Dwayne Phillips ' Day Book

Items I happen to view each day. Science, Techonology, Management, Culture, and of course Writing

This is my day book for this week. I have modeled this after science fiction and computer writer Jerry Pournelle's view, or as he calls it, his Day Book. I encourage you to see Jerry Pournelle's site and subscribe to his services.

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This week: May 30-June 5, 2016

Summary of this week:

Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday - Saturday - Sunday

Monday May 30, 2016

Today is Memorial Day in the US.

As a stunt for a vacuum cleaner maker, a woman climbs a 33-story building. Yes, it is a holiday and a slow news day.

The government of India kills the idea of Apple selling used phones there.

ASUS shows their Zenbo home robot. It rolls about and tries to be an Amazon Echo.

The ASUS ZenBook laptop is thinner and lighter and more powerful than the Apple MacBook. Time for an Apple refresh.

And ASUS updates its ZenFone.

Alta Motors: the Tesla of electric motorcycles? Let's just go for practical electric bicycles.

Governments are using open-source hacking tools to squash their subjects who dare to disagree.

The government of France vows to go after foreign companies operating in France regarding taxes.

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Tuesday May 31, 2016

A look at Intel's 10-core, $1,700 desktop processor. For those who actually process from the desk.

CalTech files a patent suit against Apple and Broadcom.

Katy Perry has 89million Twitter followers and her account was hacked.

Thoughts on Twitter's bug bounty program. It didn't help Katy Perry.

And now we have research showing that working in a coffee house boosts productivity. Maybe someone will find the secret. Is it the noise, the scent, the furniture, the other people, the...

How to repurpose an electric drill to drive a skateboard. It's just a battery and a motor.

Wearables are hard to use because they are small. So Google's Soli is a radar that reads your big actions.

The ambient home assistant—the Google and Amazon approach to home computing in the future.

Dell shows a new line of 2-in-1 laptops—one has a 17" display.

Qualcomm shows a new processor aimed at wearable computing devices.

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Wednesday June 1, 2016

Samsung is now delivering the world's smallest 512GigaByte SSD. More power, less size.

Fog Creek Software introduces HyperDev—have code running on the Internet now.

When America wants to know the news, we turn to ... Facebook(?), apparently so.

Google's coming home assistant will undercut Amazon's Echo by an order of magnitude.

Why the iPhone 7 will probably break all the smartphone sales records.

Ice + battery + fan = portable air conditioner. Clever.

Want to boost your productivity? Go camping for a week. A day won't do it, take a week.

One of our courts declares that our government doesn't need a warrant to get our cellphone location data. What are we doing to ourselves?

Atari, of all companies, will enter the Internet of Things market.

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Thursday June 2, 2016

If you can, fly a JetBlue A320—free WiFi, Internet entertainment, USB ports in every seat.

Alexandra Andresen, 19, is the youngest billionaire in the world.

To prove that lame duck presidents have time on their hands, ours lambasts Donald Trump for an hour.

I like watches, but really. This one sold for $2.5million at auction, Patek Philippe.

Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes once reportedly had $4.5billion. Now she has nothing.

Once again, Facebook puts its customers to work at no pay to teach its text understanding system Deep Text.

A look at how Ginni Rometty is reshaping IBM.

Excellent commentary on shades of gray, blame, and—gosh—things can be tough in the real world.

A good summary of the market places of the iPhone and the nearly ubiquitous Android phone.

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Friday June 3, 2016

The retention rate for Amazon Prime customers appears to be over 95%.

Our FDA wants to tells us how much salt to consume. They are often wrong on nutrition guidance.

Researchers crawl the web to learn what the web is asking about us all the time—it's a lot.

It is a small sample size and it was an accident, but stem cells injected into the brain helped paraplegics walk.

It seems that Prince died of an overdose of prescription drugs.

Britain's tech community is strongly against Brexit.

Snapchat now has more daily users than Twitter.

Nvidia will soon release desktop-class GPUs to laptops.

Our Federal government smacked Volkswagon for cheating on tests. Will it do the same as 33 US cities cheat on water testing to hide lead.

Our FBI wants our email records—without warrants. Why is it that some citizens want to rule others as subjects?

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Saturday June 4, 2016

Muhammad Ali dies at age 74.

The Golden State Warriors and their use of technology. They aren't the only team doing this, but given luck in the NBA draft, they have succeeded more.

Instagram turns on a new algorithm that puts best posts first.

Tony Fadell, who founded Nest, is out as CEO.

A good review of deep learning and computer vision trends in research and applications.

A new type of inexpensive "metalens" could replaced the precision ground glass lens. Better, lighter, cheaper. There are significant applications for this in telescopes—especially those put up in space—and contact lenses. Not the current contact lenses, but ones that enable the blind to see.

The cult atmosphere inside the offices of Facebook. I hope one day we don't discover a lot of evil there.

Microsoft releases instructions to build your own smart mirror. Rumors are MS will release its own product version.

The new high-tech power: Volvo, yes Volvo.

Billionaires in tech who are giving away the $$$ instead of building family empires.

Our Federal Reserve board has plenty of cyber security problems. Here comes a Congressional investigation.

SanDisk updates its USB-C flash drive.

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Sunday June 5, 2016

Thoughts on how AI is changing search engine optimization.

Some solar cooking gadgets.

American Airlines is updating to ViaSat WiFi on some 737 planes. Much better performance coming.

A ten-year commitment vs a ten-year plan. Seth Godin

The Python folks created a xNIX shell scripting language called Xonsh ("conch").

Here come several trials of Universal Basic Income. Someone is paying for these.

GoPro had a bad financial year. They are trying to change their situation with software. They make great hardware—a tough, little video camera that has produced much of the world's great videos the last couple of years. It is evident that someone has mismanaged the company.

Questions that writers may want to consider about themselves.

Loosening up or warming up as a writer. Funny how these are hacked cliches applied to writers.

Thoughts on writing case studies or success stories. Also, they can be about terrible failures.

Finding time to write while you have team-eating kids. I was most productive as a writer while my sons were small, time-eating kids. I don't know how that works, but it did.

As a writer, do you have a core message?

Yet another exercise to overcome writer's block. What would I do if I were a great writer?

Good ideas on journalling and writing your reality for the future.

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