I have a confection to make. Ugh! No, I don’t want to bake a cake. Let me type that again. I have a confession to make. I worked for many years as a software developer at Apple and I invented touchscreen keyboard autocorrection for the original iPhone.
I’m proif if rhe wirl… ahem… I’m proud of the work I did to bring software-assisted typing to a smartphone near you. After all, if the iPhone keyboard wasn’t based in software, Apple couldn’t have delivered on Steve Jobs' vision for a breakthrough touchscreen computer with as few fixed buttons as possible. The keyboard needed to get out of the way when it wasn’t needed so the rest of the apps on the phone could shine.
We all have our own myth of Steve Jobs: surges of love, gratitude or awe for the man who gave us the tools we use to express ourselves. At his memorial service, and in the years that followed, strangers would burden Lisa with their Jobs legends — people she had never met praising her father, “asserting a claim” that Steve was “like a father” to them. She knows they want her to “confirm him as the ur-father. His great greatness.” Bearing his last name, yet forced to live under the crushing reality of his emotional deficits, Lisa was, in some sense, uniquely deprived of the myth. But after Steve dies, Chrisann insists that she can sense his spirit, telling Lisa that he’s following her around and he’s overjoyed to be with her: “He wants to be with you so much he’s padding around behind you … he’s delighted just watching you butter a piece of toast.”
“I didn’t believe it,” Lisa writes in the book’s perfect last line, “but I liked thinking it anyway.”
The ultimate question for all of us is what image of our father we carry forward: our own ur-father, the internalized figure we choose to keep. Having sifted through the complex reality of her experiences, Lisa is finally free to claim her own myth: the fantasy of the father she longed for that allowed her to survive the father she had.
Figures like Turkle and Mcnamee argue that understanding our vulnerabilities represents the first step in modifying device design and placing limits on trends like micro-targeting, which can allow marketers to link products to temporary emotional states tied to social media posts. In doing so, the challenge will be to find an adjusted balance for the modern world between the rational, cortex elements of our brain and the most primitive, but powerful lizard base.
We are perhaps entering a unique phase in business history where those who inherit the Earth will be the companies that best prevent us from using their product.
As the recent revelation over Google’s background tracking of your location shows, it’s not as easy as it should be to work out when apps, giant tech companies and pocket devices are tracking your location and when they’re not. Here’s what you need to know about how location tracking works on a phone—and how to disable it.
Location information is one of the prime bits of data any company can get on you, whether they want to personalize your weather reports or serve up an ad for a local bakery. As a result apps and mobile OSes are very keen to get hold of it. It’s a compromise though, and if you don’t want to give it away, you’ll have do without some location-based services (like directions to the park). Do you want convenience or privacy? You can’t have both, but know how it works, and when you can or should activate it should help.
If you do any kind of work that can benefit from a better graphics processor then likely an eGPU is worth it for you. The NVIDIA eGPUs are a viable option for macOS desktops, since you should only need to perform the setup hassle every once in a while. Users who often take their laptop will likely prefer AMD chips in their eGPUs due to the plug-and-play nature (at least until Apple adds support for NVIDIA architectures). The added convenience of USB-A adapters and power delivery in eGPUs such as the AORUS Gaming Box is fantastic. I can just come home, plug in one cable, and my workstation will be all set up.
As people may know, I try to capture nearly everything I want to read in Pocket. I rarely read anything in real time, and even when I do, I often still save it to Pocket, just so I have a record of it. But it’s not that simple. Given just how much I read, I’ve found I need a few different tangential services to capture everything and to create an ideal workflow for my reading.
The Arlo Baby is not for everyone, given its steep cost and potentially superfluous features. Parents with infants are more likely to get excited about this product given its baby-friendly capabilities, and therefore more willing to shoulder its extra cost.
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But the Arlo Baby is a decent security camera for those who don’t mind paying a premium. Its unique features, which have a variety of not-baby-related uses, could make it worthwhile.
The current version – Parallels Desktop 14 – is by far – the best version of the virtualization environment yet. It's fast. I have both Windows 10 AND Windows 7 VM's on my Mac, and running them under Parallels Desktop 14 is very surprising to me, since they perform like native hardware PC's.
So, Chrome is ten years old. Officially in the double-digits. Soon it’ll be getting wispy chin-hairs and its voice will be cracking. That said, Google’s browser has accomplished a lot in the ten years that it’s been around. It went from a latecomer in the Browser Wars, with just a 1-percent market share early on launch, and now it’s the most-used browser in the world, with around 60-percent market share. We thought we’d take a look back at the few of the ways it became so dominant.
You can scarcely go out the door in California without bumping into a Zen master or meditation practitioner. And yet, when it came to choosing a voice for one of the world’s most popular mental wellness apps, the founders of San-Francisco-based Calm.com Inc. turned to a Torontonian. Downloaded 30 million times, the Calm app relies on the tranquil tones of Tamara Levitt, 46, who writes, produces and narrates its mindfulness and meditation sessions.
Ms. Levitt has held the title of head of mindfulness content at the app since November, 2014, and has an equity position in the company (although she won’t share the financial details). She records her sessions for Calm at a studio on Queen Street West, and since she joined the team, subscriptions have grown from 22,500 to 1 million. Subscribers pay US$60 a year to access the app’s content.
Quotas obligating Netflix, Amazon and other streaming services operating in the European Union to dedicate at least 30% of their on-demand catalogs to local content are set to become enshrined in law soon.
Roberto Viola, head of the European Commission department that regulates communications networks, content and technology, said the new rules, which will also demand visibility and prominence of European product on streamers, are on track to be approved in December.
I've had days when one significant (to me, anyway) thing happend that made me feel sad for the rest of the day. I've also had days when nothing really significant happened, but little things just pile on sadness one over another.
And then, I've had days when, at the end, I didn't even have the energy to figure out what sort of day I was having and what sort of sadness I am having.
I should have just stayed in bed this morning.
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Thanks for reading.