a result of the ongoing arguments and tension between Serbia and Kosovo, currently deliver less energy to the European grid than planned. To compensate for that and balance the European network, the overall frequency of the alternating current has been lowered a tiny bit (0,004Hz of 50Hz) across Europe since mid January. Clocks like on our microwave use the frequency of the electric power to keep time. When the frequency drops, their counting slows. The Serbia and Kosovo energy producers caused me to nearly miss my train recently!
So this week I am working in the place that makes the clocks run slow.
Source We all know that the oil industry is unreliable and that electric and other powered vehicles are making an emergence more and more as time goes on. With cities beginning to phase in car charging stations versus petrol stations, it’s only a matter of time before electric cars are the way of the future, […]
I've always shared that while we live small intentionally, we are taking it year by year and sometimes even month by month ensuring that everyone is comfortable and getting what they need. When Trevor and I decided to stay another year in our small space it was with the intention of keeping expenses low to afford more travel even with my new part-time freelance work. Our first family trip of the year on the first weekend of March feels like we are on track for our goal of getting away often in 2018. While Tofino is not a new trip for us, this beautiful west coast town keeps us coming back every year for it's beautiful beaches, open ocean and amazing food. Our Westfalia doesn't have heat and we aren't brave enough to winter camp so we were lucky to stay at a newly built modern home in town, the Cloudbreaker House by Dwell Tofino. We've actually stayed in one of their other properties previously and loved their aesthetic, friendly service and attention to detail. The Cloudbreaker House exceeded expectations and was such a treat for our small living family.
One of the reasons we visit the island so often is my Mom lives there so we get to visit her (I swear our kids would prefer to live with her than us!) and benefit from her and her husband's generous helping hands! Below are some of our favourite stops in Tofino and a bit more about where we stayed and how we got there with a 4.5 and 1.5 year old.
Mae and Trevor. Maybe it's just me but this picture just gets to me with it's sweetness.
DO:
Beaches: We gear up in layers, Simply Merino, knits, Rain Gear and hit the beach for as long as the kids can stand it. We went to a different beach each day. Chesterman's, Cox Bay and Tonquin Bay (just a short trail walk from our house). We bring nothing and the kid's just wander and climb and throw rocks.
Bike: Theo just learned to ride a pedal bike so we brought it and Trevor ran beside him on the flat bike path long the main hwy. They also went for a trail bike ride near our house that made Theo completely exhausted which NEVER happens.
Park: We visited the local elementary school playground one evening to run the kids out and local families were all hanging out and were super friendly.
Steam: We didn't make it but Christie of Dwell Tofino recommended a steam at the Wickinnish Inn (kid-less) so we are adding that to our list for our next visit.
Caravan: I like to pop into this sweet shop when I'm in town. Great for gifts or a reminder of Tofino at home. Sometimes she hosts vintage clothing pop-ups. I found Theo a perfect pair of denim shorts here last summer.
EAT:
Wildside Grill: after the 6 hour trip on Friday my mom had Wildside take-away waiting for us at the house (thanks mom!). We love their gumbo and fish tacos and well, everything.
Kuma: Trevor and I got to sneak away for a dinner at Kuma which was wonderful. It's also kid friendly with crayons and friendly staff. I can't wait to go back and try more items. My incredibly talented friend Layla helps with the wine and sake list and I trust her with all my drinks so want to work our way through that list as well!
Tofitian: best coffee in town in my humble opinion
Tofino Brewing Co: We usually end up here after the beach. Loved their new larger location with more natural light. And love that we can bring the kids.
The windows and the landscape I was talking about. at the house. And Mae in her Petits Vilains.
TRAVEL:
Logistically, Tofino is about a 6 hour trip (each way) from our home in Vancouver when you factor in Ferry travel. While ferries are great for letting kids run around, they add quite a bit of time to the journey. The winding road from Port Alberni to Tofino is just something you have to get through with kids. We bring snacks they can easily eat in their carseat and a loaded ipad and hope for naps. Sometimes they cry and sometimes they sleep but we always find the journey is worth it. We also often tell the kids what great travellers they are. We thank them for being so patient and brave and reward them for this. In our home, being a flexible traveller is high praise. We acknowledge that its boring or tiring but are quick to turn it around and talk about how that makes them such good travellers. Also while we are usually strict with buying new toys we often will let Theo choose a small toy ($3 or so) on the ferry. This small toy is a great incentive (re: bribe) and keeps him entertained after for at least half a day. Mae is too young to know if a toy is new or old so we just give her a small toy of Theo's so she feels included. Oh and we didn't bring a stroller (good idea) and forgot the ergo baby carrier (bad idea).
