Summary of this week:

SpaceX has a successful launch and landing
Kraft Heinz and Unilever agree not to merge
Nebraska student building self-driving car $700
Google Cloud Platform now has Nvidia GPUs
Apple Park (the spaceship) to open this April
Google breaks the SHA-1 cryptographic hash
All the tech giants are filing on behalf of transgender youth

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

Monday February 20, 2017

SpaceX launched a resupply mission and stuck a perfect landing back on land in Florida.

Watch the landing as recorded by a drone-mounted camera. Looks like this is just what was supposed to happen. This also illustrates the use of drones: they can be put in places where you would rather not put a person.

Apple acqui-hires an Israeli face-recognition technology company.

More tangible in America, food producing giants Kraft Heinz and Unilever agree not to merge.

How to fly around the world on less than $1,000—free miles given with new credit cards.

Outside Your Bubble: can social media companies cause people to look a little further than their circle of friends?

Competition: Amazon lowers the threshold for free shipping in response to WalMart's initiative.

Making camera lenses that are the size of a grain of salt.

Political correctness has hit a wall. Younger people are seeing it for what it is: no free speech here! Good for them.

India has a booming market for Internet of Things gadgets.

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Tuesday February 21, 2017

Surprise find this morning: music player made for those with Alzheimer's and dementia.

Snap's Spectacles now available online for $130.

Harris poll shows Samsung's reputation drops from #3 to #49 from the burning phone fiasco.

Nebraska college students transforms Civic into self-driving car $700. Will the regulators stay away or ruin it?

Google and Bing search are participating in a program to NOT point to pirate websites. Someone is being judge and jury and creating the lists of "bad" websites. Here come the lawyers.

Amazon updates the Fire TV stick by incorporating Alexa voice control.

Uber, sexual harassment, Eric Holder: what will become of all this?

Controlling your smart car even years after you have sold it. No one is resetting these things.

Linux kernel 4.10 is released.

Geologists discover that New Zealand is the tip of a submerged continent that is huge. We just discovered a huge landmass that has been there for longer than we have been here. Again, this shows how little we know about the earth. We are a bit too ignorant to be predicting climate change and all sorts of other things.

A look at an Alienware laptop with the power for VR.

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Wednesday February 22, 2017

Google's Project Fi rolls out a test of voice over LTE.

UPS is testing drone deliveries in rural Florida. That works in rural areas where roads are long and often lead in the wrong direction.

Facebook may be live streaming one baseball game a week this season.

Microsoft announces Skype Lite for low-connectivity areas (India first). Can we have this in the US as well?

Major elections approach in Europe, and fake news is in the middle of everything.

Apple's stock price and value hit another all-time high.

A first for programming languages, PHP will have a cryptography library in its core.

More people are realizing an obvious lesson from history: to reduce inequality, have a catastrophe.

Google puts Nvidia GPUs in its Cloud Platform.

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Thursday February 23, 2017

Inside the tech office at Uber, no one is surprised that they are being sued for sexual harassment.

Intel enters the GigaBit LTE world with its new modem.

Apple Park—the rounded Pentagon out west—opens to employees in April. 12,000 will eventually work there. Traffic?

AMD Ryzen: an eight-core CPU for the desktop at a competitive price. Some competition for Intel.

How a few engineers and scientists at Pinterest created image search.

"Find your with."—Seth Godin

The new way to communicate in the workplace—well, someday the great majority of us might get there, not now, though.

Competing cloud computing services: for today, it is an AWS world. Be safe or daring?

Ford learns that drivers of self-driving cars quickly stop paying attention to everything and nap.

NASA finds earth-like planets just 40 light-years away. A tad too far for a group that cannot put a person in orbit.

Self-driving Uber rides are now operating in Arizona on a trial basis. California kicked Uber to Arizona where Uber was welcomed with open arms.

The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) reports that half of Internet traffic is now encrypted.

I can't explain Computer Show, just watch the video.

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Friday February 24, 2017

HP Enterprise has a bad financial quarter.

A $500 "arm" could replace $2million machines to do "robot" surgery at smaller hospitals. It could also save all of us lots of money on healthcare.

Amazon doesn't want to give law enforcement Alexa recordings in a murder trial. The government wants access to what was said in the home. They didn't have a warrant for that at the time. They want tech companies to be 24-hour surveillance on citizens. This is America.

