Items I happen to view each day. Science, Technology, Management, Culture, and Writing

    This is my day book for this week. It is a log of things I see on the Internet.

This week: 23-29 March, 2020

Summary of this week:

• Tech news slows as politicians take center stage
• Apple changes its policy for developers that eases multi-platform apps
• Apple's Safari jumps ahead of everyone in privacy protection
• Unemployment in the US (caused by panicked politicians) is astounding
• Rural retreats are booming as people flee urban areas for rural WiFi (farmsourcing)
• NASA awards SpaceX future moon base supply contract

Monday 23 March 2020

Week two for most of us at staying in our homes.

We are staying home. Hence, we are buying more home office equipment. Best Buy moves to curbside pickup.

Amazon falters under a heavy load. All that money paid for Prime membership appears to be wasted.

Amazon cannot convince its warehouse workers to keep working. Pay is a big motivator.

Meanwhile, in Taiwan...if you have been identified as infected, you are tracked via cellphone to ensure you stay home. Of course it takes about one dry cough to figure out how to beat the system.

There are at least ten countries doing this type of thing. Watch the subjects, they may get out of hand.

We now have a COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium that includes the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the U.S. Department of Energy, MIT, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Argonne National Lab, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NASA, and the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Amazon, and IBM.

Google gives up and completely cancels this years I/O Conference.

Smart folks attempt to predict life after all this stay-at-home stuff. It will be fascinating.

Tuesday 24 March 2020

Nvidia ups its Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) to 2.0. It uses AI to sharpen images in games.

In the land of large numbers, China's mobile carriers lose 20million users as business activity stalls.

With the you-know-what shutdowns, Disney+ has a booming business as do a few other entertainment companies.

Apple is providing free eBooks and audiobooks during this time.

Tesla delivers a thousand ventilators to California hospitals. It appears that these things are not difficult to make.

Our FCC gives SpaceX licenses for a million satellite terminals that will use the StarLink satellites for broadband service.

Wednesday 25 March 2020

Apple changes its policy for developers. It is now much easier for developers to create software that runs on iPad as well as Mac.

O'Reilly runs some of the best technology conferences available. They are suspending that business indefinitely.

Apple updates its Safari browser to block all third-party cookies. This is a first for Apple and puts them ahead of Google's Chrome in privacy protection.

Very nice: the Internet Archive, for a short time only, has a lending library for stuck-at-home students.

Apple will open its retail stores in the first half of April. I hope that starts a trend among everyone.

Apple is donating 9million face masks. Where do they find these items?

Thursday 26 March 2020

Dell's Mobile Connect app now let's us see our iPhone screen on our Dell computer's screen.

Someone discovers that if we get news from social media we aren't getting the news from the mainstream media. Amazing conclusion (not). I hope they didn't spend much money on that study.

Everyone wants AirPods. Qualcomm is one of the first to releases a system-on-a-chip that will power AirPod competitors. Look for them by Christmas.

The world's wind-based power generating grew a fifth after another record year.

Friday 27 March 2020

Apple is providing a 90-day free trial period for Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro.

We are receiving official numbers on unemployment. Panicked politicians destroyed the economy.

Microsoft acqui-hires Affirmed Networks. They do fully virtual, cloud-native networking solutions for telecom operators.

Stronger rumors that Apple will move away from Intel and use its own processors in 2021. Will the old software run on the new processors? It should, but...

The US Space Force has its first satellite launch.

By one count or another, the US now has more COVID-19 cases than China. We learn that these counts are highly subjective.

Saturday 28 March 2020

A New York court rules that gig workers are employees and deserve benefits. Short-term gain for the workers, but long-term loss.

The current situation is showing that the systems of government are outdated and under performing. What did they do with all the taxpayers' money?

Some folks are hiring. The list is pretty common sense. Stock shelves, deliver goods, build things. Waiter jobs? Forget it.

Another hot business right now is software that enables "bosses" to watch employees who are working from home.

Another booming business is Airbnb out of the cities in the far flung reaches of the countryside. Get your family out to a place where there is WiFi and clean air. This was once called FarmSourcing, and it may make a big comeback after you-know-what.

This may be big or may never happen: NASA awards SpaceX the contract to fly supplies to a future moon-orbiting station.

A deeper look at the new 2020 MacBook Air. People seem to love the keyboard. My MacBook Air is so old that it probably has the "new" keyboard.

Sunday 29 March 2020

MacStadium runs data centers full of Macs. With everyone working and learning from home, their business is booming.

Nice little website that provides quick bits of information about AI. The A-Z of AI.

The state-of-the-practice in tablets for 2020. The post title says "Android" but it covers Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon's Fire OS.

Booz Allen, the company that spawned Snowden, reports on Russian military cyber operations over a 15-year period. Predictable contents.

A ray of hope in the COVID panic, Abbott receives emergency approval for a test that takes 5 minutes and most general family doctors already have the equipment needed.

It was bound to happen and has probably happened more than a few times—someone guesses an online meeting code and appears all naked.

Working from home helps us notice that there is an entire department in the office building that is no longer needed.

Waxing over the lack of testing and the roadblocks of the regulators. Persons with good intentions doing the jobs created by legislators slowed everything and allowed disease to spread.

The unemployment spike: don't blame some molecules. Some persons decided to stop the economy. Those deciding persons continued to receive paychecks. The victims of their decisions did not. Funny how that works, huh?

This is the usual post, except for one bit of advice that is close to something that I do: close your eyes while writing. I did this several years ago when my eyes were simply tired. You don't see what you are typing and this removes many temptations to edit while drafting.

Practical advice about setting your writing in the morning with coffee and other supplies.

This is some practical advice. Write everyday, but don't write and publish in one day. Keep a queue of writing projects. Write something. Don't edit it for five days. Each day edit something you drafted five days earlier. Keep the writing projects flowing through the queue so that something goes into the queue and something else comes out of the queue everyday.

"When you’re a freelancer, you’re not at the mercy of a global pandemic..." True. There are other hazards, but that isn't one of them.

Thoughts on being edgy and quirky. I guess those are words. I guess there is a way to write that way. I think this is another way to say, "be concrete, precise, and specific." I was drilled with those three words in freshman composition.

Some thoughts on writing during the current age of self-imposed isolation. Go out. Be a rebel. See the streets. Write about it.