Category: Weekly digest

• Dunblane: Our Story – 20 years since the tragedy in Dunblane and this program is an emotional watch. Always sticks in my head that I was euphoric coming back from a sea trial at work on the day this happened. Sailed down a misty Clyde and went into the office at night and we were all so happy and then the wind was taken right out our sails when a colleague shared the news. No mobiles, no news, no idea…a bombshell.
• What Happens When the Surveillance State Becomes an Affordable Gadget?
• Surprise! NSA data will soon routinely be used for domestic policing that has nothing to do with terrorism – Why resisting the UK snoopers charter is so important.
• The Obama Doctrine
• 1988: The Year Donald Lost His Mind
• Lack of sleep alters brain chemicals to bring on cannabis-style ‘munchies’ – Might explain the hunger I’ve been feeling the last couple of weeks as my mystery illness flares up again.
• Why Am I Right-Handed? – I’m left handed but write with my right hand thanks to my Gran tying my left hand behind my back when I was wee. Lefties were the work of the devil seemingly.
• An Apple Pencil-drawn review of the Apple Pencil – So good. Still want an iPad and Pencil.
• The Making Of Playstation VR – Not long now.
• videoGaiden Episode 1
• Television Has A Business Model Problem. And It’s Killing Good TV
• Coming Soon
• Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War – Trailer 2 – Looking good
• Game of Thrones Season 6: Trailer – Looking good too
• Orkestra Obsolete play Blue Monday using 1930s instruments – BBC Arts

A bumper update as I took a break last week.

• Exclusive Q&A : Apple CEO Tim Cook
• Naughty words – Fucking bollocks
• Tumblr Porn
• Inside the Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report, Pt. 1
• Atlas, The Next Generation – Terminator one step closer
• The Elephant In The Room – Web design work drying up
• What’s Next in Computing? – great read
• Winners of the 2016 World Press Photo Contest – Some powerful images
• Photographer Greg Armfield on how he missed mating rhinos at Nairobi national park
• Do cool things that matter – stories from the software engineers at Google
• Meet the 63-Year-Old in Charge of Approving New Emojis
• Life and Death in the App Store
• The Writer Who Made Me Love Comics Taught Me To Hate Them
• Microsoft wants to monopolise games development on PC. We must fight it. – Microsoft is playing hardball with games developers and also in forcing the upgrade to Windows 10.
• Photos of the Glasgow High-Rises That Are About to Disappear
• The painful what-if that haunts ‘Ghostbuster’ Ernie Hudson
• GHOSTBUSTERS FanCUT Teaser Trailer HD (RECUT) – So much better then the official trailer.
• Doing a TED Talk: The Full Story
• The Lonely Launchpads and Rusted Rockets of America’s Abandoned Space Facilities
• The Complete Conceptual History of the Millennium Falcon – Long but rewarding read.
• How we made Angry Birds

• Why Michael Gove is wrong on Europe – He’s never been right on much to be honest
• A Message to Our Customers
• Apple, FBI, and the Burden of Forensic Methodology
• Apple Versus The Fbi, Understanding Iphone Encryption, The Risks For Apple And Encryption – Apple’s stand in an increasingly strange and important test case.
• Apple and Fashion: A Love Story for the Digital Ages
• The Most Important Apple Executive You’ve Never Heard Of – Core of much of Apple’s competitive advantage comes from this decision.
• The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens
• Too many people have peed in the pool – Twitter drama
• I Want to Know What Code Is Running Inside My Body
• Which Type of Exercise Is Best for the Brain?
• The NSA’s SKYNET program may be killing thousands of innocent people – Whoever named this program Skynet and didn’t think it could go south has a lot to answer for
• The superhero of artificial intelligence: can this genius keep it in check?
• Hard Drive Reliability Review for 2015 – Backblaze put this report out each year – fascinating read.
• The Daily Mail Stole My Visualization, Twice – Thief’s!!!
• How Renegade Filmmaker Casey Neistat Breaks Rules, Reinvents Himself, and Gets Thanked For It
• How One Mashup Artist Got Legal Permission to Pair Calvin & Hobbes with Dune
• 10 Adventure Trips Every Photographer Should Take
• If company slogans were honest
• Inside the Artificial Universe That Creates Itself – Still looking forward to this game

I’ve been floored with manflu since Friday so i’m a bit behind with reads but there’s still enough good stuff this week. Onwards.