Google researchers show how to create identical cryptographic hashes for different files. They want to retire SHA-1.

Google's charity arm gives $11.5million in grants to fight racial inequality in law enforcement.

This is nonsense: skills needed to get a job at the big, famous, tech companies. You need 30 years experience to have real experience with everything listed. And if you have 30 years experience, they won't hire you because you are too old and won't work for them for the next 20 years.

Wall Street analysis: Apple is poised to clobber Samsung in the phone business.

This was bound to happen with so many companies making very rapid advances in self-driving car technology at the same time—too many companies advancing too quickly. Google sues Uber for stealing self-driving car technology.

Microsoft inches closes to software that translates English into source code, eliminates the programmer.

It seems that the repeatable experiment is vanishing from science. Too nerdy I guess.

HP puts a 4K 15" display in a laptop without killing everything else.

Uber's CEO meets with female engineers. What they tell him isn't good. Now we see what happens. Why did it come to this? What did leadership do on the job that led people to behave like cads?

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Saturday February 25, 2017

The ITU releases the specifications for 5G communication. How did we ever live with 300baud?

Google and others have their failures, too. Google closes Spaces.

ASUS is shipping its 34" curved screen monitor. I work with some folks who have curved monitors. They look impressive when you put three of them side-by-side. Great for writing half-page Microsoft Word memos.

NASA stumbles forward. Maybe one day before the end of the NEXT decade, we can put a person into space.

Predictable and predicted: ISIS makes bombers from cheap drones and other off-the-shelf stuff.

Embark: here come the self-driving trucks. There go the jobs.

Elon Musk dismisses refutes bad working conditions in his car factory. They don't exist (per his look).

Sling TV lowers its already low prices.

This story is all over the Internet, so it must be important. Apple and other tech biggies are backing the transgender kids in an upcoming Supreme Court Case. A suppose this is a sign of the times. People claim the right to be what they want to be on any given day and have that choice upheld and protected by the government from those who disagree. Something like that. Perhaps. Tech companies generally have younger employees and such.

At least one other group understands risk management. When you consolidate into one place, and that one place fails...bad stuff for everyone.

Someone builds a simple interface adapter so everyone's headphones can use Bluetooth.

Robots will take your job, but not mine. And we all believe that. Such is our plight.

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Sunday February 26, 2017

Seiko to re-release the watch Steve Jobs wore in a 1984 photo. This is some sort of nostalgic craving for something.

Apple is pushing two-factor authentication, i.e., you have to do more work to reach your stuff.

Alienware releases a gaming laptop that doesn't make you look quite so nerdy. You look more like Penny than Leonard.

Research In Motion and the Blackberry tries again. Look for a Barack Obama commercial coming soon.

The molten-salt reactor and practically limitless energy. Time to try again?

How YouTube has stayed out of the fake news battles.

Love the title: You Aren’t Born an Artist, You Become One

The decline of malls. The decline of the middle class. The 21st century "The Grapes of Wrath" lies in there somewhere. Hmm, maybe...

Silly title, but four good ideas that can help a writer.

Post-project depression. Yes, there is a let down that comes with finishing and staring at another blank screen.

Do you write the first draft by hand with pencil and paper? I have written books this way. JK Rowling says she does this, too.

Essential oils. Some writers swear by their benefits. Addictive? I don't know. Sounds better than alchohol.

Writing part-time and working a full time job? Good points to consider before quiting your day job. It is not what you earn; it is what you spend.

Is this the greatest time in history to be a writer? Is this the time in history when a couple of billion people are literate in English and have the power to publish and drive your wages down to pennies a day?

Let your computer read your writing to you. An interesting twist.

Excellent infographic about redundant words and how to eliminate them in writing.

Four content mills that pay decent wages per word.

Attitude and productivity. Yes, we can think ourselves to do better. It is called faith.

Ten minutes of reflection a day does wonders: try the journal.

Writers supplement their incomes by teaching. There are many types of teaching. Like anything else, you have to do a lot of marketing to make any money at this.

This is one person's experience: location independent professional earned only $27K last year, but put money in savings. It isn't what you earn, it is what you spend.

Some thoughts on copyright law. Keep your work as your own. Don't let others steal it.

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