Stairs = playgym for these kids
STAY:
We had the most wonderful stay at the Cloudbreaker House. The size alone (3 bedrooms) was a luxury but there were many details in place to make our stay wonderful. The radiant heated floors, stocked kitchen with every utensil you could imagine including vintage glassware, growlers and fresh, local coffee beans. Modern details like poured concrete counter-tops and floors, warm wood finishes and white walls were the perfect backdrop to our weekend. It truly looks like it should be in a magazine for modern west coast homes but at the same time nothing felt too precious or fragile that I was worried we would break it. The stairs were also a huge hit, ha, a novelty for our apartment dwellers. The kids found a suitcase of duplo that kept them entertained for the weekend which was great and also ironic as the duplo in our home has never been touched. While not on the beach, it is nestled into a rock face in a quiet corner of town. The oversized windows show off the natural landscape that I could stare at all day (why are the ferns so much more beautiful in Tofino?). At one of the highest points in town there is a view of the nearby mountains and the always changing clouds. Couldn't believe how we lucked out on the weather with sun in March! We even hung out on the deck for a bit.
Thank you to Christie at Dwell Tofino for hosting us at CloudBreaker House. She has kindly offered 25% off in the off season and 15% in the shoulder season to anyone that mentions 600sqftandababy. If you are looking to book her house in high season send her an email and mention this post and she will try and accommodate you! We loved staying here and I would highly recommend it. Link to Dwell Tofino's website for info and booking here.
The magical suitcase of duplo. Theo in his Simply Merino PJ's.
iPhone X emits twice as much stimulating light as an older iPhone, but you can’t tell just by looking
Studies of older iPads have shown us how light from devices affects circadian rhythms. But despite being smaller, the new iPhone X makes more light than old iPads did.
The new OLED screen has a high-powered green color, and both blue and green move into the “melanopic” region of the spectrum that tells your body it’s daytime.
Apple’s screen is now taller and bigger than it feels: it makes twice as much light as an iPhone 6, even more than the “plus” models do.
Tap the image to compare
iPhone 6 vs. iPhone X
iPhone X makes 20% more melanopic light when visually identical. Gray region shows the "melanopic" parts of the spectrum that tell your eye it's daytime
Comparing OLED and LED
Spectrum Differences
When we talk about how light affects the body, it’s important to measure both spectrum and intensity.
While people say that “blue light” affects the circadian system, it’s actually “blue-green” light that matters. Melanopsin senses light that looks cyan, and so it has blue and green in it. Some kinds of green matter more than others.
OLED screens make more saturated greens by moving the green primary from 540nm over to about 524nm, which may sound like a small change, but the shape of that green also gets narrower, and so a lot more of it winds up in the range that affects melanopsin, more of it than did before.
The M/P ratio
One way to write down this spectral impact is to measure the M/P ratio, or the number of (non-visual) “Melanopic lux” per (visual) “Photopic lux”. The idea is that you can make two lights that look exactly the same to your color vision system, but which affect melanopsin differently.
Most LEDs fall within a small M/P range, but OLED has a larger impact. Using some numbers, the iPhone 6 gives an M/P ratio of 0.93, and the iPhone X has an M/P ratio of 1.13. So when you’re seeing exactly the same colors on an iPhone X, they are making 20% more stimulating light, and you can’t see this–the difference is invisible.
This OLED multiplier persists when we change the color temperature: iPhone 6 at 2700K has M/P ratio of 0.47, and the iPhone X at 2700K has M/P ratio of 0.57 (or 20% more).
If you want to make the impact “per lux” the same as an iPhone 6, you’d have to pull down the color temperature of an OLED screen to 5000K on the newer screen.
But spectrum is not the whole story (it’s not even a majority of it).
Screen is Larger and Less Directional
The new iPhone X has a larger screen area because it is quite a bit taller, and you might not think this would matter very much. But consider that a taller screen doesn’t make you hold your phone farther away–your arms are the same size, the width of the screen is very similar, and your minimum focusing distance doesn’t change. If you hold this screen at about the same distance (and it feels about the same “size” as the older phones), the amount of light is a lot more, almost double.
This effect is enhanced by the ability of this screen to give off light in all directions–it lacks the directionality of an LED. LED-based screens have a very rapid fall-off as you tilt the screen, so you might have made a habit of tilting the screen a bit to dim it, pointing your phone up a bit while reading. OLED has much less of this falloff–it is considerably more uniform, like a piece of paper. But you can no longer tilt the phone to dim it quite so much, and actually, the edges of the screen will be somewhat brighter than before.
This means that the “edges” of the screen deliver more photons to your eyes, and this difference was a big change in our measurements, enough that we had to change our model to account for it.
When the increase in screen size and change in directionality is considered, the iPhone X at the same measured “brightness” (luminance or cd/m²) can deliver nearly double the light to your eye that the old screen can.
Good news: you can dim more now
The new screen can dim more. Compared to the iPhone 6, it can get to below half the previous measurement (1.6 cd/m² vs about 4), and Apple has hidden the Automatic Brightness toggle in iOS 11, which makes it harder to turn off. Our advice is to try your best to leave it on. The good news is that these new screens are capable of getting dimmer at night, and the hidden settings will make it more difficult to have a fully-bright screen late at night, which for most people is a good thing.