• Uber is no better than an old-fashioned gangmaster – so London’s cabbies are striking
• Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them
• Piled Higher and Deeper – Great explainer on Gravitational Waves and why their discovery is so important. So easy to read too!
• Farage’s vile views are dominating the Europhobe pitch
• Andrew Marr: the loss of the Independent means the loss of a community – There is an inevitability about this.
• An old-school reply to an advertiser’s retro threat – two fingers form a journalist – brilliant.
• Researcher illegally shares millions of science papers free online to spread knowledge
• George Galloway: I Am The Spiritual Son Of Tony Benn And Jeremy Corbyn Is Making A Very Big Mistake On The EU – Twat
• Jeremy (H)unt Compilation – Jeremy Cunt
• Putting out the Twitter trashier – Hopefully Twitter implement some if not all the suggestions listed here.
• Visions of the Future – Beautiful posters from Nasa.
• The Trouble With Superman
• Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – Official Final Trailer – Better trailer but we’ll find out next month how good the film actually is.

A bit behind on my reads this week due to work but still some interesting posts and a great Star Wars video. Enjoy.

• My Bathroom Mirror Is Smarter Than Yours -Want!
• The Futility of Pleasing All Users
• The Inside Story of Uber’s Radical Rebranding – Still looks bizarre to me
• Is this the perfect save icon?
• Your Next New Best Friend Might Be a Robot
• A Mac for all seasons: Why the Mac has so much staying power – Still love Mac’s
• Not the oignon: fury as France changes 2,000 spellings and drops some accents
• Centriphone – an iPhone video experiment by Nicolas Vuignier
• The F-35’s Terrifying Bug List
• We got 10 CEOs to tell us their one killer interview question for new hires
• Wolfsburg sign young British player – as their official Fifa gamer – Still see e-sports as a massive growth area
• ‘Star Wars’ Recut as a Grindhouse Film – Glorious

2016 really has got off to a pretty shit start. Maybe it’s just January? Here’s hoping.

• From Eurovision to Radio 2: Terry Wogan’s best quotes – So sad to hear of Terry Wogan’s death today.
• Electoral reform: Party leaders call for pact to achieve alternative voting system after next election – I’d love to see this happen but infighting will lead to failure I fear.
• Spannergate – Are you Brian Spanner? If so how dare you go against the SNP and will of the minority in Scotland.
• Two columnists depart from Glasgow’s Herald in row with Rangers
• Without Fear or Favour – The Herald but more importantly Rangers come out of this looking awful. Rangers are a disgrace. Run by crooks for years and with a support that is decades out of touch with modern society. Officially disowned.
• Why the calorie is broken
• More details emerge about motorised doping at cyclocross worlds – From bad to worse.
• Amazon’s customer service backdoor – This needs fixing
• Inside Facebook’s Decision to Blow Up the Like Button
• The App Store as an Economy
• The 2015 Panic Report – Great write up on 2015 form Panic but his is sobering – More and more I’m beginning to think we simply made the wrong type of apps for iOS — we made professional tools that aren’t really “in demand” on that platform — and that price isn’t our problem, but interest is.
• The End of Twitter
• How Facebook Squashed Twitter
• Project Skybender: Google’s secretive 5G internet drone tests revealed
• AlphaGo: Mastering the ancient game of Go with Machine Learning
• World’s Fastest Rubik’s Cube Solving Robot
• Last Land Rover Defender rolls off production line
• The Times Square snowboarding video: Why it went viral
• We’re not leaving this bar until we’ve come up with such a great idea that I can’t sack you – The beginning of iPlayer.
• Glittering Blue

The weeks are passing quickly at the moment and I’ve a couple of blog posts sitting in draft that I need to move on. Busy busy.

