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The Delicate-and-Disposable Edition Monday, February 19, 2018

The Case For Using The iPhone X Without A Case, by Nick Statt, The Verge

We use our phones all day every day, for hours and hours and in a varsity of precarious activities and environments, from bike rides to dance floors to subway tracks. So it’s become easy to think of these devices as simultaneously delicate and disposable, an object we feel we should have the liberty to be careless about and yet one we remain terrified of disabling in any way whatsoever. But it is liberating to treat your smartphone with a level of care proportional to its role in your life, and to be able to enjoy the device as it was designed and not according to the whims of OttorBox, Spigen, JETech, and into the infinite void of Amazon-surfaced brand names.

Not All Great Tech Has To Be New, by Anthony Caruana, Macworld Australia

What I’ve realised is that Apple’s gear has great longevity. My Mac mini is over three years old and LED Cinema Display it’s connected is about seven years old. The MacBook Air is nudging six years but still works perfectly and looks great.

Google Chrome Now Blocks Irksome Ads. That’s A Good Thing, Right?, by John Herrman, New York Times

With the Chrome update, the company hopes to come out ahead by lessening the temptation of web users to install more comprehensive ad-blocking software. In other words, Google is betting that ridding the web of especially intrusive ads will render it more hospitable to advertising in general — and more profitable for advertisers and Google itself.

The new filter will be rolled out gradually to the browser’s hundreds of millions of users. Website operators had a few months before the launch to become compliant; going forward, those who violate the standards will be given 30 days to get in line. If they don’t, Google will demonstrate its leverage not by simply removing offending ads from a noncompliant site, but by disabling all of its ads. Revenue to the offending websites would presumably plummet as a result.

Utilizing Chrome’s popularity in this way is yet another example of Google’s singular position in the modern web.

Develop

Introduction To Apple WatchKit With Core Motion — Tracking Jumping Jacks, by Eric Hsiao, Heartbeat

The ultimate goal is to build a machine learning model that can automatically categorize and log an exercise from the motion data we collect from the watch. I decided to choose a ubiquitous exercise used in almost all traditional workouts: jumping jacks. In this post, we’ll focus on data collection by understanding Core Motion and building a WatchKit app to record jumping jacks. Future posts will discuss more sophisticated models that can recognize multiple exercises.

Rock Stars Have A Boss?, by Derek Sivers

The independent music revolution was so exciting because thousands of musicians were realizing that they didn’t need to sign these kinds of deals anymore. They didn’t need labels, distributors, publishers, or anything else to get their music to the public.

But years later, I still hear people making that trade-off. Giving up their rights and serving a company, in hopes of a greater reward.

Bottom of the Page

I have been using a case for my iPhone X from day one, mostly to avoid the camera bump from touching the table surface when I put the phone down. Someone is probably going to tell me that it's alright to do so because Apple has probably tested for that scenario. But, I am superstitious, and the camera is an important part of the phone for me.

I am also superstitious about avoiding the use of the physical buttons on the iPhone X. I will often just let the phone switch off by its own, rather than clicking the side-button to turn off the display. This supersition probably came from that button on my iPhone 3G which broke down -- ten years ago.

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Thanks for reading.