Circadian impact should be quite big, more like an iPad
If you don’t dim (which you should) and you use a 9” viewing distance, this new screen can make >110 melanopic lux at the eye, and our survey of screen users says that some people hold the screen even closer than that. Those with presbyopia (at 18”) will still have a screen capable of 35 melanopic lux, which is still quite a lot.
Most iPhone X users will be seeing more light than that, unless they make sure to dim the screen quite a bit.
Apple’s color adjustments don’t do much
On a screen this bright and effective at delivering bright light to the eye, the mild “Night Shift” settings Apple provides just don’t have much impact.
Night Shift’s default setting is not capable of dialing things back to the level of the old phones with Night Shift turned off.
Compared to previous phones, with the screen the same brightness (luminance), your eyes will see twice as many melanopic-weighted photons as you would on an iPhone 6 (20% from the spectrum, and nearly double from the geometry and directionality).
Let’s be clear: this screen is now well beyond the range of early iPads to delay sleep. It’s not a “little” screen anymore, and it’s very good at making light that your non-visual photoreceptors will see.
Screens and sleep
To avoid increased sleep and circadian disruption, you will need to dim this screen more, use inverted dark modes whenever possible, and most importantly, keep automatic brightness on. If you can learn to, hold the new phone even farther away.
As a common-sense test, if a screen is lighting up your face (or your child’s face), it is too bright, and you should dim it more.
And mostly, try to turn it off well before bedtime.
United Airlines attempted to replace its employee bonuses with a lottery. This is a “motivational” idea so stupid that, after the employee backlash, the company had to “press pause” on it. Ironically, the plan was an attempt to encourage employees to be more consistently caring — but a plan like that shouldn’t start with random … Continued
Price Tags will post candidate’s statements – who they are, what they’ll do – for the upcoming civic election.
I’m Christine Boyle, I’m a young parent, a community organizer and a United Church minister, born and raised on unceded Coast Salish land in Vancouver. I am seeking the OneCity Vancouver nomination for City Council.
This feels like a critical moment in Vancouver. This place we love is becoming more and more of a shiny, empty place. I’m running because I love this city, and because I think we’re running out of time to change the direction that Vancouver is headed.
I’m particularly passionate about tackling the deepening wealth gap here, about ensuring that homes are for housing people rather than profits, and about deepening community engagement and community-level planning to build a better city together.
This means having some pretty bold conversations about housing. Vancouver is a wealthy city with far too many people struggling. We need to figure out the right mix of progressive property taxes and a land-value capture tax that will diminish speculation and raise the revenue we need to preserve and build adequate social, coop, and affordable rental housing.
While all of that happens, we need to prioritize the needs of vulnerable communities, and protect existing affordable housing stock, strengthening tenancy protections, restricting short-term rentals, and much more.
Housing action is critical, and urgent. And it’s not going to be easy. Which is why I am equally passionate about rebuilding trust in government, to strengthen the social contract between those living in Vancouver and their locally elected leaders. This means inviting community groups and cultural groups into city hall, encouraging participation and shaping the future together. Ant it means putting more emphasis on community level planning, to be building and growing at a human scale.
It will require all of the tools we have, and advocacy for those we need from the Province, including cultural and residential land trusts, rental-only zoning and zoning for social housing and coops, stronger tenant protections, progressive property taxes to raise income for affordable housing, land lift tax to reduce speculation, deepened democratic participation, and more.
With a strong progressive City Council, with the contributions of community groups, social movements and working people, and with a provincial government that appears willing to work with the city, together we can change the direction Vancouver is headed. We can push back against the pressures of global capital, and bring about the inclusive, vibrant and affordable city we believe is possible.
“”My plan,” wrote Jesse Osborne, who had turned 14 three weeks earlier, “is shooting my dad getting his keys getting in his truck, driving to the elementary school 4 mins away, once there gear up, shoot out the bottom school class room windows, enter the building, shoot the first class which will be the 2d grade, grab teachers keys so I don’t have to hasle to get through any doors.”
He had been researching other school shooters for months and, determined to outdo them, learned exactly how many people they’d murdered: 13 at Columbine High; 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary; 32 at Virginia Tech.
“I think ill probably most likely kill around 50 or 60,” Jesse declared. “If I get lucky maybe 150.””
[…]
“Jesse could have killed so many more children, he knew, with that Mini-14.
“To the media, it’s called an assault rifle,” he told interrogators before lamenting, for a second time, that it remained locked away.
But he was wrong.
Soon after the shooting, investigators searched the teen’s home for evidence. In his parents’ bedroom, they looked in the closet, and there, outside the safe and just feet from his father’s dresser, was the weapon Jesse coveted.”
While pondering some options for automating stuff on macOS, I decided to take a look at the Objective-CJavaScript bridge. These are cursory notes on various odds and ends, without any real structure.