• The Tennis Racket – This massive story broke just before the start of the Australian Open. Is any sport really clean?
• Oxfam says wealth of richest 1% equal to other 99%
• An increasingly precious metal
• A message from Stewart Butterfield to Slack employees
• How Fujifilm’s cameras and lenses are Made in Japan – I love my Fuji X-T1 and the lenses are gorgeous. This is a great photo story behind the scenes at Fuji.
• Cuba’s Internet Is F*cking Insane. And the Ways Cubans Use It Are Genius.
• So, Uh, Here’s The Full Text Of Sarah Palin’s Bizarre Trump Speech – American politics is jus bat shit crazy at the moment.
• Anywhere but Medium – Own your content.
• Desktop Neo – Current desktop operating systems have become stagnant. This is a great rethink.
• Star Wars – Deaths
• Gillian Anderson was offered half of David Duchovny’s salary for the X-Files revival – So the better actor by far gets offered less money due to her sex. Wow.
• Caltech Researchers Find Evidence of a Real Ninth Planet
• Blue Origin Relaunched the Rocket it Landed in November – Loving this new space race, all played out on Twitter too.
• Why You Should Fix Your Inconsistent Sleep Schedule
• Fuck working hard
• Horizontal History
• The Full History of Board Games – Long but glorious read.
• Opie and Anthony – Billy Connolly The Cunt joke – Billy Connolly is a master.
• Tian Tian – Too cute

Such a sad week. Fuck cancer!

• Bowie Gif – Helen Green – Shared everywhere last week for all the wrong reasons
• A David Bowie Playlist
• Skratch Bastid – David Bowie Tribute “Let’s Dance” routine
• LBC’s James O’Brien demolishes Boris Johnson’s argument about junior doctors
• Martin Lewis Writes A Damning Open Letter To David Cameron Over Retrospective Student Loans Hike
• Britain is on the verge of an IT crisis
• The driverless, car-sharing road ahead
• Inside the Hidden World That Handles Your Holiday Returns
• The slowly fading art of flying—and maintaining—Cold War fighter jets
• The tube at a standstill: why TfL stopped people walking up the escalators
• Girls go missing
• The Letterboxd Year in Review
• Adele Carpool Karaoke

Far too ugly a start to 2016…only some Star Wars rescues the mood this week.

• It’s 2016 already, how are websites still screwing up these user experiences?!
• You say advertising, I say block that malware
• Media coverage of protests sure looks different when demonstrators are white
• Thank You Twitter – By Unverifying Milo Yiannopoulos, You Are Standing Up for Women Online
• The Search For The Killer Bot
• Who Controls Your Facebook Feed – Interesting post but I find Facebook less and less interesting.
• The Deep Space of Digital Reading
• Labour complains to BBC over Stephen Doughty resignation – What a fucking mess. The Tories can’t believe how lucky they are.
• Artificial intelligence: Can Watson save IBM?
• Apple in 2015: The Six Colors report card
• The inventor of the hoverboard says he’s made no money from it
• Netflix is on F****** Fire – I’m signing up
• Playing for Time – Fuck Cancer.
• At Long Last…My “Star Wars: Episode Vii” Review. The Force Awakens & The Rise Of Idiot Journalism – Great post and take down of the 40 things wrong with The Force Awakens post that did the rounds recently.
• ‘Star Wars’ Reimagined In ‘Calvin And Hobbes’ – All the best things in one handy sketch
• Meet Fn-2199, A.K.A. Tr-8R: The Stormtrooper Behind The Meme – love the depth in the Star Wars universe

Hello 2016. Work begins for many tomorrow, or Tuesday for those in Scotland (mostly), and I’m looking forward to it. The breaks been long and health has been a bit poor again but the last few days have been much better. No resolutions but some goals and changes that I plan to make – all good 🙂 Anyway, on with the first link dump of the year.

• Meet the cop who brought down the murder rate in inner-city Glasgow – Good insight into how Glasgow has tackled it’s murder problem.
• The Hustlers At Scores – Long but great read.
• Star Wars Fan Spends A Year Building The Best LEGO Millennium Falcon Ever – Want, want, want.
• Happy new year? When scheduled tweets go wrong
• The new Apple revealed itself in 2015
• Why is the media so afraid of Facebook?
• Lessons I learned about life from my mother’s early death
• Sir Terry Pratchett remembered by his daughter, Rhianna Pratchett
• The Storm That Will Unfreeze the North Pole
• The Inside Story of Shell’s Arctic Assault
• The Year in Design
• Murphy’s law – meet the man behind Corbynomics
• The 100 Most Important Fails Of All Time
• Obama cries as Aretha Franklin proves why she’s the queen of soul – Stunning