Category: Weekly digest

Last of the year!

• 24 Beautifully True Cartoons That Show What It’s Like Being An Introvert And Infj</li>
• Meet Your Second Wife – SNL
• The 15 Most WTF House Of Commons Moments Of 2015
• Climate—Where Do We Go From Here?
• All-in on iPad Pro – It won’t replace a desktop for me but the Pro could certainly do away with my Macbook Air.
• SpaceX has successfully launched and landed a Falcon 9 rocket—and made history – Such an achievement and great to watch/
• Radiohead – Spectre – Love it
• The devil and José Mourinho
• Why hipsters all look alike
• Battlefield 4’s latest elaborate Easter egg is ridiculously complex

It’s that time of year…holidays, food, friends and shite weather. Also lots and lots of 2015 roundups which I’ll avoid for a change.

• The SNP has failed Scotland – Does anyone care though?
• Is Critical Thought Being Suppressed in Post Referendum Scotland?
• From fracking to the bedroom tax: The 7 pieces of bad news the Government tried to bury
• Has Europe Reached the Breaking Point?
• Let’s not let fear defeat our values
• Get rich or die vlogging: The sad economics of internet fame
• The Astonishing Power of YouNow
• Graphic, Novel
• MacKeeper Leaks 13 Million Mac Owners’ Data, Leaves Passwords Open To Easy Cracking – Shocking…almost as shocking as 13 million people being conned into buying MacKeeper.
• Slack: A Platform Awakens
• How Rogue Techies Armed The Predator, Almost Stopped 9/11, And Accidentally Invented Remote War
• Jose Mourinho: Jeremy Vine’s letter to sacked Chelsea boss
• On Thursday…. – warms the heart at this time of year.
• The 5 Habits That Will Make You Happy, According to Science

Been a hectic couple of weeks but I stop work for the year this Tuesday…can’t wait for a break. Some good reads this week but no Star Wars spoilers or trailers – only 4 days until I see it.

• The 2016 Pirelli Calendar May Signal a Cultural Shift
• People’s racist Facebook comments are ending up on billboards near their homes
• Microsoft spreads the spirit of the season on 5th Ave (TV Commercial) – Who really wins out of this? Surely Apple?
• Full text of Hilary Benn’s extraordinary speech in favour of Syria airstrikes – While a good speech it’s disappointing that Labour haven’t forgotten the sins of Blair.
• The DNA of a London Underground Station
• Tiger Woods 40th Birthday Interview – No longer the sportsman we knew.
• What It Feels Like to Cover Gun Violence in America
• In Scotland, Unlike America, Mass Shooting Led to Stricter Gun Laws
• Flickr Year in Review 2015
• How Football Manager changed the game
• These photos are why I’m trapped in Tokyo forever now
• How Three Americans Prevented the Paris Train Attack
• The 100 Best iPhone Apps of All Time – Quite the list.
• Donald Trump’s call to halt Muslim immigration is getting exactly the reaction he wanted
• Rousey Says She’s Down But Not Out
• GoPro: Danny MacAskill – Cascade – This took balls.
• I Was Internet-Famous
• Goodbye, Dad … A Tribute to Ian Bell by his son – If you only read one thing this week, make it this.
• 90:9:1 – the odd ratio that technology keeps creating
• Why 2015 Was a Breakthrough Year in Artificial Intelligence
• How Microsoft plans to make the Xbox great again
• As World Crowds In, Cities Become Digital Laboratories
• Get ready for Star Wars: The Force Awakens by watching these ‘anti-cheese’ edits of the prequels
• Best News Bloopers 2015

