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: 24-30 June, 2019

Summary of this week:

• Raspberry Pi releases a new model 4
• Apple significantly boosts the number of jobs in Seattle
• Founder of Alienware leaving Dell for AMD
• Intel auctions its modem holdings
• More and more censorship by social media companies
• Jony Ive leaves Apple (sort of)
• Amazon becomes its number one shipper of it packages
• Liberals bash a liberal, but successful, company

Monday 24 June 2019

Some history and future of Microsoft's Flight Simulator. It was fun way back and should be quite good by now.

Raspberry Pi releases the model 4 at $35. The most successful education program in the history of man. Where is the Nobel Prize?

If you count...well, just about anything...the number of taxi drivers in America has tripled in 10 years. Of course this has been a financial disaster for many.

Strong rumors of updates to Apple's portable computers in September including a new model with a 16" display.

And rumors about a (no longer) secret Microsoft Surface with two screens and running Android apps.

Delta Airlines begins using facial recognition for an ID during boarding.

A review of Microsoft's mistakes during the decade that it was in anti-trust court. Perhaps today's successful US companies will learn something.

Tuesday 25 June 2019

Apple is releasing all its new operating systems in beta. This article is about iPadOS. This article is about macOS.

Apple announces 2,000 new tech jobs in Seattle.

Someone is using cellphone networks—easily hacked—to watch a few "important" persons quite closely. Not sure who is doing this or why, but leading edge technology is involved and massive troves of data are collected.

SpaceX manages to catch a piece of a piece of a part of a launch in a boat's net. Of course it's a stunt, but the first time it worked. Perhaps in the future...

Seth Godin has a good article on debt and compounding debt. "Only borrow money to buy things that go up in value."

Our US Senators demonstrate how good they are at creating mnemonics and ignorant they are at anything related to business and computing.

As a writer of books and all that, I find this two-part series on using the Apple computers to write and (almost) publish paperback books quite fascinating. Here is part 1 and part 2.

Bill Gates on the mistakes that kept Microsoft from competing with Apple in the smartphone market. They allowed Google to build Android and practically rule the world.

Wednesday 26 June 2019

The government of San Francisco bans the sale of e-cigarettes. This is the first, others will follow. I guess someone feels this is needed and that they have the legal authority.

Boeing passes a parachute safety test with its Starliner capsule. This moves us closer to the moon.

We can connect our game controllers to the iPad and Apple TV real soon now. This may make the iPad an important portable game platform.

Microsoft is adding a (more) secure storage area to OneDrive. Users will provide more passwords etc. to access each file.

Toys R Us will reopen a few stores and a website.

Our government is now going after illegal robocallers—finally.

Common regrets about college: the wrong degree, too much wasting time, too little studying, too much debt. It is a shame we push such life-long decisions on the young.

Judging employee performance by monitoring our smart devices. It is being tested and it may work better than what we have now (human misjudgement).

Yet another study predicting massive job losses due to coming automation.

Apple updates its office apps Pages, Keynotes, and Numbers.

Intel is leaving the smartphone modem business and auctioning its property.

Thursday 27 June 2019

More censorship, this time on Reddit, which usually allows adult behavior. At least they allow adults to judge content in the way an adult can.

Facebook may try a new, bureaucratic, approach to deepfakes. There are other ways.

Zuckerburg calls for government "help" in their censorship efforts.

More censorship from Facebook.

Google uses old "mannequin challenge" videos to train robots. Free data, and lots of it.

A detailed article on how the Chinese government hacks business the world over.

An attempt to explain Facebook's Libra currency. Perhaps this is what BitCoin should have been.

The "flying taxi" took a big step forward as Kitty Hawk teams with Boeing.

We reap what we sow...our President threatens social media companies because of biased censorship.

I love this idea: a tool for the Firefox browser that fools advertisers with a mixed up phoney browsing history.

Once again, the Apple Watch shows that it is more than a pretty thing on the wrist. It's "medical" features are actually helpful.

Friday 28 June 2019

Apple, further moving into the healthcare market, now sells a glucose monitor in stores. You use it with the iPhone and Watch.

Google Maps now includes traffic delays for mass transit buses.

Waymo (Alphabet (Google)) hires a dozen top engineers from robotics company Anki to boost its self-driving truck effort.

Jony Ive leaves Apple to start his own company that contracts to Apple. We learn that Mr. Ive has the biggest creative brain in the last 100 years (according to some).

Our Supreme Court decides that how state and local governments draw district lines is a state and local matter. Sometimes basic definitions work. If you don't like your locality, either move or change the local system.

More angst about encryption and law enforcement. Read, e.g., the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution for background. Then work harder and smarter.

What we shall call The Piggy Bank Rule from Seth Godin. Somethings can be smashed only one time. Apply judgement.

Google folds its cybersecurity goods back into Google. One day I might understand how Google and Alphabet work...maybe not.

Twitter takes a needed step toward acting like adults as it will put "warnings" on some posts, but then say they are posted in the public interest. Finally. This is like history books showing photos of atrocities so that we will learn history. It is needed.

Science Fiction to reality: we have a technique to identify persons via our unique cardiac rhythms from a distance with a laser. Other applications of the technology are BIG and somewhat FRIGHTENING.

Saturday 29 June 2019

We fear Amazon's surveillance state technology watching us.

We realize that Amazon's surveillance state technology isn't as good as some people say it is.

Amazon is now Amazon's number one shipper of packages.

GrubHub owns tens of thousands of web domains. They beat restaurants to the Internet and now own the advertising space.

Hyperventilating about the departure of Jony Ive from Apple. Similar fretting occurred at the death of Steve Jobs, but Apple today is better than it was then.

The government of San Francisco wants to crush Uber and Lyft by making their drivers employees.

Liberal candidates for President bash Amazon—a liberal company based in liberal districts of liberal states. Odd, to say the least.

Someone puts some thought into the concept that we may no longer be able to be just a face in the crowd.

Sunday 30 June 2019

This is a good article on choosing a cloud-hosted desktop. Little hype here. Practical.

Advice for brief, concise requirements: "If I can't write large enough on the front of the card to see, my story is too large. I don't use larger cards. I break the story."—Johanna Rothman

Researchers find a performance-enhancing bacteria (a PEB). Soon this will be banned, and we will go around and around with how many games to suspend athletes who use it and ... 

And now we have performance-enhancing spinach (a PES?). Got to ban that stuff as well. Soon we will band calories as they too enhance performance. Next thing ya' know, we'll ban exhaling as that increases CO2 in the atmosphere...oops, already did that.

Here it comes...a re-release of the Commodore C64.

Moving towards self-driving vehicles. Do you hire more engineers to solve problems or more lobbyists to hide problems?

Our President meets Kim Jong Un at the 38th parallel. A last minute tweet arranged the meeting. I suppose there is something to be learned here.

It appears the Wikipedia is not exempt from political intrigue and rumors of rumors.

USA Network is set to make a TV series (remember those?) about id Software in the 1990s. Doom was their creation, but I used id's C compiler which brought a flat memory space to the x86 architecture (nerdy, huh?).

Thoughts on the benefits of writing that only the writer feels. It isn't always money, although let's not forget that money buys food, clothing, shelter.

A few more tips for writing blog posts and earning money.

How do you "warm up" as a writer? Many well-known writers never warmed up.

Quick bits of writing advice from 30 writers.

The art and science of spreading your word via email.

If you have some success (and you define success) you did things in a certain way. Continue in that way. If you wrote a novel on blank paper with a pencil, don't go out and buy a computer thinking you will writer more better faster.