Retrieving the Current Wallpaper
Run the below with osascript -l Javascript -i:
// Import the bridge
ObjC.import('Cocoa');
// Get a shared workspace
sw = $.NSWorkspace.sharedWorkspace;
// Get the first screen (yes, this is an NSArray)
screen = $.NSScreen.screens.firstObject;
// Log the pathname (NSURL) out
$.NSLog(sw.desktopImageURLForScreen(screen).absoluteString)
If the above is a folder, you have to go into the Dock’s desktoppicture.db database1 and take a look at what’s there in the data table.
Since the JavaScript bridge seems to lack SQLite bindings, I haven’t yet had the time to pursue this in depth, other than the data table doesn’t seem to keep track of what wallpaper is on what display if you have multiple monitors (although I suspect that the last entry is always for the primary display).
Hopefully no one ever teaches computers about Capitalism or a few computers will hoard all the algorithms and the rest of the computers will have to give them half of their processing power just to do any work.
Posted by
existentialcoms
on Tuesday, March 6th, 2018 8:53pm
It’s hard to pick a Bowie because, obviously, there were so many Bowies. One time my son and I, he then fifteen or so, were
driving somewhere, and he asked me “Dad, who’s David Bowie?” and I said “A musician who…” then I was stuck. For me, there are
really two big Bowie songs, Heroes and Ashes to Ashes, and while the former has more emotion, I think
Ashes has more musical depth. Oh, yes, and This Is Not America, but that’s a niche taste.
I believe the full title is Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps).
I remember my then-wife bringing home
Scary Monsters; at the time I was in a jazz&blues phase and would never have bought a Bowie
record, deeming him too synthetic. But somehow I find myself putting on Ashes to Ashes over and over again, sometimes
sitting up late after she’d gone to bed.
Spotify
playlist.
This tune on
Spotify,
Amazon,
iTunes.
Now as for live video, we’re in the period where Bowie was the most beautiful living human being, so these are a treat for the
eyes.
More feminine (with better photography and bass) vs
more masculine (better dynamics).
Does anything say ‘mid-second-decade architecture’ better than coloured panels?
It seems to be the way the profession has settled on introducing colour into the highrise palette. After resisting for decades.
“Gray,” would have been the choice for ‘Does anything say Vancouver architecture better ..?’ going back to the Ericksonian Sixties – and maybe forward. Here’s a recent high-profile example between the stadiums:
It runs the colour gamut from A to B. Totally, unrelievedly gray.
But even if we did [bring the four fundamental forces together
in a common framework], and it's a big if right now, this
"unified theory" would be limited. For how could we be
certain that a more powerful accelerator or dark matter
detector wouldn't find evidence of new forces and particles
that are not part of the current unification? We can't. So,
dreamers of a final theory need to recalibrate their
expectations and, perhaps, learn a bit of epistemology. To
understand how we know is essential to understand how much we
can know.
People are often surprised to hear that, in all my years
of school, my favorite course was probably PHL 440
Epistemology, which I took in grad school as a cognate
to my CS courses. I certainly enjoyed the CS courses I
took as a grad student, and as an undergrad, too, and but
my study of AI was enhanced significantly by courses in
epistemology and cognitive psychology. The prof for PHL
440, Dr. Rich Hall, became a close advisor to my graduate
work and a member of my dissertation committee. Dr. Hall
introduced me to the work of
Stephen Toulmin,
whose model of argument influenced my work immensely.
I still have the primary volume of readings that Dr. Hall
assigned in the course. Looking back now, I'd forgotten
how many of
W.V.O. Quine's
papers we'd read... but I enjoyed them all. The course
challenged most of my assumptions about what it means "to
know". As I came to appreciate different views of what
knowledge might be and how we come by it, my expectations
of human behavior -- and my expectations for what AI could
be -- changed. As Gleiser suggests, to understand
how we know is essential to understanding
what we can know, and how much.
Gleiser's epistemology meshes pretty well with my
pragmatic view of science: it is descriptive, within a
particular framework and necessarily limited by experience.
This view may be why I gravitated to the pragmatists in my
epistemology course (Peirce, James, Rorty), or perhaps the
pragmatists persuaded me better than the others.
In any case, the Gleiser interview is a delightful and
interesting read throughout. His humble of science may
get you thinking about epistemology, too.
... and, yes, that's the person for whom
a quine in programming
is named. Thanks to
Douglas Hofstadter
for coining the term and for giving us programming
nuts a puzzle to solve in every new language we learn.
We first reviewed Halide, the powerful third-party camera app by Ben Sandofsky and Sebastiaan de With, when it debuted in the summer of 2017, providing a powerful and elegant alternative to Apple's Camera app that fully embraced RAW photography and advanced controls in an intuitive interface. We later showcased Halide's iPhone X update as one of the most thoughtful approaches to adapting for the device's Super Retina Display; to this day, Halide is a shining example of how the iPhone X's novel form factor can aid, instead of hindering, complex app UIs.
