The fruits of the Enlightenment allowed us to consider ourselves as rugged individuals, navigating the world by our wits alone. This persistent cultural meme has weakened, particularly over the past decade as research in social neuroscience has emphasised our essentially social selves. Our relationship to our devices provides a new wrinkle: we have entered what the US engineer and inventor Danny Hillis has termed ‘the Age of Entanglement’. We are now technologically embedded beings, surrounded and influenced by the tools of modernity, seemingly without pause.
In 2007, Steve Jobs introduced the world to the iPhone with the catchphrase ‘this changes everything’. What we didn’t know was that the everything was us.
The podcasts are powered by SpokenLayer, a company that has developed a service that quickly turns a publishers’ RSS feed of articles into audio recordings that can be distributed anywhere – in iTunes, on SoundCloud, on the web, or any other audio platform. The idea is not only to allow consumers to “hear” from their favorite websites instead of reading them, but also to give each publisher’s brand its own distinctive voice.
Apple told me on Monday that it is making its new macOS Sierra available to customers as an automatic download beginning today. What this means for users is that if you have auto update downloads enabled, macOS Sierra will download in the background for you.
Apple has taken steps to reduce possible criticism of the change: The Sierra upgrade -- which tips the scales at 4.8GB -- will not auto-download to a Mac short of storage space. And if the Mac's storage shrinks sufficiently before Sierra is installed but after the upgrade has downloaded, the file will be automatically deleted.
If you don’t want macOS updates to download silently in the background, you can disable this feature with a few clicks in your App Store preferences.
Photoshop Elements includes a new Transform tool that's able to turn frowns into smiles, adjust squinting eyes, and make other quick, easy adjustments to photos in a matter of minutes.
If you are a photo enthusiast who seeks special effects goodness without the learning curve, Photoshop Elements is the ticket. While I found at least two of the new guided edits less than compelling, improvements to the Organizer were uniformly useful.
I was perfectly happy with PCalc’s old behavior, which always rounded halves to even, but, shockingly, James has to consider the needs and wants of customers other than me. Now there’s rounding for everyone.
Traditionally, we've thought about security and usability as a trade-off: a more secure system is less functional and more annoying, and a more capable, flexible, and powerful system is less secure. This "either/or" thinking results in systems that are neither usable nor secure.
What should I listen to so that I can forget about work, de-stress, and get to sleep easier? Audiobooks, music, NPR, or podcasts?
Too many choices, I tell you. That makes me anxious.
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Thanks for reading.