• Grant Shapps is a lying liar who tells lies
• George Osborne quietly cuts funding for all of UK’s opposition parties – Can’t trust a Tory
• Abandon Ship – Labour are in a right old mess
• Angus Robertson: SNP Westminster leader on being the new star of Prime Minister’s Questions
• This Amazon Executive Has One of the World’s Most Insane ‘Star Wars’ Collections
• Historic Rocket Landing – Blue Origin vs SpaceX
• Jeff Bezos vs. Elon Musk: A Thrilling, New Space Race
• The Last Days Of Marissa Mayer? – Lots of acquisitions but little strategy?
• How I’m Handling My Depression (Using an App)
• The trouble with saying you don’t want children
• Samantha Bielefeld is Victor Johnson: The Story – Inside baseball but this story has brewed over the last month in the Mac community. Basically a con man has posed as a woman, made up a rape allegation, discredited many in the community and also launched a paid for blog. Horrible.
• Blogs by Women – If you want a fresh non male tech perspective then you could do worse than follow some of these recommendations or import the handily provided OPML.
• Paris Attacks Plot Was Hatched in Plain Sight
• The Serial Swatter
• User behaviour – Should the net be regulated like drugs or casinos?
• Black Friday 2015 – Cards Against Humanity dare to be different.
• Fuji 35mm f/1.4 vs. Fuji 35mm f/2 – My next lens. Love Fuji.

Slightly late and hopefully some of it will be an escape from the doom and gloom surrounding much of the news cycle recently.

• Ideology
• Don’t Blame Edward Snowden for the Paris Attacks
• Andrew Neil’s message to Paris attackers – BBC News
• John Simpson: British Media Is ‘Grotesquely Selective’ In Reporting Terror Attacks
• Ronda Rousey And The Danger Of Being Imperfect And Female
• Apple reinvents the pencil: in conversation with Sir Jony Ive
• The iPad Pro Experiment: The Pencil arrives, and it’s going to change my life
• Apple Pencil Review – If you can’t already tell, I really want an Apple Pencil. However I don’t want an iPad Pro so will wait to see if a future iPad Air 3 update will support the Pencil. Fingers crossed!
• Reuters bans freelance RAW photography to boost speed and preserve ‘reality’
• Junior doctors row: 98% vote in favour of strikes – 98% support. Staggering.
• 100 Women 2015: Desperate not to have children – Great writing but unfortunately the author got attacked online after this. So sad.
• Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Bold Plan For The Future Of Facebook
• Adele at the BBC: When Adele wasn’t Adele… but was Jenny!
• Nostalgia Is Ruining Video Games
• The Problem With The Battle of Five Armies – Sad to watch and explains a lot of the issues with The Hobbit.

A horrific weekend in Paris. Words can’t be found. Social media does it’s best yet again to show it’s worst side. However in amongst the right wing warmongers and the closet racists there is much to give heart…apart from Tweets. Bring back the stars!

• you never think it will happen to you
• what he says
• What ISIS Really Wants
• Social Media Rumours About The Paris Attacks That You Shouldn’t Believe
• Lebanon holds day of mourning after deadly Beirut blasts
• The only weapon IS fear is tolerance
• ‘People want to help’: Scottish town prepares to host Syrian refugees
• How Facebook Tells Your Friends You’re Safe In A Disaster In Under Five Minutes
• Mobile, ecosystems and the death of PCs
• Tim Cook: Apple CEO on the company’s latest venture – the iPad Pro
• Apple’s Tim Cook declares the end of the PC and hints at new medical product
• iPad Pro Review: A New Canvas – It’s the Apple Pencil I want to use not so much the iPad Pro.
• The digital revolution in higher education has already happened. No one noticed.
• No One Minding the Store – Not a great week for the Mac App Store
• How Apple TV Turned Me Into a Game Developer
• Apple Forbids Sideloading f.lux – F.lux is essential for me on the desktop and laptop – I’d love iOS to have something either built in or to allow f.lux for iOS.
• Lord Coe questioned: IAAF “asleep on the job, or corrupt?”
• Mint Sauce, Anyone?
• David Cameron hasn’t the faintest idea how deep his cuts go. This letter proves it
• Beware of ads that use inaudible sound to link your phone, TV, tablet, and PC
• Should you be sacked for off-duty behaviour?
• Amit Gupta, Photojojo – XOXO Festival (2015) – After Photojojo founder Amit Gupta was diagnosed with leukemia, the community rallied to find a very rare matching bone marrow donor. After recovering, he found himself unable to resume the life he had before, and carrying a secret that took him a year to tell the world.
• Caged: What Drives Ronda Rousey To Wake Up And Fight – A defeat?
• From sex symbol to icon: How Crystal Dynamics saved Lara Croft
• Betamax is dead, long live VHS
• A huge collection of the best podcasts
• Kaleidoscope: See Things Differently (4K)

Autumn/winter weather is starting to kick in so stay indoors and catch up on this weeks content.