While Halide was already regarded as an appealing alternative to Apple's stock app for professional photographers and RAW-curious iPhone users (something that designer de With covered in depth in his excellent guide), it was lacking a handful of key features of the modern iPhone photography experience. Sandofsky and de With want to eliminate some of these important gaps with today's 1.7 update, which focuses on bringing the power of Portrait mode to Halide, supporting the iPhone X's TrueDepth camera system, and extending the app's integrations via a special ARKit mode, new export options, and native integration with the popular Darkroom photo editing tool.
In Halide 1.7's viewfinder (on compatible iPhone models), you'll now see a Depth button that, once enabled, engages the dual-lens camera system to shoot in Portrait mode. While the final product may look similar to a Portrait picture taken in the Camera app, there are some implementation differences and underlying limitations to consider.
In terms of what is displayed onscreen, Halide, like the Camera app, lets you turn on a real-time Depth Preview that instantly shows you what a Portrait photo will look like before you take the shot.
In addition, Halide offers a Depth Peaking effect, which is best described as a "wave" that displays a scanning outline of the 3D space interpreted by the camera. If you've ever played Horizon: Zero Dawn on PS4, it's kind of similar to Aloy's Focus 3D scan of her surroundings. Depth Peaking is only available when Depth Preview is disabled; I'm not sure it is as useful as a real-time Portrait preview, but it's a neat, almost sci-fi cinematic effect that visualizes what the camera sees as the foreground object in a 3D environment.
Speaking of which, Halide's creators tout their implementation of the Depth API as an "App Store first" in that they're using "a combination of smart facial detection and point-of-interest detection" to speed up the execution of Portrait mode. In my tests, their claim proved accurate: Depth Preview in Halide activates as soon as a subject is in focus, sometimes even giving the illusion that it's faster than Apple's Portrait mode in detecting edges and applying blur.
Two of Halide's new real-time Depth effects.
I did note, however, that Halide's Depth Preview effect often made the blur appear more aggressive than it actually ended up being in the processed shot; from this standpoint, Apple's Camera app was more consistent in its real-time preview and final Portrait photo. Furthermore, the default Camera app offers helpful tips for light and distance when in Portrait mode; Halide doesn't. In the future, I'd like Halide to offer, if technically possible, more consistency between its blur preview and final product, as well as inline messages on what to do if Portrait mode isn't working as expected.
Despite these incongruities, I believe Halide 1.7 provides one of the best Depth-enabled camera experiences on iOS 11. Integration with the iPhone X's TrueDepth camera means Portrait selfies can often be more aesthetically pleasing and accurate than rear-camera Portrait pictures; more importantly though, Halide's comprehensive set of advanced tools and nice subtleties, such as the swipe gesture to control exposure and haptic feedback when a shot is aligned, work alongside Portrait mode, augmenting it in ways not explored by Apple in the Camera app.
Sandofsky and de With also managed to integrate a visualization of the camera's depth map into the app: it is accessible both in the viewfinder in real-time, and by tapping a button (or pressing with 3D Touch) in a photo's detail view in the photo reviewer. This screen has been sped up too, and it now contains options to turn off the Portrait effect in a photo and export a depth map as a PNG file for other graphic editors.
Due to limitations of the Depth framework for developers, Portrait photos captured in Halide won't carry a 'Portrait' label when reviewed in Apple's Photos app. In fact, if you shoot in Portrait in Halide, then open the photo in the Photos app and tap Edit, you'll be able to apply a second blur. I checked with Sandosfky about this problem, and he explained that, currently, there's no way for Halide to inform the system that a blur has already been applied to a photo – thus the ability to apply it again in Apple's Photos app.
What's even stranger in this case – and clearly something Apple must fix – is that while a blur can be re-applied, Photos also recognizes Halide photos as Depth-enabled: the Portrait label is grayed out, but you can apply Portrait Lighting effects to a Portrait photo previously processed by Halide. Despite Apple's willingness to open up the Depth API to developers, it appears that there are still half-baked aspects that should be improved at a framework level in the future. For now, you can either apply Portrait Lighting effects to the blur generated by Halide, or disable Halide's blur in Photos (tap Edit ⇾ Revert) then re-apply it using Apple's Portrait button.
In what has become one of the most fun and unsettling features I recently tried in an iPhone app, Halide 1.7 also integrates Portrait captures with ARKit to let you place them as "3D posters" in space and walk around them. The idea of Portrait photos as interactive 3D objects was first explored on iOS by Focos, and Halide takes it to the logical next level: instead of moving a 3D Portrait around with a bunch of sliders, why not walk around it and let the user physically get closer to another person's nose?
In practice, Halide's Portrait AR effect is remarkable, hilarious, and terrifying at the same time. From a technical perspective, the combination of ARKit and the Depth API is impressive: you can truly walk around subjects and move closer to them to see the thousands of data points that make up a Portrait capture. However, looking at selfies as disembodied 3D heads made out of dots and floating in space can get just slightly uncomfortable after a while, making this mode a fun accessory to the app to be enjoyed in small doses.
