Happy new year! It’s become a tradition at this time of year to export our annual music playlist1. Here it is, our 2023 music playlist on Apple Music (make sure you’re logged in or you’ll only get a preview):
I’ve also exported it using tunemymusic.com as 2023 Youtube playlist and converted it to My 2023 Apple Music Library in .CSV format.
When I was a kid I had a Mickey Mouse sweat shirt that I loved.
As the clock strikes midnight tonight, the iconic figure from that old sweatshirt is set to embark on a new chapter — Mickey Mouse will officially enter the public domain. For nearly a century Disney has carefully guarded its iconic mascot, but as this protection expires, it makes me wonder if Disney lobbyists have dropped the ball in permitting this new era of creative freedom? Don’t get me wrong, it never should have been extended in the first place but I’m surprised because up ’til now every time Mickey was about to enter the public domain new laws were passed that fiercely guarded the intellectual property (and as a side effect kept a lot of other works out of our collective culture).
There’s a deep dive from Center for the Study of Public Domain explaining how we got here.
It is not simply that Mickey is a famous copyrighted character. So are Sherlock Holmes and Winnie the Pooh, and while they entered the public domain with some fanfare, it paled in comparison to this event. I’d like to offer a tentative answer. The reason that this event gathers so much attention is that it is the story of a 95-year-old love triangle, a tangled drama that rivals any Disney movie for twists and turns. The protagonists are Mickey, Disney and the Public Domain, and their relationship positively exemplifies the social media weasel-words “it’s complicated.”
When we visited Disneyland in November, I picked up a new Mickey Mouse shirt that sports the 2013 iteration of the mouse. I also happened upon an earlier version at a thrift store and took a photo to compare.
I’m probably just getting old but my favourite will always be the 1980’s Mickey — but neither of these versions will be the one in the public domain on January 1st.
Mickey isn’t the only work to enter the public domain tonight, ABC News has more on this story including a short interview with Larry Lessig1:
Update: AI models are now being trained on public domain Mickey.
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom: “What we have is 124 minutes of fish vomit. Fish vomiting is rare, so when it happens, it’s an indication of a fatal condition and time for little Chips to visit SeaWorld by way of the nearest commode.” — MontiLee Stormer, moviereelist.com
Anyone But You: “Anyone But You updates Shakespeare’s classic romance, Much Ado About Nothing, to a brainless romp with fleeting nudity and F-bombs galore. Thankfully, there’s ample chemistry between the gorgeous leads to facilitate the requisite happy ending.” — Julian Roman, MovieWeb
Freud’s Last Session: “Freud’s Last Session is an appointment you can skip.” — Joey Magidson, Awards Radar
Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire: “Take a Star Wars movie, remove the sense of humor and adventurous fun, and you might have something that looks like the Netflix space opus, ‘Rebel Moon.'” — Russ Simmons, KKFI-FM (Kansas City)
The Boys in the Boat: “The appeal of lads propelled forward through laborious craft is obvious, but The Boys in the Boat fails to do more than skim the surface both literally and metaphorically.” — Jay Horton, Willamette Week
My son was watching some iteration of a Mickey Mouse holiday special this morning and deciphering the message of the episode declared:
“Mom, it’s just like the book we read. Christmas is not about candy canes!”
“That’s right! What is it about?”
Without missing a beat he confidently declared, “Christmas is about presents!”
David Thomas writing for Reuters:
Apple’s former top corporate lawyer will receive no prison time after pleading guilty last year to U.S. insider trading charges, a judge said on Thursday.
U.S. District Judge William Martini in Newark, New Jersey, sentenced Gene Levoff to four years of probation and 2,000 hours of community service. Levoff was also ordered to pay a $30,000 fine and forfeit $604,000.
Levoff had admitted to six securities fraud counts that each carried a maximum 20-year prison term and $5 million fine.
A lawyer for Levoff, Kevin Marino, said in an email that they were “extremely pleased” for what he called a “fair and appropriate sentence of probation.”
A spokesperson for the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.
Prosecutors said Levoff exploited his roles as Apple’s corporate secretary, head of corporate law and co-chair of a committee that reviewed drafts of the company’s results to generate $604,000 of illegal gains on more than $14 million of trades from 2011 to 2016.
Levoff ignored quarterly “blackout periods” that barred trading before Apple’s results were released and violated the company’s broader insider trading policy that he himself was responsible for enforcing, prosecutors said.
Apple, based in Cupertino, California, fired Levoff in September 2018, five months before he was criminally charged.
When someone uses insider information to trade stocks, it really does take the money from other investors. That $604,000 came from somewhere. As someone bought shares during that time, perhaps the difference would have only equated to fractions of pennies on any given share, but it still makes me glad they caught him.
(via Daring Fireball)
Android has a new app, Beeper, that connects to iMessage. Well, it did for a few days until, apparently, Apple shut it down. It remains to be seen if Beeper Mini has a future.
Chris Welch, writing for The Verge:
On Friday, less than a week after its launch, the app started experiencing technical issues when users were suddenly unable to send and receive blue bubble messages. The problems grew worse over the course of the day, with reports piling up on the Beeper subreddit. Several people at The Verge were unable to activate their Android phone numbers with Beeper Mini as of Friday afternoon, a clear indication that Apple has plugged up whatever holes allowed the app to operate to begin with.
Beeper Mini was the result of a comprehensive attempt to reverse engineer Apple’s messaging protocol. A 16-year-old high school student managed to successfully pull it off, and for a while, everything worked without a hitch. That effort became the basis for the new app, which requires a $2 / month subscription
Beeper Mini used a direct link with Apple iMessage servers, allowing beeper users to access Apple’s exclusive blue bubbles directly using iCloud addresses and no intermediaries.
I’m a little disappointed it’s been shut down because I would really like my Android family (just my brother actually) to get on the iMessage train.
Update: MacRumors confirms Apple shut it down over purported security concerns.
From Jesus Diaz writing for Fast Company, “Tesla’s Cybertruck has a serious problem that only a complete redesign can fix“:
The problem, according to Musk, is the bright metal construction and predominantly straight edges mean that even minor inconsistencies become glaringly obvious. To avoid this, he commanded unparalleled precision in the manufacturing process, stating in his email that “all parts for this vehicle, whether internal or from suppliers, need to be designed and built to sub 10 micron accuracy. That means all part dimensions need to be to the third decimal place in millimeters and tolerances need [to] be specified in single digit microns.” Drawing a comparison to everyday products known for their precision, Musk added, “If LEGO and soda cans, which are very low cost, can do this, so can we.”
The cybertruck is not made from LEGO blocks or soda cans. It’s just not feasible to have such tolerances on parts that are so big and non-uniform at production scale. I suspect we’ll continue to see the truck’s release date pushed back as each deadline comes whooshing by until they admit defeat and do a redesign.
At least it’s bulletproof:
Bobby fingers is back with another unhinged installment, this time opting for supersize scale.
I created these living works by animating some images from The Photography Book as well as a couple other pieces that I just happen to like. Using the magic of Photoshop I widened each of the images to an aspect ratio of 16:9. Check out the originals linked above each image to see what I changed.
I completed a project like this for a university class on Flash and I’ve always meant to make more but since the deprecation of the .swf format I wasn’t sure I could get it to work in html 5. It turns out, it’s not that difficult except that you may have to scroll if you’re viewing them on mobile or viewing from an RSS reader.
