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The Get-A-Crash Edition Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Some 2016 MacBook Pros Suffering USB Drive Problems, by Jeff Porten, TidBITS

In my testing, my system appears to be stable when a single external drive is connected to one Thunderbolt 3 port or when multiple drives are connected to a powered USB hub that plugged into a single port. But I eventually get a crash whenever I have multiple drives connected to multiple ports directly on the MacBook Pro. The issue appears to be related to whole drives; most of my drives have multiple partitions, which doesn’t seem to matter.

Apple Says More iPhone 6s Models May Be Affected By Random Shutdowns, Issuing iOS Update, by Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac

In a support document seemingly not yet posted in English, Apple said that it needed additional diagnostic data to determine the cause of the problem. However, it believes that a software fix may be possible for units outside the original batch.

The Finder’s GUI Tax Can Be Very Expensive, by Rob Griffiths

Expand 24 .gz files
Finder: 12.8 seconds
Terminal: .013 seconds Terminal is 984.6x faster than Finder

To put those results another way, if expansion time is linear, gzip could expand 23,631 files in the time Finder takes to expand 24 files. That’s nuts!

Growth

Apple Watch Sales To Consumers Set Record In Holiday Week, Says Apple's Cook, by Julia Love, Reuters

Responding to an email from Reuters, Cook said the gadget's sell-through - a measure of how many units are sold to consumers, rather than simply stocked on retailers' shelves - reached a new high. [...]

"Sales growth is off the charts. In fact, during the first week of holiday shopping, our sell-through of Apple Watch was greater than any week in the product’s history. And as we expected, we’re on track for the best quarter ever for Apple Watch," he said.

Librarian

Google Alters Search Autocomplete To Remove 'Are Jews Evil' Suggestion, by Samuel Gibbs, The Guardian

On Monday the searches for Jews and women no longer returned those results, although the “are Muslims bad” autocomplete was still present.

A Google spokesperson said: “We took action within hours of being notified on Friday of the autocomplete results.” Google did not comment on its decision to alter some but not all those raised in the article.

Google, Democracy And The Truth About Internet Search, by Carole Cadwalladr, The Guardian

Am I just being naive, I ask him? Should I have known this was out there? “No, you’re not being naive,” he says. “This is awful. It’s horrible. It’s the equivalent of going into a library and asking a librarian about Judaism and being handed 10 books of hate. Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here. It can and should do better.”

Stuff

Apple Shares New 'Romeo And Juliet' Ad Highlighting The iPhone 7's Camera, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

In the ad, entitled "Romeo and Juliet," two children are shown acting out Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in a realistic setting, with the camera panning out to show that it's actually a father recording a school play with the iPhone 7.

Review: Wacom Bamboo Slate, by Michael McCole, Wired

There should be no way that you can draw a picture on a pad of paper, press a button, and have a perfect facsimile almost instantly pop up on your phone or your iPad. It defies the laws of… everything. Even if you know how it works, it still seems like it shouldn’t be possible.

But it is possible, and in the case of the Bamboo Slate, it works really well.

Runkeeper Now Lets You Track Workouts iPhone-free With Apple Watch Series 2 GPS, by Zac Hall, 9to5Mac

The app supports four workout types when using Apple Watch Series 2 without an iPhone: running, walking, cycling, and other.

AKVIS Releases Watercolor 1.0 For macOS, by Dennis Sellers, Apple World Today

It’s an app designed to make a photo look like a watercolor painting.

Notes

How The 404 Error Created The World Wide Web, by Jesse Dunietz, Popular Mechanics

In a way, the 404 did for hypertext what the zero did for math: It was obvious, but formalizing it and creating a notation revolutionized the rest of the system.