Lastly, alongside a series of speed enhancements and other miscellaneous improvements, Halide 1.7 lets Darkroom users start editing their shots directly from the photo reviewer. If Darkroom is installed on your device, Halide will show you a Darkroom button in the reviewer UI; tap it, and you'll be taken to Darkroom's full-featured photo editor. As someone who's been following de With's tutorials on how to get started with RAW photography on iOS using Halide and Darkroom, this integration makes perfect sense.
A photo captured in Halide and being edited in Darkroom with a streamlined workflow.
Version 1.7 solidifies Halide's role as the rising star of advanced camera apps. Halide employs thoughtful design and modern iOS features to unlock the power of iPhone photography without getting lost in a sea of dropdown menus and complex instructions. Even for someone like me, who barely understands terms such as ISO and exposure, Halide feels and works like something that can empower me to take better shots and ultimately preserve better-looking memories for the future. The app's latest update, in spite of a few issues with Portrait mode, is another important step toward making Halide a powerful alternative to the stock Camera app1, and I'm looking forward to what Sandofsky and de With will tackle next.
Whether you’re a developer who’s working on mobile apps, or just someone enjoying the millions of apps available for your phone, today is a very special day. It’s the ten year anniversary of the original iPhone SDK.
I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that this release changed a lot of people’s lives. I know it changed mine and had a fundamental impact on this company’s business. So let’s take a moment and look back on what happened a decade ago.
Craig Hockenberry published a fantastic retrospective on a decade of the iPhone SDK, which, after months of jailbreaking, allowed developers to start making real iPhone apps in 2008. It's an excellent, well-researched story (with a lot of links, which you should open in new tabs; take your time to explore) that brings back a lot of memories. You should also check out the replies (standard and quoted) to Craig's tweet for a lot more interesting stories.
It's not an exaggeration to say that I wouldn't be here, typing this post today, hadn't Apple decided to open iPhone app development to third-party developers 10 years ago. I think many of us in this community of people who still care about this stuff at least partially owe our careers to the iPhone SDK. I've shared this story before, but in 2008 I dropped out of university, got a job at a physical "eBay store", and later started blogging with a free WordPress website because I wanted to write about apps. But really, I wanted to write about iPhone apps and try as many as possible to share my thoughts with other people. That website eventually became MacStories and these words I've been putting out for almost 9 years now.
In hindsight, it feels strange that thousands of jobs around the world were created or inspired by a huge and sprawling corporation, but it didn't feel that way back then. Even as a nobody watching and blogging (in poor English) from the sidelines of a burgeoning industry, that period between the spring of 2008 and early 2009 carried a palpable sense of discovery, surprise, and wild experimentation that I remember fondly. I saw app developers as pioneers charting a future we couldn't even imagine. It was, in many ways, a different, ingenuous, more enthusiastic era – one that I hope to live through again someday.
PhotoRec is an amazing little command-line (OK, text menu) utility that is able to recover photos and other file formats from memory cards (provided, of course, you took the sensible route and stopped writing to the card in any way before running it).
Notes
To recover JPEG and RAW files from some Canon models, PhotoRec may require you to select Paranoid : Yes (Brute force enabled) from its options menu - otherwise, it will recover JPEG data without most of the EXIF information.
(with this selected you’ll get a separate JPEG file for each thumbnail - around 16K - but that’s a sensible trade-off)
As a nice bonus, PhotoRec will set the recovered files’ modification date to the original whenever possible, greatly simplifying the process of tracking down what you deleted.
Mountain View search giant Google is making it easier for Maps users in 25 cities outside of the U.S. to find decent parking spots.
Originally rolled out to 25 U.S. cities last year, the Google Maps ‘Parking Difficulty’ icons are a feature that allows users to quickly make note of how difficult or easy it is to find parking at a particular location.
The feature is now rolling out to 25 international cities, including Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
“With parking difficulty icons, the ability to find parking, and save your parking location on the map, Google Maps get you from point A to point B and everything in between,” reads an excerpt from a March 6th, 2018 Google blog post.
The parking difficult icon shows up when users search for directions to a location.
“Parking difficulties range from limited to medium to easy and are based on historical parking data with a little machine learning magic,” reads an excerpt from the same March post.
The feature is currently only available for Google Maps on Android.
I done wrote another thing for Wired. About URLs and the psychogeography of domain names. Or something.
I always want to have a credits page for things I write. For everything that didn't get in there and all the people I stole the ideas from.
So, for this one: all the actual ideas came from conversations on Slack with Chris and James. And the apparently detailed recall I have about what suck.com was like and how they changed writing was all based on an Amazon 'look inside' of Steven Johnson's Interface Culture.
Most people would be content after bringing an innovation — nay a phenomena — like the selfie stick into the world.