• Morrisons Pledges To Donate Unwanted Food To Charity – Finally, hopefully the other big chains will follow.
• Mark Thomas interview: The social-activist comedian talks opera, charity shops, and Nicholas Soames
• Instagram Star Quits, Reveals How Photos Are Edited, Contrived, and Paid For
• The Worst Time Of Year For The Most Patient And Polite Man On The Internet Has Begun
• Emirates: #HelloJetman
• NASA: Stare directly at the sun safely with this 4K video
• A Seismic Shift in How People Eat
• The Power of Being Persistently Right – a detailed response to Wings Over Scotland. Great read.
• Programmers: Stop Calling Yourselves Engineers
• Reconsider
• Why Static Website Generators Are The Next Big Thing
• Drones, hackers and online satire: eight lessons from a global tech fest
• Ad Blockers and the Next Chapter of the Internet
• Four fundamentals of workplace automation
• 20 Little-Known Facts About Being Left-Handed – I should be left handed and I am apart from writing thanks to my gran who back in the day believed left handed people were the work of the devil so she tied my left hand behind my back and forced me to write with my right hand. Thankfully I can’t remember any of this but does explain my awful handwriting
• Why Was 5 x 3 = 5 + 5 + 5 Marked Wrong
• Must-Have Tools for Freelancers
• The New Face Of Star Wars – Just over four weeks. Not long.
• 「スター・ウォーズ/フォースの覚醒」予告編2 – And here’s The Force Awakens Japanese trailer with new footage.
• Every James Bond Gadget. Ever. – Saw Spectre last week and it was good but not great. Casino Royale still the best Daniel Craig Bond movie.

New toy from Apple as the updated Apple TV landed on Friday. Some hits and misses so far which I’ll write about through the week. Meantime, enjoy these great reads.

• Apple Tv Is A Radical Rethinking Of Your Relationship With The Hardware And Games You Own
• Aerial – Apple TV Aerial Views Screen Saver – The new Apple TV has some great screensaver which you can now run on the Mac.
• Inside Apple’s perfectionism machine
• The Inside Story of Surface Book, Microsoft’s Next Big Thing – Great to see Microsoft taking it to Apple.
• Steve Jobs: the legacy of Apple’s mysterious co-founder
• The Mythbusters always had an amazing secret weapon: They can’t stand each other
• Sonny Bill Williams video: New Zealand star gives Rugby World Cup medal to young boy after security guard wrestled him to the ground
• Could Depression Be Caused By An Infection?
• Ghost Boat – Great reporting…heart breaking.
• Greenland Is Melting Away
• Indonesia is burning. So why is the world looking away?
• How the Cold War Vulcan bomber flew again – I saw the Vulcan fly at a RIAT a few years ago – an awesome sight.
• Why I Ditched Evernote for Apple Notes — and How You Can Too – I’m looking at OneNote right now – itchy feet.
• Tweet, O Muse – Can Moments save Twitter?
• How to Organize Your Entire Creative (And Personal) Life in Three Steps
• The Podcast Universe
• Now that’s an eagle-eye view! Bird of prey carries video camera to capture stunning panoramic shots of London’s skyline – Daily Fail link alert but the video is stunning.
• ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Trailer Music: Who Composed It? Watch a Music-Only Trailer – Not long now.