Most would hang up their inventing cap, settle down and watch contentedly as millions of tourists around the world raise their selfie sticks to the sky almost as if to salute their ingenuity.
But the Canadian who pioneered the selfie stick, Wayne Fromm, has refused to tame his inventive mind. In a bold move, his company Fromm Works has revealed the Selfie Stick-It, a hands-free mobile photography gadget that represents the next logical evolution in mobile photography accessories.
The Selfie Stick-It is a $24.99 CAD smartphone mount that promises to work on almost any sealed or painted surface including wood, glass and marble. The device, which weighs less than an ounce, uses a washable gel that the company says won’t damage the surface it’s attached to “when mounted properly.”
It comes with a Bluetooth remote to facilitate the hands-free capture and is currently available at selfiestickit.ca as well as on Amazon.ca.
If your main take-away from all of this is a shocked sense of pride (and/or shame) that a Canadian had a hand in the selfie stick craze, here’s a little background for you.
While homemade selfie sticks date back to the early 20th century, in the modern digital era Fromm is frequently cited as the first to launch the hand-held monopod product that came to be known colloquially as a selfie stick. He brought the ‘Quik Pod’ to market in 2006.
Of course, others can also be credited with building on the product’s success. Still, there’s no doubt that Fromm was a selfie stick pioneer.
This latest innovation is a collaboration between the Canadian inventor and his daughter, Sage Fromm. The duo took their new innovation to the Dragon’s Den not long ago where they — in their own words — “stuck it to the Dragons.” You can find that in full-length here.
When people talk about entrepreneurs being the ones taking on the risk, they always fail to mention what it is they risk: which is merely having to lose their life of privilege and join the rest of humanity in laboring for a living.
Posted by
existentialcoms
on Sunday, March 4th, 2018 10:20pm
Why study philosophy? Greece: to live the good life. England: to understand the world. Germany: to change the world. America: did u know philosophy grads have the highest average salaries of the humanities?
Posted by
existentialcoms
on Tuesday, March 6th, 2018 1:26am
In 64 hours of tests, the Dyson AM10 humidified a room no better than our comparable humidifier pick, the Levoit LV600HH. Not only does the Levoit run much longer between refills, but it’s also far more user-friendly and easier to clean. And it sells for a fraction of the Dyson’s price.
Making Work Futures a research and education non-profit
Claude Levi Strauss
Over the past months, I transitioned Work Futures from Medium, and then through a number of experiments in newsletter platforms (like Patreon), and now to Substack.
But one subtle change also took place which I haven’t explored publicly.
On Medium, Work Futures was based on a publication model, and I used the domain name workfutures.io, and called myself the editor-in-chief. Sounds like the domain of a hip product company, with that .io. That publication had over twenty five contributors, which suited the publication model.
Presently, this blog/newsletter/thing goes by workfutures.substack.com. However, I also have grabbed the domain name workfutures.org, which is a better indiction of my goals: a research and education organization dedicated to advancing a more humane, science-based, passionate, and fast-and-loose way to work.
Over the next few months, I plan to convene an organization from this starting point, and to begin with those of you reading this are invited to join. In effect, by signing up for this newsletter you are inherently a member, and those who subscribe become so in a more explicit way. And instead of two dozen contributors, we might have hundreds. At least I hope so.
So, instead of editor-in-chief I am now instigator-in-chief. And a some point in the near future I will be hosting a website for workfutures.org, and this blog/newsletter/thing will be part of it, in some way or other.
And what do I hope to accomplish?
Five years ago, I asked the question, What Drives Us?, looking to Mazlow’s final, improved hierarchy of needs, and I wound up philosophizing about how we might advance into a better future despite the myriad problems confronting us. Five years later, this is still the case, except things might be maybe even more complex and chaotic, if any change has occurred at all. The following thoughts could stand as a starting point in the discussion of a new way of work, and how that must fit into a new way of living together:
This is, in a way a paradoxical time. Like Charles Dickens’ characterization of the period surrounding the French Revolution:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
We are living in a period of time where we have the greatest understanding of human cognition and the biology of our deep connection as social beings, while at the same time folklore and bias about human drives and needs still dominate business, media, and society. We have concocted a web that offers us unparalleled opportunities for social connection, opportunities to find a new, shared fluidarity to replace and extend the solidarity that seems to have disappeared in postmodern times. As I recently wrote,
Modernity has erased solidarity. I don’t think we can get people to have a sense of shared purpose in a society so remorselessly divided, in a culture obsessed with individuality.
My hope is that the postnormal makes it clear that solidarity is gone, here in a world where connection is displacing membership, where social media is eroding institutions, and where loose connection is replacing tight collectives. We should aspire to fluidarity in place of the modern era’s solidarity.
We need to find a way forward relying on the wellspring of human cooperation, without having to become a mass collective marching in machine synchrony. We’ll need to pull ourselves into the future, not be pushed into line and follow someone else’s script. This is fluidarity, now that the era of mass belonging is over.
The web is its own paradox, since much of our energies on the web are being squandered, or as an early Facebook employee Jeff Hammerbacher put it,
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.
The ancient world order around us is crumbling: we’ve moved into a new economics that is beyond the control of those who spirited it into being, a global, pathologically complex, self-reinforcing system that consumes nearly all our resources, labor, and production and distributes the outputs and byproducts in a massively corrupt and inequitable way. And this system is unsustainable and erratic, producing a planet that is rapidly suffocating on toxic byproducts, and proving the idiocy of an economic system grounded in unchecked growth, and treating the earth, the seas, and the air as spoils to be controlled by the few ‘winners’ to the detriment of the many ‘losers’.
But at the same time, deep in the wiring of the human mind we uncover evidence of human universals, innate capacities in our shared expression of humanity, in-built tendencies toward justice, concern for those who cannot care for themselves, love of the natural world, and strivings toward Mazlow’s self-transcendence and the transpersonal. Curled next to these angels in our inner being, we also find a predisposition to exclude those not like us, and a bias toward rejecting ideas that do not match the cultural rules we use to define belonging.
So, as we reflect on our deepest aspirations, we have to look outward, to the society and culture we live in, our workplaces and organizations, our nations and peoples. We have to find ourselves there, not working to merely make ourselves rich, or happily married, or as a powerful captain of industry, or the world’s wisest philosopher.
My greatest hope is that we can make the transition to a postnormal world before the sins of the fathers doom us, and our best hope is to find purpose and meaning through fluidarity.
And to return to where we started, what drives us? We are motivated by many drives, all at once. Like nearly everything these days, everything is happening at once. In business, we all need to understand the myriad drives bubbling at all times inside all people. Increasingly, as businesses relax into a fast-and-loose orientation based on pull, following, and autonomy, many of the traditional barriers to gaining self-esteem and self-actualization through work are reduced as well.
But businesses — increasingly operating as connectives comprising individuals working together — need to confront the world, not just compete in it. The reason for businesses to exist can no longer be simply to increase the return on investment for shareholders, and putting aside considerations of the people working, or their impacts on the world in which the business operates. In a real sense, every business needs to take on, first — as elements of the company’s operating credo — the goal of working to help its people fulfill their drives for mastery, autonomy, and the respect and connection with those with whom they work. And finally, knowing that we live in a world in trouble, those leading our businesses forward will need to operate like benefit corporations, who explicitly have social aims as well as the goal of making a profit. This must be a cornerstone of postnormal business and management.
This must become a social movement, an awareness of our essential and inescapable fluidarity: a distributed, decentralized, discontinuous effort, guiding our thinking, decisions, and reasoning, so that our striving for love, belonging, safety, success, and self-actualization has as its final consummation the opportunity for others to strive, as well, and a world put back into balance.
…
So, I invite you to join in that striving, and to help fill out the agenda of that distributed, decentralized, discontinuous effort.
In the next months, I will take the steps to make Work Futures a non-profit organization, dedicated to research and education, where all who subscribe are members of the organization. I welcome your support. I will be expanding on these plans, and look forward to finding new ways to gain your participation.
Please help spread the word, and share this and other posts with your colleagues and friends. It will take a lot of people joined in fluidarity to have an impact on a slow-to-change world.
Question or comment? (Can be private, or public: your choice. I occasionally publish public comments or questions.)
Alleged images of the Huawei P2o Pro have found their way online, revealing the upcoming phone’s triple camera setup.
The promo, spotted by Dutch publication Telefoon Abonnement, shows that the phone features a camera configuration with three lenses and a dual LED flash. In a somewhat strange design move, the third camera is separated from the other two lenses.
Further, like the P10 series, it looks like Huawei worked with Leica on the P20’s cameras.
The appearance of the handset is similar to the CAD renderings revealed nearly a month ago.
The front of the handset features an iPhone X-style notch, similar to the new Asus ZenFone 5 series.
Huawei P20 = 679,xx Euro Huawei P20 Pro = 899,xx Euro Huawei P20 Lite = 369,xx Euro
Leaker Roland Quandt tweeted the European pricing for the P20 series. According to Quandt, the P20 will cost €679 (1,085.75 CAD), while the P20 Pro will dost €899 ($1,457.60) and the P20 Lite will be priced at €369 ($590.07).
Last year, the P10 Plus retailed for $749 outright.
Huawei plans on revealing the Huawei P20 lineup on March 27th in Paris, France. Recent leaks have also revealed the Huawei P20 and the P20 Lite.
f.lux news.
I’m Christine Boyle, I’m a young parent, a community organizer and a United Church minister, born and raised on unceded Coast Salish land in Vancouver. I am seeking the OneCity Vancouver nomination for City Council.
existentialcoms on Twitter.
existentialcoms
on Tuesday, March 6th, 2018 8:53pm
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
CommitStrip.