Mixed bag of reads this week…but all good 🙂

• Insight: Scottish prisons think outside the box
• Out of the Darkness – Torture, CIA and those fuckers Westlife.
• J.K. Rowling and her heroic attack on the wicked cybernats
• Please don’t call me A Girl Called Jack. I have something to tell you.
• Responsibility
• Tony Fadell: the man who wants to take control of your home
• Apple’s New Thing (iPod) – 14 years since the iPod was announced and the reactions, with hindsight, are pretty funny.
• Microsoft Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 Review: New Hope for Windows Hardware
• The collapse of the US-EU Safe Harbor: Solving the new privacy Rubik’s Cube
• Global Temperatures Smash September Record by Widest Margin in History
• The Background Data and Battery Usage of Facebook’s iOS App – This smells and if it wasn’t one of the biggest tech firms in the world I’m sure Apple would have them kicked out of the App Store. They have done so for much less.
• Apple’s Jony Ive and Vogue’s Anna Wintour: Machines can build beautiful things
• 1Password Leaks Your Data – Ouch!
• How Emojis Find Their Way to Phones – Emoji’s drive iOS upgrade adoption. Fact.
• Why Britain has secret ghost trains
• Go West, young UK – Classy redesign of Great Western Railway
• Digital transformation will not happen across local government – so what’s the alternative?
• Digital Exclusion Heatmap
• The Staggering Impact of IT Systems Gone Wrong
• The Role of a Product Manager
• How to Prioritize, Pursue Goals, and Focus When You Have Many Interests
• The Stack That Helped Medium Drive 2.6 Millennia of Reading Time – Geeky but insightful
• Magic Leap is a computing platform where the real world is your screen
• Taylor Swift Gets Interviewed by Ryan Adams
• Daniel Craig on James Bond – People can overthink Bond sometimes. Great interview with Craig and I’m looking forward to seeing Spectre later this week.
• 2015 CATERHAM MOTORSPORT SEASON REVIEW – Shout out to Chris my fellow podcaster. The Caterham races are great to watch so take a look at his YouTube channel for some amazing racing that while slower is more action packed than F1.

Scotland just lost in the RWN quarter final to Australia. Bastards. Anyway, on with this weeks reads.

• On Apple’s Insurmountable Platform Advantage
• The Inside Story of Apple’s New iMacs – some nice updates but I think it will be this time next year before I upgrade to a retina iMac.
• So here’s the thing – As much as the last article praises Apple for sweating the details, they just can’t get the mouse right. I’m not a fan of the mighty ,ouse but to have the lightning port underneath the mouse, meaning it’s unusable even if it is just for minute is just wrong. Thank goodness for Logitech.
• IBM cuts down IT support staff w/ Mac deployment, says 5% of Mac users call help desk vs 40% for PCs
• Rethinking iTunes – Some nice idea’s for how to rebuild iTunes.
• The Elephant in the Room – Macdrama! This was a pretty ugly week for the Mac community. Samantha Bielefeld has been a recent addition within the Mac blogging community and has written some great posts over the last few weeks. This post was in response to Overcast 2 from Marco Arment and was pointing out the unique position that Arment has built for himself. However the post went to far trying to calculate his income. Cue a vicious response from Marco supporters including hate mail, rape and death threats and general abuse towards Bielefeld. Horrible sexist abuse which unfortunately Arment did little to defuse. For more follow up read Samantha and The Great Big Lie and Big Money is Coming which is a follow up from Bielefeld herself. So sad.
• Europe’s love affair with diesel cars has been a disaster
• How Tesla is ushering in the age of the learning car
• Getting Over Taxis – Uber launched in Glasgow this weekend. Haven’t made my mind up about them yet. A necessary disrupter or evil. Both?
• The Drone Papers – A whistleblower reveals the truth behind America’s drone success. Great read.
• “Arabian Street Artists” Bomb Homeland: Why We Hacked An Award-Winning Series</li>
• Nudes Are Old News at Playboy
• Ronda Rousey’s Next Fight: Body Image in Hollywood – “I swear to God,” she said, shaking her head, “if anyone calls me fat one more time in my life, I’m going to kill them.”
• 55 Internet Things for Back to the Future Day
• Force Awakens Official Poster
• 50 Weird & Unknown STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE Facts
• Computer Show – Glorious!
• How to Get Some Rest When Stress Is Keeping You Up at Night
• Break – Great writing from Matt Gemmell. If you only read one thing this week, make it this.
• What’s Lost When Most People Work From Home
• Five Years of Building Instagram
• Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It)
• Why I Unfollowed You on Instagram – I’d love an Activity app that first thing in the morning and mid-evening I could open and it would give me the best from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram plus e-mails, videos, reads all in one place without the duplication and noise that each separate network delivers now. Surely it’s coming?
• Here’s What “M,” Facebook Messenger’s Virtual Assistant, Looks Like – Also coming soon, the virtual assistant.
• The prime minister is pig headed – Well done Nicola Sturgeon